Symbiopolitics, Sustainability, and Science Studies: How to Engage With Alien Oceans

Abstract

This essay explores the implications for inquiries in sustainability education of Helmreich’s discussions of how human biocultural practices scramble nature and culture, life forms and forms of life, and his ethos of acceptance of ambiguous boundaries and transformative linkages with others. The silences in Helmreich’s arguments around gender and sustainability through looking at Probyn and Merchant, and the possibilities for a more-than-human scientific inquiry curriculum, are discussed, as is how science studies offer an image of a more-than-human anthropology that leads us to reconceive evolution, nature, gender, and sustainability, to which educational researchers need to pay attention.

Fire as Unruly Kin: Curriculum Silences and Human Responses

“…What the bushfires of Australia's 2019/2020 Black Summer have shown us is that we need a different relationship with fire in the environment, one that recognises fire as our unruly kin and which foregrounds the agency of human and more-than-human materiality (i.e., "nature") and their entanglement. We see a pyro-pedagogy of becoming-with fire as building on each of our previous writings-Annette Gough's (2019) on more-than-human scientific inquiry in education, Blanche Verlie's (2018) on becoming-with climate change, and Briony Towers (2019) on child-centred DRRRE-and more. In doing this we have much to learn from Victor Steffensen and other First Nations peoples.…”

Posthumanism for Sustainability: A Scoping Review

“…Furthermore, the post-Enlightenment vision reminds us that the discrete, autonomous, free individual of the Enlightenment never existed. The relational interpretation of sustainability (Walsh et al, 2021), embodied learning (Fredriksen, 2020), place-responsive pedagogy (Lynch & Mannion, 2021), and curricula (Gough, 2020) that pay attention to more-than-human beings can be read as reflections of this vision. Following such a post-Enlightenment vision will also have consequences for different areas of sustainability, such as reimagining sustainability policies (Maggs & Robinson, 2016), designing products, services (Forlano, 2017), and cities (Jon, 2020), and conducting scientific research (Ulmer, 2017).…”

Reading over and under the waves: A study of ocean picture books for children

“…However, marine education is limited to Foundation through to Year 10 in the current Australian Curriculum (Gough, 2017). References to marine education only appear in Year 2 Humanities and Social Sciences curriculum and again in Year 10 for Earth and Space Sciences understanding (Gough, 2020). Despite Australia's reliance on the surrounding ocean to provide economic, social and environmental wealth, we are yet to see marine education embedded into the curriculum, to align with both the National STEM strategy and the recommendations outlined in the National Marine Science Plan.…”