Professor Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles

Correction to: Chapter “Walking as a Critical Art of Inquiry” in: A. Lasczik et al. (eds.), Walking as Critical Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 7, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29991-9_1

In the original version of this chapter “Walking as a Critical Art of Inquiry” the last name of Cory Jobb in Section 4 was spelled incorrectly in the initially published version. It has been corrected.

The corrected chapter and the book has been updated with the changes.

This transdisciplinary, international collection is situated within a genealogy of experimental walking practices in the arts, arts-based research, and emergent walking practices in education. It brings together emerging cartographies of relation amongst walking practices ranging across arts-based, ecological, activist, decolonising, queer, critical and posthumanist modes of inquiry. Its particular investment is in the proliferation of artful modes of inquiry that open up speculative practices and concepts of walking as an orientation for pedagogy, inquiry, and the everyday, resisting the gaze of privilege and the relentless commodification of human and nonhuman life processes. This is important work for the burgeoning demand for creative methodologies in the social sciences, and more specifically, for arts-based educational research [ABER], which is pushing creative methods of inquiry into zones of contact previously siloed by disciplinary boundaries.

This chapter walks a doctoral inquiry located in, through and with Covid-19, the virus that reached pandemic proportions from 2019 onwards and is still a malignant presence at time of writing. This chapter argues that the more than human presence of the pandemic created the conditions for an inquiry that shifted, responded and diffracted away from its original planning towards an engagement with posthuman entities, Covid-19 being but one. Originally planned as a place-based and pedagogical doctoral study that intended to inquire with Chinese art and design university students in Hunan province, the study was necessarily redesigned and repositioned to accommodate a practice-based inquiry impacted by the pandemic and its associated restrictions. The project transmogrified into a study that focused on the more than human. It became a walking-with posthuman covid as a ubiquitous and unyielding presence, always co-implicated in the study and the life and artmakings of the first author, her students and her doctoral supervisors. Posthuman covid thus became a creature implicated in the work by its absent presence and inspired a more fully posthuman artmaking practice, where the agency of more than human entities became actively and agentically implicated in the materiality of art process, art performance and resolved artworks. Place and pedagogy, once the initial focus of the study, became an apparatus of enactment, in an ecology of practice—in this case, walking-with posthuman covid.

This chapter presents an exploration of young people's digital media practices for climate justice applying the conceptual figuration of a general ecology. The figuration of "general ecology" positions digital media technologies as elements of young people's natural environments intricately interwoven with atmospheric and climatological processes. To illustrate a "general ecology" theoretical framing to youth digital media studies, we draw on two significant speculative digital research projects, namely the co-development of Climate Action Adventure! with Australian children and young people, and the co-production of speculative online drama performances with young people in Australia and Sri Lanka. We conclude that these speculative digital projects act as sites of generating knowledge differently, affirming that education requires an urgent change in becoming worthy of the general ecological conditions of the Anthropocene or ecocide.

This chapter shares an overview of the Australian branch of the Mapping A/r/tography Project, which sought to engage in transnational storytelling across historical and cultural routes of significance through the methodologies of a/r/tography, walking and mapping. The inquiry included young people from a secondary school for youth at risk who became researchers through a participatory research framework, and engaged in a deep mapping of connections, ecologies and experiences of the world heritage listed Gondwana Rainforest site through the languages of ecology, Art and creativity. This process mobilised affective knowing as an opening to creative teaching and learning, and emergent geographies of self and other through walkographic inquiry through the development of collaborative and creative exchanges that address storytelling through geo-specific understandings of a/r/tography. This Australian site of the Mapping A/r/tography Project afforded a unique opportunity to initiate innovative pedagogy and curriculum and practical actions that sought to privilege the agency of young people as researchers.

This book brings together visual arts educators working on an international research project titled Mapping A/r/tography: Transnational Storytelling Across Historical and Cultural Routes of Significance. Emphasizing a collaboratory model (Muff, 2014) that fuses concepts of collaboration and laboratory, the project underscores how a/r/tography facilitates participatory, collaborative, and cooperative knowledge creation and mobilization. Each chapter is located in a collaboratory in a particular location.

This chapter places learning in a posthuman experimentation. This posthuman experimentation engages ‘place as event’ extending from ‘nature as event’ as framed by and formerly by Deleuze (1980), Whitehead (1920) and James (1912). This process of working-through or experimenting attunes creatively to affect and the sensorial as a key engagement of socioecological learning through passages of poetry, photographic essay and creative writing. In effect, the posthumanist learner (re)adjusts to being already entangled as nature and not separated or dominated by humanist dispositions. In this process we acknowledge the everpresent and sometimes incomplete traces of the posthuman, socioecological learner.

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.

The “animal turn” in academia has been described by researchers like Weil (J Fem Cult Stud 21(2):1–23, 2010) as an increasing scholarly interest in the status of animals beyond that of the utilitarian or agricultural scientific study of animals and the larger-than-human degraded ecological times we are living in. The human condition has always been defined and studied in relation to the animal, from ancient to contemporary posthuman thinkers, where the study of animal relations forms a large component of this ontological turn, with shifting aspirations to decenter anthropocentric interactions and challenge human assumptions of more-than-human lives. Human-animal studies, while still firmly planted within disciplinary margins, “have been edging towards the mainstream” (Ritvo, Environ Hist 9(2):204–220, 2004, p. 205), becoming increasingly popular, respected topics of inquiry (Ritvo, Daedalus 136(4):118–122, 2007). Creative opportunities for experimentation therefore exist where new terms, becomings, and conceptualizations are underway.