From action to intra-action? Agency, identity and ‘goals’ in a relational approach to climate change education

Abstract

Engaging with new materialist/posthuman approaches to agency, in this paper I explore what might happen to the goal of cultivating climate action if we decentre the human from our climate pedagogies. Specifically, I engage with Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action which argues that agency is not possessed by individual things or beings, but emerges through relationships. I work with experiences and occurrences from Climate Change Responses, an undergraduate social science course that I tutored in 2015 (CCR15). I explore how in CCR15, while trying to learn to better mitigate climate change, we became climate killjoys, resisting, challenging and disrupting pleasurable carbon intensive practices. Through these empirical examples, I show that ‘climate intra-action’ can enable us to attend to how human and more-than-human identities change through engagement with climate change; how our human capacities to affect climate emerge through acting-with more-than-human entanglements; and thus how unanticipated, different actions can emerge in climate change education. I therefore suggest that an intra-active approach to climate change education research and practice might enable less anthropocentric and more relationally attuned climate change ‘response-abilities’, for both teachers and students.

Keywords:

• Diffraction
• intersectionality
• acting-with
• posthuman
• new materialism

Acknowledgments

This research was conducted on Wurundjeri and Dja Dja Wurrung country. I pay respect to Wurundjeri and Dja Dja Wurrung elders past, present and future, and recognise that colonisation is an ongoing process which requires active decolonisation.

I would like to thank my PhD supervisors, Iris Duhn and Lauren Rickards, as well as my Climate Change Responses class from 2015 for participating in this research project. I would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers provided insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.