Report on the symposium “speculative realism in environmental education and the philosophy of education”

Abstract

“Speculative Realism in Environmental Education and the Philosophy of Education” was a joint research symposium for the networks on Environmental and Sustainability Education (NW 30) and Philosophy of Education (NW 13), held at the European Conference of Education Research (ECER), 25 August, 2023, in Glasgow, Scotland. The symposium aimed to open up discussion on renewed interest in realisms in the field of philosophy, and what that might mean for education research and the field of environmental education research in particular. As backdrop, environmental education harbours strong democratic traditions as well as recognitions of relationships to a world that is composed by more than human positions and desires. The symposium then forms part of an ongoing discussion of how these positions are understood and intermingle in a rapidly changing world. The expectation of the event was to broaden discussion about the voices present in environmental education, human and otherwise, and sharpen engagement with established traditions within the field. In brief, three paper presentations and discussion by Graham Harman probed questions of: (a) the lightness and darkness of the objects of education, (b) who visibly desires which object in/as education, and (c) the risks of literalisms and correlationalisms in, for example, what is alluring to, and pursued by, educators. In other words, what we care about in and as environmental and sustainability education, what is perceived/treated as peculiar, and what is treated as normal and perverse to the realities of education in the Anthropocene, all matter to the work of speculative realism.

Keywords:

• Realism
• philosophy
• speculative realism
• environmental education

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS:

• SDG 4: Quality education

Introduction

Stefan Bengtsson (Uppsala University, Sweden)

Recent debate within the field of environmental sustainability education (ESE) research has highlighted the need to re-engage with education philosophy and the ontological assumptions informing these responses to the Anthropocene in education (e.g. Sjögren & Hofverberg 2022; Clark & McPhie 2020a, 2020b). A key concern here is both the recognition and consequences of anthropocentrism to much that passes as educational thought (see, for example, Öhman 2016, Bazzul 2022, Misiaszek 2023). To date, a common response in environmental and sustainability education has been to draw up alternative entry points, such as by appealing to a (neo)materialism (Payne 2016; Clark & McPhie 2020a, 2020b) or a posthumanism (Malone & Young 2023; Weaver & Snaza 2017). The intention here, it seems, is to disrupt commonplace notions of subjectivity and agency in and through associated educational provision (see also White et al. 2024).

Drawing on the loose classification of ‘speculative realism,’ a term coined at the seminal workshop with the same title held at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2007, the ECER symposium was convened to offer different routes ‘into, through and out’ of such positionings and debates. The symposium was predicated on a differentiation: any return to realism partially overlapped with some of the aforementioned options, but from a speculative perspective, it also sought a distinct entry point for rethinking education and instruction in the Anthropocene. Put differently, the contributions summarised herein explored aspects to the limits and possibilities of a philosophical realism that was anti-correlationist.

Correlationism refers to an axiomatic starting point in much thinking about education, namely, we always already have to assume a mutual correlation of thought/practice/experience/discursivity and world (Meillassoux 2008). In blunt terms, when we think of the world in education, it is routinely reduced to a world of human thought. Each of the contributors refuses such a simplification in various ways, but also seeks to return us to questions of the real in realism through the lens of speculative realism. Such an alternative entry point (re-)invites us to consider ‘thought’ and ‘world’ in isolation from the other, rather than default to that found in correlationism, assuming a world always already subsumed in thought (Harman 2018, p. 3).

The contributions were speculative in other senses too. On the one hand, they did not claim to arrive again at the world through thought. On the other, their authors wanted to open up a non-reductive space for worlds that evade thought and practice in education. In a broad sense then, what the contributions in this symposium aimed to explore were: how educational thought can be critiqued with regards to a correlationist framing; alongside, what speculative openings are there for the abandonment of correlationist framings?

