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Who Can Speak for the Earth? Working the Socioecological Touchstones of the Anthropocene, the Posthuman and Common Worlds through the Creative Milieux of Speculative Fiction
Book chapter

Who Can Speak for the Earth? Working the Socioecological Touchstones of the Anthropocene, the Posthuman and Common Worlds through the Creative Milieux of Speculative Fiction

Alexandra Lasczik and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles
Arts-Based Thought Experiments for a Posthuman Earth: A Touchstones Companion, pp.6-16
BRILL, First edition
2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004507838_002

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Abstract

Creative arts, media and communication curriculum and pedagogy Environmental education curriculum and pedagogy Pedagogy
This chapter seeks to activate (through arts-based methods), socioecological learning, which was introduced in the original chapter, entitled “Touchstones for Deterritorializing the Socioecological Learner” (). The Touchstones are the Anthropocene, the Posthuman and Common Worlds as Creative Milieux. This assemblage opens up the space for de-learning and de-imagining the learner as a socioecological learner. This chapter has thus been written as speculative fiction, because we wanted to provoke further accessible dialogue around these deeply theoretical constructs. We worked through a process similar to that of the Surrealist invention of ‘le cadaver exquis’ (exquisite corpse). This was a parlour game of drawing, whereby the artists take turns to create an image with guidelines or prompts, not viewing what the artist before them had created, the result of which was a Surrealist drawing. The reason we did this was that we sought an enigmatic conversation, a playful exchange, in keeping with notions of engaged and pleasurable learning experiences. Thus, we handed the manuscript backwards and forwards to each other in a socioecological dialogue, working the Touchstones in practice. The aim of the writing-as-inquiry () was to create, to generate, to explore, to provoke. We asserted our own guidelines and prompts, engaging enabling constraints after Manning and Massumi (2014) in order to create in a more focused way, allowing our creativity its breath. We therefore constrained the word limit for each pass: 250–500 words, with a 24-hour turnaround. Whilst we did not always strictly adhere to the constraints, what we found was that such a dialogue can take the writer to unexpected places, and that we were entirely engaged in the project, often eschewing other more pressing work to linger in the act of writing. We also found that we were eager to trouble the tensions around anthropomorphising more than human entities, given that, as humans, we know no other onto-epistemological perspective than that of our own. As we wrote ourselves into the more than human characters, we pondered that the learner in the context of education is ineffably human, as are we, the authors. We can no more speak as a dolphin or a spider than the spider or dolphin can speak for us. We can however, imagine, create, and speculate as socioecological learners. Indeed, we cannot speak for the Earth, although when attempted to connect, we found that the Earth likely had a lot to say.

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