Chessa Adsit-Morris, PhD student in the Visual Studies department, is publishing a new book with Palgrave Macmillan titled: Restorying Environmental Education: Figurations, Fictions, Feral Subjectivities. This book examines a performative environmental educational inquiry collaboratively undertaken with a class of grade 4-6 students through a place-based eco-art project around the lost streams of Vancouver. The resulting work explores the contradictions inherent within the Western educational system and the myriad of “Others” (real and imaginary others) encountered, in an attempt to find and foster nourishing alliances for transforming environmental education. Drawing on the work of new materialist theorists Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Karen Barad, Adsit-Morris considers the co-constitutive materiality of human corporeality and nonhuman natures and provides useful tools for finding creative theoretical alternatives to the reductionist, representationalist, and dualistic practices of the Western metaphysics.
The book employs research methodologies that utilizes inventive narrative and textual strategies to foreground the complex and messy processes and practices of doing, thinking and writing academic research, or what David Lewkowich (2012) describes as a process of “clandestine labor,” the uneasy struggle of translation, inventiveness and emergence. Utilizing narrative strategies to foreground such processes can provide emerging scholars and researchers with inspiration and encouragement to be creative, imaginative, and experiment with methodologies/methods of inquiry. Although these processes can be difficult, they are also fun and rewarding. This book project aims to be playful in all seriousness in order to encourage both established and emerging researchers to think differently about research.
Image: Holobiont or Entangled Bank. Copyright 2010-2016 Tommy Leung.