The rich and innovative ideas of quantum physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad have much to offer environmental educators in terms of practical theories for teaching and learning. This article shares insights gained from a facilitated conversation at the Australian Association for Environmental Education (AAEE) Conference Research Symposium, and offers an introduction to Barad’s theories for environmental educators. At this time of challenging planetary imperatives, environmental education is increasingly called upon to contribute to students’ understanding of connectedness, and Barad’s theory of agential realism provides a way to think about, articulate and engage with connectedness as inherent within the world rather than something we need to create. By considering entanglement as a fundamental state, we understand that separateness is not the original state of being. This shift in perspective supports a subtle yet powerful approach to knowledge, communication and collaboration, understanding difference as integral within the world’s entangled becoming. The convened conversation sought to explore Barad’s thinking by defining and discussing the concepts of agential realism, intra-action, material-discursivity, phenomena and diffraction. Barad’s ideas were used to collectively explore what it means to be intraconnected and entangled in today’s world, and specifically how these concepts and experiences relate to our work and lives as environmental educators and researchers.

This article considers the ethico-aesthetic potential of British choreographic practices that respond to questions raised by the current sociopolitical moment by staging im/possibilities and dis/orientation and by envisioning alternative understandings of the present. It embraces Karen Barad's new materialist onto-epistemology as an inspiring framework to discuss the significance of choreography that troubles accepted patterns of relationality and engages in a creative-critical remapping of experience.

The ‘global turn’ in International Relations (IR), like postcolonial and decolonising approaches, moves away from the Eurocentric dominance of the discipline, and towards the inclusion of plural perspectives on global politics. The article investigates what such a call means in epistemological and ontological terms by focusing on the concept of ‘global conversations’. In section I, we show that the concept of ‘global’ conversations necessarily shifts from an individual ontology to a relational ontology of intra-action within a global space. In section II we explore why ‘conversation’, as distinct from dialogue fits more comfortably with this relational shift and has practical implications for how the engagement takes place. The third section engages in an exploration of some of the obstacles to global conversation, and not least the emotional obstacles, in light of historically embedded and embodied relations of power that shape who can speak and who is silenced or heard. The final section then engages in a discussion of the types of practical engagement and research that might flow from this analysis. In moving beyond ‘dialogue’, the article reveals the intersection of power, language, emotion and embodiment in the constitution of ‘global conversations’, and how these in turn come to constitute the global, its normative structuring, contestations and transformation.

This article advances a new account of security as an intensely relational and ontologically entangled phenomenon that does not exist prior to, nor independently of, its intra-action with other phenomena and agencies. Security's ‘entanglement’ is demonstrated through an analysis of the protracted security concerns engendered by ‘dangerous’ scientific experiments performed with lethal H5N1 flu viruses. Utilising methodological approaches recently developed in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), the article explicates the intensely ‘co-productive’ dynamics at play between security and science in those experiments, and which ultimately reveal security to be a deeply relational phenomenon continuously emerging out of its engagement with other agencies. Recovering this deeper ontological entanglement, the article argues, necessitates a different approach to the study of security that does not commence by fixing the meaning and boundaries of security in advance. Rather, such an approach needs to analyse the diverse sites, dynamics, and processes through which security and insecurity come to intra-actively materialise in international relations. It also demands a fundamental reconsideration of many of the discipline's most prominent security theories. They are not merely conceptual tools for studying security, but crucial participants in its intra-active materialisation.

This themed journal issue provides many examples of ways forward in the study of death and memory in the Viking world. While all contributions demonstrate that there are exciting new ways to study remains from funerary contexts that focus on different forms of citation involving material culture and monuments, this article will very briefly discuss dimensions that have not been addressed here. Specifically, it showcases how the mortuary citations approach can also use post-humanist theory for further development and exploration of mortuary practices in the Viking world. Although short, this article discusses rune stones, particularly rune stones with kuml inscriptions, which I have examined elsewhere. The term kuml appears on contemporary rune stones; it refers to different material entities such as rune stones, mounds/cairns, and other standing stones. The being and becoming of kuml is briefly discussed through the concepts of intra-action and agential cuts championed by Karen Barad.

School gardens are becoming increasingly recognised as important sites for learning and for bringing children into relationship with food. Despite the well-known educational and health benefits of gardening, children's interactions with the non-human entities and forces within garden surroundings are less understood and examined in the wider garden literature. Using a relational materialist approach (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010) that considers the material artefacts that constitute a learning environment, this article examines children's interactions with the animate and inanimate life forces through three specific garden photographs. The photos belong to data derived from a study that examined food, ecology and design pedagogies in three Australian primary schools. This paper argues that children's interactions with the non-human materialities of a garden are a vital dimension of gardening practice. The agential powers of gardens have great capacity to mobilise and inform children's inhabitation of food gardens.