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Abstract
We address the aims of this Special Issue by exploring, critiquing, and responding constructively to the emergence and potential significance of new materialist thought in environmental education research and the broader theoretical landscape in which such research is situated. We offer some productive possibilities for advancing postparadigmatic materialist theorising in environmental education research by deploying concepts selected from Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘box of tools’ (namely, ‘machinic assemblage’ and ‘lines of flight’), supplemented by concepts associated with SF (science/speculative fiction)—namely ‘cognitive estrangement’ and ‘object-orientated thought experiments’—to generate new lines of flight in material-semiotic environmental education research assemblages.
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This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Deleuze refers to a concept as a ‘box of tools’ in a conversation with Michel Foucault (Citation1997, 207).
2 We prefer to use Norman Denzin’s (Citation2013, 355) term ‘empirical materials’ as an alternative to ‘data’ although we acknowledge than many of the authors, we cite approvingly use the latter term. Nevertheless, we agree with Denzin who eschews the term data because it brings into play a positivist ontology and an epistemology based on a politics of evidence.
3 Peta Malins (Citation2004, 84) offers a convincing demonstration of the generativity of this conception of machinic assemblage by substituting the concept ‘book’ with ‘drug using body’ to suit the purposes of her explorations of the ‘ethico-aesthetics of drug use’.
4 Manifest Destiny held that the US was destined—by God, its advocates believed—to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent. ‘Manifest Destiny’, a phrase coined in 1845 by journalist John O’Sullivan, expressed the philosophy that drove 19th-century US territorial expansion (see, for example, The Ohio State University History Institute’s lesson plan: https://hti.osu.edu/history-lesson-plans/united-states-history/manifest-destiny-westward-expansion).
5 Reid (Citation1990, 215) adds that other possibilities are comparative studies or futures studies.
6 In fact, the stories and characters in Always Coming Home were strongly influenced by Le Guin’s father’s work as an anthropologist studying indigenous cultures. As director of the University of California Museum of Anthropology, Alfred L. Kroeber was famed for his work with Ishi, an indigenous man known as the ‘last wild Indian’ (Curry Citation2018).
7 It should be noted that although Barad is often called a new materialist—e.g. Carol Taylor (Citation2016, 201) refers to Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007), as ‘already a “foundational” text for new material feminism’—she is first and foremost a feminist science studies scholar and philosopher. The breadth of academics brought together under the term ‘new materialism’—many of whom draw from different theoretical fields—can limit the interpretive potentiality of their work and lead to substantial misinterpretations. As noted in the text, we embrace the multiplicity and variety of theoretical approaches put forth by academics currently labelled as ‘new materialists’, all of whom engage differently with matter and the material world. We believe that such tensions and contradictions are generative. Yet we caution that the nuances of their theories have often been selectively overlooked or collapsed into each other, leading to misreadings and misunderstandings of particular concepts.
8 One of the anonymous reviewers of this article objected that this ‘reads as a reductive definition of imagination’ but we stand by it because it is a particularly important characteristic of scientific thought experiments, most of which involve visualization of phenomena (Maxwell’s daemon, Einstein’s train and elevator, Schrodinger’s cat, etc.).
9 Haraway (Citation1985, 66) has consistently engaged the material from her earliest work, such as ‘A manifesto for cyborgs’ in which she states: ‘The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality’, and ‘the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion’.
10 Which can also be seen as a pointed critique of the bias of using predetermined hypotheses in scientific research.
11 Haraway (Citation2016, 31) explains this another way by stating that: ‘Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something.’
12 As a further example of Wells’ ‘visions’ Le Guin (2016, 190) adds: ‘A squadron of airplanes over Naples (two years before Kitty Hawk!)’, an apparent reference to ‘A Dream of Armageddon’, a short story by Wells first published in 1901 in the British weekly magazine Black and White.
13 Earlier English translations of Verne’s (1870) Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, inaccurately translated mers as the singular ‘sea’ rather than the plural ‘seas’.
14 For further elaboration of biopolitics in SF literature and popular media see Gough (Citation2017).
15 Much of Barad’s (Citation2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway reflects her training as a high-energy theoretical physicist, and she predicates many of her arguments for ‘how and why we must understand in an integral way the roles of human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors in scientific and other practices’ (Barad 1997, 25) on her interpretation of Neils Bohr’s and Werner Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics. But, as Silvan Schweber (Citation2008, 881) points out, Barad’s reading of quantum physics is selective: she almost completely overlooks the contributions of Wolfgang Pauli (he is mentioned in a footnote) and his extensive correspondence with Bohr and Heisenberg, as well as more recent scholarship on the subject. Schweber (who is also an eminent professor of physics and the history of ideas) disagrees with Barad’s assessment of the failure of representational approaches in fundamental physics. He writes: ‘advances at the nuclear and subnuclear levels were due to the possibility of a confluence between ontology and representation’. We were also astonished by Barad’s (Citation2007, 85) assertion that quantum mechanics is ‘the correct theory of nature that applies to all scales’. This ignores Sandra Harding’s (1986, 193) call for feminist science scholars to resist ‘the longing for “one true story” that has been the psychic motor for [modern] Western science’. Also, as Schweber (Citation2008, 881) points out, although quantum mechanics applies to a wide range of length scales, it is not a ‘final theory’ or a ‘theory of everything’, because, for example, it cannot (to date) incorporate gravitational phenomena.
16 On October 13th 2017, Haraway participated in a public dialogue with the SF writer Starhawk at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sponsored by the Science and Justice Research Center, the talk was titled: ‘A Public Conversation with Donna Haraway and Starhawk: Magic, Figuration & Speculative Fiction as Calls to Action’.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Noel Gough
Noel Gough is emeritus professor in the School of Education at La Trobe University, Australia, where he served as Foundation Professor of Outdoor and Environmental Education (2006–2014). His teaching, research and publications focus on research methodology and curriculum studies, with particular reference to environmental education, science education, internationalisation and globalisation. He is a coeditor and contributor to Curriculum Visions (Peter Lang, 2002) and Internationalisation and Globalisation in Mathematics and Science Education (Springer, 2007), founding editor of Transnational Curriculum Inquiry, and a past president and honorary life member of the Australian Association for Research in Education.
Chessa Adsit-Morris
Chessa Adsit-Morris is a curriculum theorist currently pursuing a PhD in Visual Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA, where she is Assistant Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies. Her teaching, research and publications focus on curriculum studies and evolutionary theory, with particular reference to environmental education, environmental humanities, science studies and science fiction. She is the author of Restorying Environmental Education: Figurations, Fictions, Feral Subjectivities (Palgrave Macmillan 2017).