Individually and together, the symposium’s three dual-authored contributions and reflections from a discussant sought to offer a venue for speculative educational thought too, engaging with a key question that brought the presenters together: How might we re-think education and instruction once we break with correlationism? While as a whole, the symposium’s contributors sought to resist reductions of the world to processes of human learning and education, and in so doing, refused claims to access this world in classical or ‘naive’ realist ways by reducing the world once more to its correlation to thought/practice/experience/discursivity. Convening the symposium then was meant to reclaim a space that is often forbidden or withheld in engagements with education as a science: that of a return to the underlying ontological questions and positions of thinking education and its associated ambitions and limits. So rather than reduce educational science to epistemology (i.e. what we can know about education and its processes/outcomes), the symposium sought to return to matters of ontology by other than contemporary means (e.g. critical realism, or neomaterialism), carving out a route to speculate and engage with what remains beyond or withdrawn in education.

As the contributors illustrate below, this return to ontology via a speculative realist lens provides a series of alternative entry points for engaging with anthropocentrism and education in the Anthropocene. It does so by raising speculative questions and offers tentative answers as to how to think and engage with education beyond the confines of correlationism. The Anthropocene is invoked throughout as referring to precisely this process of attunement of ‘modern’ subjects to, and awareness of, objects - objects that actually escape the limits of a knowing and controlling human subject, posthuman or otherwise (Braidotti 2019). The appeal to concepts such as the eccentric, sensual vs. real object, and allure mark a different vocabulary too, in that deliberations on such aspects help express in words something that escapes the possibilities of knowing and control in education.

The three contributions to the symposium were prepared by Nordic scholars in the field of environmental education and the philosophy of education, whose previous work has engaged with speculative realism. Dist. Prof. Graham Harman from the Southern California Institute of Architecture–one of the original presenters at the Goldsmith workshop–acted as discussant. His written comment was read in his absence by Prof. Greg Mannion, University of Stirling, and provided a critical reflection on how philosophy and educational sciences might nuance an engagement with the challenges that the Anthropocene can be seen to impose.

In the following, we provide a summary of the three presentations in the order they were originally presented, as well as the main points of the commentary provided by Prof. Harman.

The Inescapable Realisms of Education

Daniel Kardyb and Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard (Danish School of Education)

‘The Inescapable Realisms of Education” examined notions of realism in sustainability education by presenting an empirical confrontation with an educational development project in Denmark. The project, Naturkraft, takes place in a built natural environment, operated as a nature-science centre on the Danish West Coast. As such, Naturkraft served to open up questions about relations between human material designs and more-than-human forms of life in sustainability education. Examples of this included the massive human-made structures surrounding the park and an engulfing wind that is ever present, interacting with the structures and the visiting humans in the park in patterned, surprising, and even uncanny ways.

The presentation drew on a combination of Deleuze and Guattari-inspired attention to relational constitutions of educational entities (Deleuze & Guattari 2004) and Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) including a need to attend to unruly experiences of ‘something other’ imposing itself from outside of these constitutions (Lysgaard, Laugesen, & Bengtsson 2019; Morton 2018). The concept of educational realisms was developed from a swirling cauldron of concepts, pragmatically recognizing how education understood through an OOO lens also offers an object in and of itself. This particular object was understood to be one that never fully adheres to the expectations imposed on it, but offers both illusive and intrusive characteristics in relation to other objects. In effect, the inevitably messy and slippery notion of ‘educational realism’ invites us to consider the ways in which educational reality is always contingent upon discursive-material assemblages, even as it also invites us to entertain a speculative realist attention to the objects’ own contingent characteristics. Education in this perspective then, is embedded and enmeshed in material, social, and more than human relationships and cannot be understood without these relations, but at the same time is never fully disclosed as an object within or beyond them.

Returning to the case, the development of the Naturkraft project and site involved a range of people from a diversity of backgrounds, and also raised questions of perspective in multidisciplinary practices and the development of sustainability education. This aspect was illustrated through analysis of how the Naturkraft project, in its diverse material-discursive constitution, exhibits differences in educational realities through a multifarious enactment of ‘hosts’ in the Naturkraft park. Host was understood as an entity, human or otherwise, that influences the educational experience of the park for the visitors. The analysis suggested five distinct hosts: commercial, schooling, behaviorist, critical-curious, and more-than-human. Each host enacted a particular mode of educational becoming, and exhibited different relations with matters of sustainability.

