Hydropoetic relational bodies of environmental education research

The doctoral dissertation proposes the reconfiguration of key concepts in education research, such as ‘research site’, ‘participants’, and ‘findings’ but also what counts as ‘environmental education’ and the notion of ‘research‘ itself. The methodology adopted is posthumanism and hydropoetics which is articulated through sound, visual images, stitching and line making. Re-turning to data of an international project on young children’s learning and play with technology, this dissertation troubles and reconfigures the binaries between home and school, theory and method, adult and child, nature and culture.

Following the questions which murky the waters of current understandings of research, this dissertation asks: How do hydropoetic relational bodies haunt environmental education and recon(vig)ure research? One of its major ‘findings’ is the strikethrough in the title (environmental education). It articulates the urgent need ontologically, epistemologically, ethically and politically to resist the categorisations we tend to work and live with when using the concept ‘environment’ in education, teaching and research.

Colonial research practices assume bodies as bounded, individual entities that exist separate and prior to their relations. The dissertation traces relations with time, space and the human and more-than-human ghosts of South Africa’s Apartheid and its in/visible presence in environmental education research. Ghosts ‘in’ Camissa (IIkhamis sa, meaning place of sweet waters otherwise known as Cape Town) are not only human relations, but also relations that include ‘other’ bodies (e.g., octopus, plants, kelp, tidal pools, schools, pavements, electric fences) alongside a train track, making, creating and swimming in deep waters enacting justice-to-come as a worlding practice.

Hydropoetics as a relational methodology also offers something ‘new’ in terms of academic writing. Methodological ‘linings’ make it possible for the chapters in-between to flourish and become bodies of co-writing. The chapters are dependent on their relationship with the linings and brought into existence through it. Linings are permeable because they connect different parts together and register movement, change and flows. The linings resurface the potential of complexifying academic practices, reconfigure time as leaky, space as porous and dis/located thereby de/colonising western logics and metaphysical individualism.