Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles

Set within the dynamic unfolding of youth climate movements, this paper explores the role of digital media in staging new possibilities for climate change education and activism. We engage theories of affective politics to explore how young people are using digital platforms to both learn about climate change and perform climate activism. We develop this analysis by describing the co-development of a climate education App with young people, a co-design project that brought together elements of climate science, speculative fiction, crowd sourcing, and hacktivism. The paper aims to advance understandings of how digital practices can help young people navigate climate change as a ‘theatre of problems’ through the cultivation of political affects and subjectivities.

This presentation ‘stays’ with the ‘traces’ in posthuman and Aboriginal knowings as an attempt to situate theory in environmental education and its research. Through a conceptualisation of theory as ‘knots’ in the vast fabric of knowledge, and these efforts to ‘stay-with’ as methodology, we sense/work in/through traces whereby theory may engage with embodied patterns of human and non-human relationality across place and time. This grounding of theory illuminates diverse epistemologies and ways of knowing that are indeed knotted together. Our approach challenges the perpetuation of reductionist humanist perspectives, including the nature/culture binary, within environmental education. Through enacting widening arenas of identification and relationality we offer an exploration of an alternative pedagogical approach, one that will provoke environmental educators to ‘stay-with’ expanding possibilities. With a focus on place and arts-based educational research methodologies, staying with the traces necessitates a slow and deep engagement within both theory and practice.

The interactive and sensory nature of this symposium allows participants to explore the innovative potentials of walking for their own research, education and artistic practice- with specific relevance for those involved with sustainability and environmental education, arts education, site-specific and relational art practices, cultural geography and anthropology, eco-cultural studies, environmental writing, location-based media and other fields of inquiry orientated towards movement, place and entanglement.

This keynote presents arguments associated with young children's play experiences in contemporary environments. The notion of 'nature deficit disorder' and the changing role of nature in young children's lives is examined and problematized within an early childhood education context. The phenomenon of the ecological continuum is considered, alongside the perceived role of environmental education in the early years as a response to children's contemporary play experiences.