The presentation drew on theories based in process and relational ontologies and added speculative realist perspectives to emphasize the weird and strange sides to such objects and hosts at Naturkraft. It was rounded off by offering the eccentric as a figuration to prompt thinking about the Naturkraft project as a heterogeneously constituted educational object involving an unconventional and slightly strange social appearance (Kardyb 2024). The eccentric triggers a sense of the out-of-balance, strange, but socially recognizable-–a position that could make it possible to combine and go beyond ‘typical’ host roles in order to embrace and exploit the weirder forms of educational realism intruding on the park.

Speculative realism entered the presentation more explicitly at this point in the form of reference to Morton’s (2013, 2016, 2018) work on hyperobjects, dark ecology, and ecological being. Morton invites attention to what it means to experience the Anthropocene in a phenomenological sense and-–by extension-–considerations of how this/these experience(s) can be/become educational. Morton also emphasizes the simultaneously potent and problematic role of strangeness in dealing with experiences of the Anthropocene, herein offering a different vocabulary for thinking about the experience of the strange to some of those currently working in the field of ESE (see, for example, Clarke & Mcphie 2020a, 2020b). Through the development of the eccentric position, the presentation leveraged this account of strangeness to understand differently how the specific challenges of ESE could be understood though an acute eye to supposed realisms that also remain inescapable and incomprehensible.

Thinking with Morton then, the contribution’s interest lay with what it really means to experience the Anthropocene from a somewhat generalized human perspective. What stands out to us is the inherent strangeness of our current planetary state: a strangeness that simultaneously incites and repulses. Education becomes a matter of daring to encounter the strange – within as well as outside the ‘self’ (Lysgaard & Bengtsson 2020).

The presentation concluded by venturing into the space between relational ontologies and object-oriented ontologies in order to examine how the realism that is faced in education can be understood as something far more complex than what can be described from a correlationist perspective. The realisms of education illustrated in the NaturKraft park are instructive here, in light of the constant challenges posed by, for example, the realities of the natural environment, and the range of different expectations to them that are always never fulfilled as expected. These simultaneously ineffable unfinished realities are thus also elusive, in that they are never fully accessible nor constant to education, teacher or learner. The figure of the Eccentric then opens questions of how it remains possible to engage with strange and challenging aspects of education in the Anthropocene.

Correlationism, psychoanalysis, and object-disoriented ontology

Jan Varpanen and Antti Saari (Tampere University)

Varpanen and Saari offered a novel analysis of education to question ontological claims by troubling the intersection between educational theorizing and ontology through conversations between Lacanian theory and correlationism. Directing their critique to the ontological tenets of object-oriented-ontology (OOO), their choice was inspired by the rare opportunity to have Professor Harman as a discussant.

Painting a fictional case of the environmental activist, Greta Thunberg, as an illustrative example of successful education, Varpanen and Saari showed that a central component of education is the ability to teach us to care about some things and not others. Based on this, they argued that education is inextricably concerned with the peculiarities of desire. Or, in more specific terms, education is concerned with the Lacanian ‘object a’.

In Lacanian theory, object a is a marker of irrepressible lack, which in turn is constitutive of human desire, and therefore of the psyche as a whole. Varpanen and Saari argued that Lacan’s object a is not an object in the sense allowed for by OOO. This is because it cannot be located either in the desiring subject or in the desired object but exists in their interaction. This is not to say that educational theorizing would by definition require a psychoanalytic vocabulary. Rather, practices of education–in so far as they aim to have an effect on what we come to care about–cannot but avoid recognition of processes that are best illustrated with the help of Lacan’s concepts.

From this, Varpanen and Saari concluded that education is a phenomenon that requires the existence of desire as a specific kind of object. As dependent on the subject as well as the object of desire, object a is not amenable to the features that OOO ascribes to all objects. An analysis of education as a practice that influences what we come to care about, therefore, amounts to an argument for the insufficiency of OOO as relevant to all objects.

If the argument presented by Varpanen and Saari holds up to scrutiny, it is therefore not only the case that speculative realism may prove a fruitful way of looking at educational issues. It is also the case that such analyses of education may prove valuable in developing the basic ontological positions available to speculative realism. More specifically, the existence of educational processes that influence what we care about shows that our catalogues of objects need to reserve a special place for that object called desire, i.e. object a.

