Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-v9fdk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T16:39:16.041Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2020

Alexandra Lasczik Open the ORCID record for Alexandra Lasczik [Opens in a new window] ,
David Rousell ,
Yaw Ofosu-Asare ,
Angela V. Foley ,
Katie Hotko ,
Ferdousi Khatun  and
Marie-Laurence Paquette
Alexandra Lasczik*
Affiliation:
School of Education, Southern Cross University, Gold Coast Campus, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia
David Rousell
Affiliation:
School of Education, RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Education and Social Research Institute, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
Yaw Ofosu-Asare
Affiliation:
School of Education, Southern Cross University, Gold Coast Campus, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia
Angela V. Foley
Affiliation:
Western Sydney University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Katie Hotko
Affiliation:
School of Education, Southern Cross University, Gold Coast Campus, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia
Ferdousi Khatun
Affiliation:
School of Education, Southern Cross University, Gold Coast Campus, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia
Marie-Laurence Paquette
Affiliation:
School of Education, Southern Cross University, Gold Coast Campus, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia
*
*Corresponding author: Email: Lexi.Lasczik@scu.edu.au
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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.

Keywords

waterwatery conceptsarts-based researchwalkingenvironmental education theorytheory knotsvisual essay
Type
Article
Information
Australian Journal of Environmental Education , Volume 36 , Special Issue 2: Mapping-making philosophy in environmental education: Lines, knots and knotting , July 2020 , pp. 146 - 168
Check for updates
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Atkinson, D. (2018). Art, pedagogies and becoming: the force of art and the individuation of new worlds. In Knight, L. & Lasczik Cutcher, A. (Eds.), Arts-Research-Education: Connections and directions (pp. 3–16). Dordrecht: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Ansari, M., Taghvaee, A.A., & Nejad, H.M. (2008). Cultural beliefs regarding Persian gardens with the emphasis on water and trees. African and Asian Studies, 7, 101–124.Google Scholar
Bakker, K. (2012). Water: Political, biopolitical, material. Social Studies of Science, 42, 616–623.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ballestero, A. (2019). A future history of water. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Best, K. (2017). The dangerous brew of politics and water. UConn Today. https://today.uconn.edu/2017/05/dangerous-brew-politics-water/# Google Scholar
Braidotti, R., & Bignall, S. (Eds.). (2018). Posthuman ecologies: Complexity and process after Deleuze. Washington, DC: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Carter, P. (2004). Material thinking. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press.Google Scholar
Chen, M.L. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, C., MacLeod, J., & Neimanis, A. (Eds.). (2013). Thinking with water. Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP.Google Scholar
Clark, J., Gurung, P., Chapagain, P.S., Regmi, S., Bhusal, J.K., Karpouzoglou, T., Mao, F., & Dewulf, A. (2017). Water as ‘Time-Substance’: The hydrosocialities of climate change in Nepal. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107, 1351–1369.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crinall, S.M. (2017). Blogging art and sustenance: Artful everyday life (making) with water (Unpublished doctoral thesis). Western Sydney University.Google Scholar
Crutzen, P.J. (2002). Geology of mankind. Nature, 415, 23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
de Freitas, E. (2014). How theories of perception deploy the line: Reconfiguring students’ bodies through topo-philosophy. Educational Theory, 64, 285–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition [Patton, P., Trans.]. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Douglas, M. (2003). Purity and danger: An analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. New York, NY: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foley, A.V. (2017). Deep mapping towards an intercultural sustainability discourse. In Malone, K., Truong, S., & Gray, T. (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 217–235). Singapore: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gandy, M. (2002). Concrete and clay: Reworking nature in New York City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gandy, M. (2004). Rethinking urban metabolism: water, space and the modern city. City, 8, 363–379.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gannon, S. (2017). Watery configurations of animals, children, pedagogies and politics in a suburban wetland. In Malone, K., Truong, S., & Gray, T., Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 253–267). Singapore: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, L.M. (2013). Bottles, bores and boats: Agency of water assemblages in post/colonial inland Australia. Environment and Planning, 45, 467–484,CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, L.M. (2014). Fresh water geographies? Place, matter, practice, hope. New Zealand Geographer, 70, 56–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goubert, J.P. (1989). The conquest of water: The advent of health in the industrial age. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Green, S. (2014). Anthropological knots: Conditions of possibilities an interventions. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4, 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hamlin, C. (2000). ‘Waters’ or ‘Water’? — Master narratives in water history and their implications for contemporary water policy. Water Policy, 2, 313–325.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haraway, D. (2016). Tentacular thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene Chthulucene. e-flux, 75. bit.ly/2oLmB5yCrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, M. (2015). The materiality of water. Aesthetic Investigations, 1, 120–128.Google Scholar
Hartman, S. (1997). Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America. New York, NY: Oxford.Google Scholar
