Ratty places – unsettling human-centeredness in ecological inquiry with young people

Abstract

Posthumanist orientations have underlined the need to foster non-hierarchical relations with other-than-human beings to adequately attend to planetary crises and help life to survive and flourish. Since a posthumanist critique towards natural sciences has mostly leaned on questioning the premise of human subjects making sense of objectified nature, little effort has been made to explore if and how scientific research and posthumanist approaches might intersect and co-exist without abandoning their respective aims. In this paper, we analyse a case of ecological citizen science inquiry on urban rats to explore theoretical and practical opportunities for environmental education that arise from bridging the posthumanist call for attentiveness towards multispecies worlds with ecological research endeavor. We reconceptualize ecological inquiry as sharing atmospheres with other animals as well as through its material aspects to articulate conceptual tools to disrupt the subject-object division of knowledge creation between humans and other animals.

Keywords:

• Atmosphere
• materiality
• multispecies worlds
• posthumanism
• SDG: 4 quality education

Acknowledgements

We thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, Marlene Broemer for checking the language on the final manuscript and the three teachers and their students for participating in this research.

Disclosure statement

There are no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Notes on contributors

Anttoni Kervinen is a school teacher, a teacher educator and an educational researcher in the Teacher Training School in the Faculty of Educational Sciences and a visiting researcher in the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, all in University of Helsinki. Holding a PhD in educational sciences, his research focuses on how the interplay between students, teachers, technology and multispecies environments can lead to doing and learning science in meaningful ways. Other lines of research focus on teacher professional development and citizen science projects as opportunities for science education.

Maria Helena Saari is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oulu in the research projects AniMate-Multispecies Childhoods and Academy of Finland funded CitiRats: From Citizen Science to Non-Anthro- pocentric Education. She teaches undergraduate courses on environmental education and multispecies child- hood studies and serves as board member and treasurer of the Finnish Network for Critical Animal Studies (CASFinland).

Pauliina Rautio is a Senior Research Fellow steering a research team AniMate, which includes several senior and junior researchers spanning disciplines from human and social sciences to natural sciences. AniMate collaborates with young citizens as well as artists working on for example speculative fiction and biological arts, exploring processes of becoming and being human with other animals and highlighting multispecies justice as an integral part of education. Pauliina’s research within the funded projects of AniMate combines ecological citizen science with education, human-animal studies, childhood studies and the arts, utilising post-qualitative and multispecies (non-anthropocentric) methodologies. Pauliina is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oulu (Faculty of Education and Psychology), an Adjunct Professor of Education at the University of Helsinki, as well as a senior scholar in the Biodiverse Anthropocenes research profiling area of the University of Oulu, the Editor-In-Chief of Trace - Journal for Human Animal Studies, as well as wildlife rehabilitator for injured birds and a companion human to budgies, rats, chickens, dogs and a horse.

Riikka Hohti is a postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Education and Psychology, University of Oulu, and Faculty of Education, University of Helsinki. Her research interests include child–animal relations, temporality, and more-than-human education, as well as research methodologies informed by feminist posthumanist and new materialist theories. She currently leads the research project Antroposeenin lapset (Atmospheres, Kone Foundation, 2022–2025).

Tuure Tammi is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oulu in transdisciplinary citizen science projects examining human-animal relations (Fellow Feelings and CitiRats). Drawing from relational ontology, and critical posthumanist and multispecies scholarship, he is interested in exploring theoretical, methodological and philosophical questions where multispecies childhoods are lived, care practiced, and justice negotiated.

Tuomas Aivelo is an Academy Research Fellow in the Organismal and Evolutionary Biology program in the Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences of the University of Helsinki. He leads Helsinki Urban Rat Project and studies wildlife pathogens and parasites, populations dynamics and interactions with humans. He also trains biology teachers and has run science education research projects. His main interests are interspecific relations in both ecological and social scientific points of view, such host-pathogen interactions, resource competition, pest management and its consequences, attitudes towards animals, (citizen) science practices, knowledge systems and living with unloved and awkward species.

Correction Statement

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

Notes

1 CitiRats, https://citirats.wordpress.com

2 Helsinki Urban Rat project, https://www2.helsinki.fi/en/projects/urban-rats.

3 Restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic prevented researchers from entering school buildings. The face-to-face activities at the schools were organised in the school yard.

Additional information

Funding

Academy of Finland, The Emil Aaltonen Foundation; Otto A. Malm Foundation.