Common Worlds Justice in Post-Anthropocentric Education: Attuning to the More-Than-Human through Walking with Sound and Smell

ABSTRACT

Onrushing ecological precarity and collapse disproportionately affects particular humans and their common worlds. This article proposes that in the face of the myriad crises the Earth is experiencing, and the uneven distribution of their effects, extending conceptions of justice in education beyond the human is crucial. This, however, requires honing the ability to notice and attune to the common worlds we inhabit. Drawing on research which deployed a “walking with” methodology with young children in a national park, this article considers the potential of listening in multiple registers as a move toward common worlds justice in post-anthropocentric education. Possibilities for thinking with the registers of sound and smell are put forward for researchers and educators working with young children. The article concludes with a speculative vignette that offers pedagogical openings which make room for common worlds justice.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Annette Nykiel for field assistance during the study. We also wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive, insightful, and encouraging feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. “The notion of common worlds is an inclusive, more than human notion. It helps us to avoid the divisive distinction that is often drawn between human societies and natural environments.” (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2022, para 2)

2. It is important to note that the term “more-than-human” is inclusive of humans. We lean on Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) definition of more-than-human which “speaks in one breath of nonhumans and other than humans such as things, objects, other animals, living beings, organisms, physical forces, spiritual entities, and humans” (p. 1). “More-than-human” is not, therefore, as O’Gorman and Gaynor (2020, p. 717) point out, a synonym for “nonhuman” or “nature.” Rather, more-than-human emphasises relationality and mutual co-constitution.

3. Thrombolites are rock-like accretions found around the edges of lakes. They are sometimes called “living rocks,” but they are not rocks. Instead, their “rockiness” arises from the precipitation of calcium carbonate laid down by “complex ecological associations of photosynthetic prokaryotes, eukaryotic microalgae, and chemoautotrophic and chemoheterotrophic microbes” (Burne & Moore, 1987, p. 241).

4. In using the term “post-anthropocentric education,” we are suggesting a move away from the largely human-centric intentions that currently characterise Euro-western approaches to education.

5. The Binjareb are 1 of 14 dialectical groups within the Noongar language group of First Nations people from south-west Australia. “Boodja” is the Noongar word for “Country” (South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council, 2021).

6. The tuart (Eucalyptus gomphocephala) is a tall (up to 40 m) eucalyptus species occurring along a narrow coastal strip of south-western Australia. The extent of tuart forest has been greatly reduced since colonisation.

7. All children’s names are pseudonyms.

8. We use the term caregiver to describe the adults who accompanied children on the visits to the site. They were often the children’s parent(s), but may also have been other family members, friends, and paid caregivers.

9. In this article, we follow Deleuze (1988, p. 127) who states, “A body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity.”

10. The Swan Coastal Plain is a 30 km-wide strip of land on the south-western coast of Australia, stretching approximately 500 km between Cape Naturalist and Jurien Bay.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jane Merewether

Jane Merewether is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at Murdoch University, Western Australia. She is a member of the Common Worlds Research Collective and is interested in pedagogies for a climate-changing world. She deploys socially engaged creative methodologies to conduct ecologically focused research which explores young children’s entangled encounters with the world. Her work is informed by childhood studies, feminist new materialisms, environmental humanities, and the educational project of Reggio Emilia.

Brad Gobby

Brad Gobby is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at Curtin University. His research and teaching interests include education policy, politics, and pedagogies for the Chthulucene. Brad plugs into Foucauldian, new materialist, and posthumanist scholarship. He is a co-investigator on an Australian Research Council-funded project on school autonomy and social justice, co-editor of Powers of Curriculum: Sociological Perspectives on Education (Oxford), and author of many articles and book chapters on power and education reform.

Mindy Blaise

Mindy Blaise is a Vice Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University, where she is Co-director of the Strategic Research Centre, Centre for People, Place & Planet. She is co-founder of the Common Worlds Research Collective, an interdisciplinary network of researchers concerned with human, environment, and more-than-human relations. Her interdisciplinary and postdevelopmental research with the more-than-human uses emergent, affect-focused, and creative methods to rework a humanist ontology. She is interested in how the more-than-human and feminist speculative research practices activate meanings of childhood that sit outside the narrow confines of developmentalism.