Book chapter
Walking the Mandala: A Big-Little Way of Being and Knowing in Disrupted Worlds
Arts-Based Thought Experiments for a Posthuman Earth: A Touchstones Companion, pp.38-56
Imagination and Praxis: Criticality and Creativity in Education and Educational Research, Volume 16, Brill, First edition
2022
Appears in Recent Faculty of Education Publications
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Abstract
Global disruptions can inspire new ways of teaching and thinking through the big questions of little things. Recognising our disrupted times, we explore the mandala as an integrative symbol – a visuo-spatial abstraction of a worldview – that invites and represents responses to big questions in ontology, cosmology, epistemology, axiology and eschatology. We re-imagine the mandala as an expansion and a contraction of intersecting ‘opposites’ (e.g. sacred-profane, mythos-logos, order-chaos) that can push-and-pull thinking through the wicked problems of disrupted times.
We embrace Walking the Mandala as a mytho-poetical and logico-mathematical act for learning and unlearning. It is at once an embodied and affective act of creative turns and qualitative diffractions, and a cognitive act of critical and analytical cartography that orientates and measures. It is a circumambulation – a circling of possibilities that connects oneself to others.
Finally, we introduce a novel three-dimensional mandala – the Zygo – as a material artefact and architecture for critical, creative and consilient thinking through disruptions in big-little worlds.
Details
- Title
- Walking the Mandala: A Big-Little Way of Being and Knowing in Disrupted Worlds
- Creators
- Raoul Adam (Author) - Southern Cross UniversityThilinika Wijesinghe (Author) - Southern Cross University, Faculty of EducationYaw Ofosu-Asare (Author) - Southern Cross University, Faculty of EducationPhilemon Chigeza (Author) - James Cook University
- Contributors
- Alexandra Lasczik (Editor) - Southern Cross University, Faculty of EducationAmy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles (Editor) - Southern Cross University, Faculty of Education
- Publication Details
- Arts-Based Thought Experiments for a Posthuman Earth: A Touchstones Companion, pp.38-56
- Series
- Imagination and Praxis: Criticality and Creativity in Education and Educational Research; Volume 16
- Publisher
- Brill; Leiden, The Netherlands
- Edition
- First edition
- Identifiers
- 991013180013802368
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Education
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Book chapter