Varpanen and Saari suggested that this ontological point is more than simply being careful with the ontological implications of speculative realism. If speculative realism is defined in large part by Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism, then the possibility of education shows that this does not mean getting rid of the subject-object relation. Rather it means that this relation might need to be taken up in a speculative and realist sense of understanding it to be a unique kind of object that has its own peculiar ontological features.

Despite mainly directing their arguments toward ontological rather than educational questions, Varpanen and Saari’s presentation was not entirely devoid of implications for (environmental) education. Their illustration of the fictional case of Greta Thunberg–of how education influences what we care about–showed how Lacanian concepts can help understand the dynamics of desire in pro-environmental actions. Given the pressing threats of ecological destruction, developing such understanding is of paramount importance in the field of environmental education.

Relatedly, Varpanen and Saari’s presentation joined with the other contributions to the symposium in highlighting the importance of allure for environmental education. In brief, if educators are to succeed in encouraging children and young people to care about environmental issues, they need to be able to make these objects of education alluring for them. In technical terms, there is more to this claim than meets the eye. For Harman (2005, p. 180), allure is a non-causal relation between two sensual objects. The sensual object is that part of the object that is accessible to other objects, whereas the real object is the part that withdraws from access (p. 195). Varpanen and Saari’s presentation raised the question of whether there is also a type of allure–i.e. a non-causal relation–that exists between a real object and the perceiving subject. Thus, at least in educational contexts, it may be necessary to view allure to be as much a matter of connecting with the real learner as it is a matter of connecting with the real object.

Thus, extending Harman’s theory of the interaction between perception and real objects, Varpanen and Saari’s presentation pointed to the need to study further the dynamics of desire as a means of understanding the complex relations of caring that can be created through environmental education. In this, a specific kind of allure marked by Lacanian understandings of desire may be taken as one way of dealing with objects outside the correlation of thought and reality. In other words, since desire is always at least in part non-conscious, it may be read as a relation to the real object that nevertheless respects Meillassoux’s call for the non-reducibility of objects to thought. In concrete pedagogical settings, this suggests that more attention could be paid to the desire evoked in learners by particular real objects, and that more systematic efforts should be made to ensure that this desire assumes the positive form of care, when appropriate.

Under the influence: on the role of the object of education in bildung

Stefan Bengtsson (Uppsala University) and Hanna Hofverberg (Malmö University)

The third presentation focused on how we might query the privilege given to content in environmental and sustainability education, from a speculative realist perspective. Bengtsson and Hofverberg provide an object-oriented ontological differentiation between a sensual object and a real object (Harman 2011), in order to break with the correlationist reduction of the object of education to that of the content of education given, for example, the ways in which it is always already incorporated into human practice and historicity (Bengtsson 2022).

Sensual objects refer to the objects of our human experience, while in the context of the symposium, Bengtsson and Hofverberg highlighted that they are not equivalent to their relative real objects (see also the discussion of the distinction between real and sensible objects in Varpanen and Saari’s contribution above). Rather, following Harman’s (2011) distinction between sensual and real objects with sensual and real qualities, they aimed to liberate the notion of a real object: one that is not reducible to the content of education as it appears (as unified) or with qualities to those of the teacher and the learner. To break with the underlying correlationist framing of content in educational thought, they introduced the ‘object of education’, i.e. real objects and their role in teaching and learning. The object of education is a conceptual intervention that also points towards the evasive reality of an object. In educational processes this quality can be seen to undermine its reduction to a stable form of content given the experience of new or unpredicted sensual qualities, as well as to the universal significance of any attribution of its particular educational significance (Bengtsson 2022).

To elaborate, against the background of the German Geisteswissenschaftliche Didaktik (curriculum theory based on the epistemological principles of Geisteswissenschaft), the presentation explored how the theory of curriculum and instruction is based on expressions of correlationist thought, in particular the correlationist erasure of a difference between content and object. The correlationist framing has consequences for the conception of the content of education (Unterrichtsinhalt) as well as how this conception frames the education project as one of self-cultivation and formation (Bildung). In German Geisteswissenschaftliche Didaktik, Bildung refers to the process of self-formation by the learner concerning a content that Klafki (2013, 1959) and Menck (1986) see as having a universal educative substance (Bildungsgehalt).

