Critical place as a fluid margin in post-critical environmental education

Abstract

Positive claims about place pedagogy in education are problematized through this small-scale interpretive study of internationally mobile students’ experiences of outdoor environmental education. Of specific interest in this empirical study of learners’ pedagogically constructed experiences of place are the fluid subjectivities, cultural dispositions, environmental consciences, and ecological assumptions they already bring ‘globally’ to the ‘place’ of the educational intervention, and the hybrid ‘splaces’ we conclude they then temporarily embody – at least, during and after the experience. The study empirically advances an ongoing need for post-critical inquiry in environmental research by incorporating a range of theoretical and conceptual resources that work the boundaries, ‘margins’, and tensions that lie somewhere ‘in-between’ the spatially projected place/local and planet/global discourses.

Keywords:

• place pedagogy and embodied experience
• post-critical inquiry
• fluidity
• hybridity
• splace

Notes

1. Zygmunt Bauman used ‘fluidity’ as a metaphor to signify the ontological dynamism of beings. For Bauman, fluidity is the ‘lightness’ that brings a perspective of change or flexible becoming into the constitution of beings: ‘[i]n a sense, solids cancel time; for liquids, on the contrary, it is mostly time that matters’ (2). Semantically, liquidity or fluidity signifies indefinability, but meaning is only contextually valid for the time being. While Bauman used the term ‘liquid’, instead of ‘fluid’, in his Liquid Modernity (2000), he often employed those words interchangeably. We only use the term ‘fluid’ for readability, because this word can be usefully modified into the adverb in English, as ‘fluidly’.

2. According to Bruno Latour (1993, 10–11) ‘hybrids’ are ‘entirely new types of beings’ made of mixtures of binary oppositions, such as nature and culture. While producing complex hybrid beings, modern society, on the other hand, also critically re-purifies them into binary oppositions, which is how knowledge is supposed to function in modernity. Latour pointed out that this double process of modern production of hybrids and their re-purification is a contradiction, to the degree that our ‘modern’ identity is now problematized. Latour’s observation supports our argument that we need to deal with hybrids (and their contradictions) in our everyday life, and this includes environmental education.

3. Cresswell (2004, 7) recommended three fundamental aspects of place for a concise definition. Those aspects are: location; locale (i.e. ‘the actual shape of place’); and sense of place (i.e. ‘the subjective and emotional attachment people have to place’). While sense of place is subjective and emotional in its origin, it also often takes material forms (e.g. establishment of a town museum), thus ‘objectified’ (Berger and Luckmann 1967). This instantly indicates that place is in fact hybrid, instead of being an objective entity that autonomously transcends our subjectivities.

4. Urry (2007, 197–198) identified an aspect of mobility as our socially organized capacity to move around, which he called ‘network capital’. Network capital includes eight elements. They are: (1) array of appropriate documents, visas, money, qualification; (2) others (workmates, friends, and family members) at-a-distance; (3) movement capacity; (4) location free information and contact points; (5) communication devices; (6) appropriate, safe and secure meeting places; (7) access; and (8) time and other resources to manage and coordinate the above elements. Following Urry’s conception of mobility as network capital, we use the term ‘mobility’ or ‘mobile’ in this paper to signify the social capacity of the subject. For example, when we describe study abroad students as ‘mobile’, we mean their sociological status as well as their literal ontological fluidity.