Herrera, V. (2017). Water and politics: Clientelism and reform in urban Mexico. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Illich, I. (1985). Water and the waters of forgetfulness. London. UK: Boyars Press Google Scholar
Ingold, T. (2007). Lines: A brief history. New York: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingold, T. (2012). Making culture and weaving the world. In Dudley, S.H. (Ed.), Museum objects: Experiencing the properties of things (pp. 368–384). London. UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ingold, T. (2014). Of knots and blocks: Dwelling in smooth space. The University of Cambridge, Department of Geography Research Seminar. http://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/seminars/ Google Scholar
Ingold, T. (2015). The life of lines. New York, NY: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingold, T. (2017). Surface visions. Theory, Culture & Society, 34, 99–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klee, P. (1961). Notebooks: Vol 1: The thinking eye. London: Lund Humphries.Google Scholar
Knight, L.M. (2016). Playgrounds as sites of radical encounters: Mapping material, affective, spatial and pedagogical collisions. In Snaza, N., Sonu, D., Truman, S.E., & Zaliwska, Z. (Eds.), Pedagogical matters: New materialisms and curriculum studies (pp. 13–28). New York, NY: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Knight, L. (2019). Playing: Inefficiently mapping human and inhuman play in urban commonplaces. In Hodgins, B.D. (Ed.), Feminist research for 21st-century childhoods: Common worlds methods (p. 139). London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Krause, F., & Strang, V. (2016). Thinking relationships through water. Society and Natural Resources, 29, 633–638l CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lasczik Cutcher, A. (2018). Moving-with & moving-through homelands, languages & memory: An arts-based walkography. Rotterdam, Netherlands: Brill Sense Publishers CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lasczik Cutcher, A., & Irwin, R.L. (2017). Walkings-through paint: A c/a/r/tography of slow scholarship. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 14, 116–124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lasczik Cutcher, A., & Knight, L. (2018). Connections. In Knight, L. & Lasczik Cutcher, A. (Eds.), Arts-Research-Education: Connections and directions (pp. xv–xxv). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer.Google Scholar
Lim, L. (2017). Knots and other forms of entanglement. In Clarke, E.F. & Doffman, M. (Eds.), Distributed creativity: Collaboration and improvisation in contemporary music (pp. 207–213). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McCoy, K., Tuck, I., & McKenzie, M. (2018). Rethinking pedagogies of place from Indigenous, postcolonial, and decolonizing perspectives. New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
Meybeck, M. (2003). Global analysis of river systems: from Earth system controls to Anthropocene syndromes. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 358, 1935–1955.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Neimanis, A. (2013). Feminist subjectivity, watered. Feminist Review, 104, 23–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neimanis, A. (2017). Bodies of water post-human feminist phenomenology. London, UK: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Nxumalo, F., & Cedillo, S. (2017). Decolonizing place in early childhood studies: Thinking with Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies. Global Studies of Childhood, 7, 99–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Protevi, J. (2013). Life, war, earth: Deleuze and the sciences. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Rabyniuk, A. (2016). Knot/Knotting practice in craft and space (Masters dissertation). Queens University, Kingston, Canada.Google Scholar
Richardson, T. (2014). A schizocartography of the University of Leeds: Cognitively mapping the campus. disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, 23, Article 10.Google Scholar
Ruyer, R. (2016). Neo-finalism (Edlebi, A. Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Rousell, D., & Cutter-Mackenzie, A. (2018). Uncommon worlds: Towards an ecological aesthetics of childhood in the Anthropocene. In Cutter-Mackenzie, A., Malone, K., & Barratt Hacking, E. (Eds.), Research handbook on Childhoodnature: Assemblages of childhood and nature research (pp. 1657–1679). New York, NY: Springer Nature.Google Scholar
Somerville, M. (2013). Water in a dry land: Place-learning through art and story. New York, NY: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Steffen, W., Persson, Å., Deutsch, L., Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Richardson, K., … Molina, M. (2011). The Anthropocene: From global change to planetary stewardship. Ambio, 40, 739.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Stetter, S., Herschinger, E., Teichler, T., & Albert, M. (2011). Conflicts about water: Securitizations in a global context. Cooperation and Conflict, 46, 441–459.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strang, V. (2004). The Meaning of Water. Oxford, UK: Berg.Google Scholar
Strang, V. (2014). Fluid consistencies: Material relationally in human engagement with water. Archaeological dialogues, 21, 133–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strang, V. (2015). Water: Nature and culture. Chicago, IL: Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Tilley, C. (2007). Materiality in materials. Archaeological Dialogues, 14, 16–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vörösmarty, C.J., Pahl-Wostl, C., & Bhaduri, A. (2013). Water in the Anthropocene: New perspectives for global sustainability. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 5, 539.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, T., & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, A. (2019). Posthumanist learning: Nature as Event. In Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, A., Lasczik, A., Wilks, J., Logan, M., Turner, A. & Boyd, W. (Eds.), Touchstones for deterritorialising socioecological learning: The Anthropocene, posthumanhism and common worlds as creative milieu (pp. 29–50). Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.Google Scholar
Wood, D. (2013). Everything sings: Maps for a narrative atlas (2nd ed.). Los Angeles, CA: Giglio.Google Scholar