By critiquing the consequences of this reduction of the content to a conflation of its position in Klafki and Menck to nature and culture and thus claim a universal educative substance, the presentation illustrated how content only attains a stable educative substance by investing it with an appeal to a static notion of ‘nature’. For Klafki, the educative substance of any given content is relative to the historical reality of human interaction with that content where he ascribes a stability and universal validity of why content is of importance for the processes of self-formation as a human subject.

Shifting focus, within the context of an Anthropocene indexed to a process whereby we become aware that what we once called ‘nature’ is not the stable background for human activity to which learning is in the foreground, Bengtsson and Hofverberg then illustrated how the determinism of a static and universal educative substance in ‘nature’ of materia/stuff is only partially bracketed by the appeal to human exceptionalism and agency concerning the appropriation of that content in culture (Bildung of humanity) and the project of self-formation (Bildung of the individual self). The correlationist conflation of those two positions of the content generates explanatory difficulties concerning the relation between the Bildung of self and humanity, and that of how the stability and substance of the content in the natural world can be maintained in the context of the Anthropocene.

The presentation then drew on two key conceptual developments by Harman and Meillassoux. First, by applying Meillassoux’s (2008) critique of correlationism to didactical thought, we might see how correlationism feeds a problematic notion of stable nature that is increasingly difficult to maintain in the Anthropocene. Second, the existing correlationist didactical outlook on content can be complemented by utilizing Harman’s speculative realist work on the notion of real/sensual object and allure. This also helps us rethink the status of content and the agency of content in relation to education as feeding processes of formation of self (Bildung). In Harman’s (2010, 2011) work, for example, the concept of allure refers to the influence that a withdrawn real object has on that which is sensing it. The presentation explored this concept of allure concerning how objects of education have a form of agency that shapes self-formation and the formation of humanity. To clarify the anti-correlational implications, the allure of real objects illustrates how the object of education exerts a form of causal aesthetic influence on individuals and humanity’s Bildung. Instead of being the passive content of education with universal educative substance, the allure of specific objects of education captures the attention of specific learners and at the same time withholds the transparency of its full educative substance for that learner’s self-formation.

In this anti-correlationist didactical outlook, the object of education is not a passive and stable entity with a universal educative substance to be actively appropriated by humans. Allure highlights here the agency of the object of education and its specific appeal to particular learners in the ways it captures us in its spell even as it becomes key to the process of formation of the self (Bildung). In other words, how an object of education appears to us has a causal influence on our formation of self. At the same time, the real object of education and its real qualities are partially withdrawn in their appearance to us. Such a prospect risks running aground within the conflation of humanity and subject in correlationist thought by associated appeals to a withdrawn and objectivized educative substance. From a speculative realist perspective, this substance remains relative to a particular object (including particular human learners that we might call individuals) and their specific experiences of allure (the learner’s experience of the educative significance of a content) rather than expressive of a general human history.

Several lines of inquiry can be developed from these changes in axiomatic starting points for didactical thought. One that was particularly fertile that arose during the discussion that followed the presentation was the role of the teacher in designing how an object of education might appear to a student and the key role of didactic intervention to let the object of education undermine its reduction to content by the student or the teacher. The particularity of the qualities and the individuality of an object might counter the conventional didactic reduction of content to a universal and determinate educative substance.

Commentary

Graham Harman (Southern California Institute of Architecture)

It was a pleasure to read these papers and become more aware of the uses being made of Speculative Realism in educational research. Philosophies are often most interesting at the border crossings where they meet other disciplines. This was one of the enduring lessons learned from my years in proximity to the late Bruno Latour, an important philosopher taken less seriously in philosophy than in most other humanities and social sciences disciplines.

The paper of Kardyb and Lysgaard proposes an intriguing distinction between the linear, the circular, and the dark. What I like best in their discussion is the notion of eccentric objects, meaning ‘unconventional and slightly strange’ entities characterized by an out-of-center dynamism. This has considerable overlap with the OOO model of an object that differs from its own qualities. In my book on H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Realism (Harman 2012), I was trying to establish the existence of something very much like eccentric objects. The importance of this concept in historical terms is that it serves as a counterweight to any notion of ‘dialectic’, so influential through the works of’ Hegel and Marx. Stated briefly, the core of the dialectic is the idea that even the most simple thought (such as ‘being’ or ‘nothing’) becomes implicated in its opposite through the work of negativity; from this a series of more complex thoughts quickly emerges, leading eventually to what Hegel (1816) calls Begriff or ‘concept.’ The weakness of the dialectic is its tendency to forget that the movement of reality does not entirely coincide with the movement of thought. In the terminology of Kardyb and Lysgaard, there could be no Hegelian or Marxist ‘eccentric object.’

