water/watery/watering: Concepts for Theorising in Environmental Education

Abstract

The assemblage of water/watery/watering is a lively cartography of how water may be accounted for when theorising with and through environmental education research. Challenging the universalising claims of Western technoscience and the colonial logic of extraction, the article develops an alternative theoretical mapping of environmental education through engagements with Ingold’s (2007, 2012, 2015) concepts of lines, knots, and knotting. For this article and for the Special Issue in which it is housed, the concepts of such knottings are defined as an assemblage of haecceities, lived events that are looped, tethered and entangled as material and conceptual agencies that inhere within situated encounters. Thus, this article grapples with the need to account for water differently in contemporary posthuman ecologies. To overcome anthropocentric and mastery-oriented approaches, various other ways to account for water in science or environmental education will continue to come to the surface, bubbling and rushing like a waterfall as they have done in this work. Some of these will include thinking with water, which will be central to a theoretical mapping of water that seeks embrace sticky knots. The article explores a (re)turn to artful practices and encounters as spaces in which posthumanist concepts for environmental education might be cultivated.

Watery assemblages: the affective and material swimming-becomings of a Muslim girl’s queer body with nature

“…Inspired by the notion of thinking with water (Neimanis, 2013(Neimanis, , 2016(Neimanis, , 2017Krause & Strang, 2016;Lasczik et al, 2020;Strang, 2014), I attend to emerging watery assemblages to think about the nomadic and fluid relationships between Maha and her relations to her own body, morethan-human bodies, hijab, family, community and the two areas where she lives. The watery assemblages that I map in this paper do not imply a concept I coined; rather, they were and still are a 'call from things' (Bennett, 2012, p. 240) that my participant and I took seriously and pulled into.…”

“…The sea that 'we explore only one percent of' and Maha who is 'the one person that goes really far out to become a dot in a distance' mutually become a political agency to materialise complex embodied and embedded relations of power, control and belonging. As Lasczik et al (2020) suggest, 'although water is often theorised as a life-creating, life-connecting source of abundance, it is also a technology for unjust political determinations of affluence and poverty, toxicity and health, freedom and control, flourishing and death' (p. 158). The materiality of water enables an understanding of water not as neutral rather as agentive co-constituents of relational meaning within society (Krause & Strang, 2016, p. 633).…”

Propositional A/r/tography: An Analytical Protocol

“…The lines of flight and becomings described in this article draw from significant scholarly work with and through a/r/tography, collaborative artmaking, and critical walking and mapping practices in process with Whiteheadian speculative philosophy and propositional thinking with enabling constraints. Most relevant to this article is the lineage of thinking and practicing around c/a/r/tography (Lasczik Cutcher, 2018; Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2017, 2018; Rousell & Cutcher, 2014; Rousell et al, 2020), peripatetic inquiry (Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2018), and walkography (Lasczik Cutcher, 2017; Lasczik et al, 2020). These approaches coalesce in the work of our project, entitled Walking A/r/tography .…”

“…We have variously engaged participatory c/a/r/tography, collaborative artmaking, and critical walking inquiry as transdisciplinary investigations at Southern Cross University since 2013 (see Cutcher, et al, 2015; Cutcher & Rousell, 2014; Lasczik & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2022; Lasczik et al, 2020; Lasczik et al, 2021; Lasczik Cutcher, 2018; Lasczik Cutcher & Irwin, 2017, 2018; Rousell & Cutcher, 2014; Rousell et al, 2019, 2020). This work is notable in its poststructural theoretical foundations and its practice-driven approaches through c/a/r/tography.…”

Rethinking Water Governance in the Saskatchewan River Delta Through Indigenous Relational Worldviews

“…In addition, the connection with origin stories exemplifies Indigenous identity as grounded in relationships with other living things (Cajete, 2000;Kimmerer, 2013;McGregor, 2012). Yet Indigenous communities in Saskatchewan are the most affected by a lack of access to safe drinking water and cultural practices with water, as the result of ongoing processes of bio-colonization and universalising claims of Western technoscience that appropriate Indigenous lands and enact coercive agricultural methods through colonial logic of extraction (Chilima et al, 2021;Lasczik et al 2020;McKibbin, 2023).…”