Varpanen and Saari strike a rather different note with their appeal to psychoanalysis. They utilize Lacan’s (2016) idea of the object a, or object-cause of desire, to challenge the OOO claim that every object is a unified whole. This classical doctrine (found in Leibniz, among others) proclaims that an object is necessarily one object, always unified despite its plurality of traits. Along with Hume, one of the great opponents of this approach is Badiou (2013), who claims that a thing is one only when it is counted as one, which is why he calls individuals ‘consistent multiplicities’ rather than unities. Varpanen and Saari emphasize that Lacan’s object a is never in its place, that it is ambiguous, and that it can be transferred from one incarnation or avatar to another: imagine a man who dates a series of women who all look like his mother. My response is twofold. First, the object a has more in common with the sensual object of OOO than with the real object. The reason it cannot be a real object in the OOO sense is that object a is always a correlate of the subject who desires it. If the subject dies, so does the specific object a they had pursued. The authors also cite Alenka Zupančič’s article on ‘object-disoriented ontology.’ And indeed, I have the highest regard for Zupančič and the other members of the Ljubljana School, of whom Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar are the other most prominent Slovenian members. But we need to remember that the orientation of this School is only half-Lacanian. The other half is Hegelian, and Hegel is nothing if not an enemy of the thing-in-itself (as Kant calls it) or the real object (as I call it). Ljubljana favors the object a because they think it’s the only object about which we can really speak. What they miss thereby is that even if the march of the dialectic exhausts the thinkable, it does not exhaust the real.

We close with Bengtsson and Hofverberg, who emphasize the drawbacks of focusing on content in education. While this might sound dangerous to some readers –if we don’t teach content, then what on earth do we teach?– there is an important basis for their claim. What Object-Oriented Ontology (or OOO) most opposes is literalism (Harman 2018, 61-65). This term refers to the view that an object is nothing more than whatever ‘bundle of qualities’ it happens to possess (Hume 1993). In Latourian actor-network theory, entities are defined in parallel fashion as bundles of actions, so that nothing is more than whatever it ‘modifies, transforms, perturbs, or creates’ (Latour 1999, 122). More generally, any form of knowledge is also a form of literalism, insofar as every form of knowledge reduces an object either downward to its pieces or upward to its effects. The reason literalism fails is that an object has emergent features over and above its components as well as ‘submergent’ features that are never fully expressed in any given situation. Stated differently, an object exists in a tense relation with its own qualities and is by no means identical with them. That is to say, an object is a disembodied core that can gain or lose various qualities at different times without becoming a different object each time. Most experience is literal, in the sense that we usually have no particular reason to sense a gap between an object and its qualities. Aesthetic experience is the sort that drives a wedge between an object and its qualities so that the qualities remain tangible and palpable though the object that unites them withdraws from direct access. The technical term for the way that the object tempts and summons us from the deep is ‘allure’ (Harman 2005, 141–144).

To summarize, the three presentations focused respectively on objects insofar as they are (a) eccentric, (b) desired, and (c) sub-contentual. While I can imagine a number of pedagogical techniques that might result from these reflections, perhaps it will be more useful if I stay in my own field of expertise and ask what the presentations can add to the existing positions of Speculative Realism. The discussion of the object as object a or object cause of desire makes the most obvious contribution, insofar as Speculative Realist discourse has been largely silent about psychoanalytic themes. The psychoanalytic concept of repression must not be identified with the Heideggerian theme of withdrawal so prominent in OOO. Yet Freud’s and especially Lacan’s discussions of metaphor and metonymy are clearly of relevance to object-oriented thought in ways that have not yet been developed in print. As for the critical focus on content in the third presentation, this is both an extension and amplification of OOO’s previous involvement with Marshall McLuhan’s theory of media. Is the sub-contentual background of a thing to be identified merely with its ‘implicit’ features, or must we look even deeper than that? And finally, the first paper’s reflections on eccentricity may prompt OOO to make further clarification of how its methods resemble and differ from classic dialectical thinking.

Way markers

Stefan Bengtsson (Uppsala University)

The symposium can be seen as signaling both various openings and possible crossroads for further education research and practice development. For example, speculative realism offers us an alternative to the idea of environmental education as a pathway to becoming one with a harmonious/positive/affirmative relationship with the world, nature, and/or more recently, the more-than-human. What speculative realism helps challenge here is: a) the holism and monism of universal absolute entities, and b) the symmetry of relationality between parts in relation to wholes. The aforementioned concepts of non-causal relationships of desire, eccentric objects, and withdrawn objects of education, provide an alternative account to the relationality in/of wholes, of holism, and the gesture of expanding the notion of agency. However, to be clear, the alternative posture offered is not holistic in gesture, as in turning the learner towards the world (Biesta 2012, 2022) or the non-/posthuman (Braidotti 2013, Barad 2007), but embraces how the strangeness and eccentricity of parts and objects subscends wholes (Morton 2017). Accordingly, the symposium’s contributions might help open up a posture that celebrates and is fascinated by how objects are subscended, that is, how they are more and significant in their ‘moreness’ than ‘wholes’. Such engagement with objects, it is argued, highlights the prospect of how they might deliver more than we could, or would, like to desire them to do.

Moreover, in contrast to pleas rooted in neo-materialism (e.g. Barad 2007) that advocate various forms of becoming and change, a shared position outlined by the symposium’s contributors appears to point toward matters of the enduring specificity and uniqueness of particular objects in education, and how they always already render habitual projections of the world as ‘out-of-place’ or ‘strange’, given what Kardyb and Lysgaard term the very ‘eccentricity of objects’. Varpanen and Saari add a layer here by gesturing towards aspects of a subscending position, such as in the need to further engage with the significance of desire and the formation of desires in educational encounters. Their call for this engagement, like that of Bengtsson and Hofverberg, involves working with the allure of unique objects in education. The notion of allure then can also be seen as a further challenge to any potential relapse into post-humanist approaches alone, by detecting a risk of failure to discern, disrupt, or redefine moments where a post-humanism elides once more into yet another form of correlationism.

The agency of the object of education as non-reducible to the content of education is one such break here for a post-humanist educational correlationism, as it reminds us that it is the object in its inaccessible withdrawness (its non-correlation to the content of education) that might serve to disrupt. Educational redefinition and sensitization then–be that neo-materialist or posthumanist in inspiration or form–will not be able to capture that object as a form of content. Moreover, Harman reminds us that the content of education as object a operates at the level of the sensual and not the real. That can also signal that caring and desiring engagement with the world, or rather, specific contents of education, might entail projections and impositions of desire. It is here that we see how the contributions highlight an asymmetry to relational perspectives on desire and caring. Such relative projections and desires to ‘speak for’ any other might surface in attempts to speak about the world instead of particular objects or to speak for the non-human. A subscendent posture of caring and desiring then points not towards an upwards or downwards or all around (e.g. the heavens or Gaia), but somewhere and at something while at the same time, refraining from projecting a symmetry of desires and becoming.

So to offer a pulse taking, so to speak, of the contributions here, we could suggest the need to refrain from ‘speaking for’ and the value of retaining an eccentricity, strangeness, and non-location of the specific objects by which we find ourselves summoned forward as ‘subjects’ during education. Education as a type of formation can accordingly always-already entail an initial dis-figuration or ‘disruption’. Accordingly, the formation of desires might (should?) not reduce the objects that summon us to the project of rational, communicative, or relational dissection that is a ‘handmaiden’ to the Anthropocene. Put differently, to care or find oneself caught up in the allure of eccentric and strange objects can also signal the need to refrain from internalizing desire within a particular learner or teacher. Accordingly, a joint way forward arising from the symposium might be a felt need to engage in research and practice with an education that facilitates a contemplative yet aesthetically curious engagement with disfiguring and eccentric objects for environmental and sustainability education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).