Arts-Based Thought Experiments is a highly visual offering that engages visual arts, photography, poetry, creative non-fiction, memoir and speculative fiction. In this novel book, the authors lean deeply into concepts of the imaginary, and through artful experiments with thought, trouble the tensions between the human, the posthuman and the more than human. In the Anthropocene, with its intractable challenges and cataclysms, engaging posthuman positions when thinking of learning in socioecological terms is paramount to human survival. In this sense, the arts offer creative and critical thought for the possibilities of a post-Anthropocene earth.
Contributors are: Raoul Adam, Marilyn Ahearn, William Boyd, Euan Boyd, Adrienne Brown, Shae L. Brown, Teresa Carapeto, Philemon Chigeza, Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, David Ellis, Katie Hotko, Rita L. Irwin, Marianne Logan, Ferdousi Khatun, Alexandra Lasczik, Alys Mendus, Yaw Ofosu-Asare, Maia Osborn, Marie-Laurence Paquette, Jemma Peisker, Ziah Peisker, Adrienne Piscopo, David Rousell, Ben Ryan, Billy Ryan, Lisa Siegel, Helen Widdop Quinton, Thilinika Wijesinghe and Tracy Young.
Alexandra Lasczik is Professor of Arts and Education and currently Associate Dean Research in the Faculty of Education at Southern Cross University, Australia. Alexandra is Research co-Leader of the Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education Research Centre [SEAE].
Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles is Executive Dean for the Faculty of Education, Southern Cross University, Australia as well as the Research Leader of the Sustainability, Environment, the Arts in Education Research Centre (SEAE). She is a Professor of Sustainability, Environment and Education.
Foreword
Rita L. Irwin Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Prologue: Fold, Unfolding, Enfolding: Socioecological Learning through Arts-Based Thought Experiments
Alexandra Lasczik and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles
1 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 2 Posthuman Arts-Based Experimentation through Place-as-Event
Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Alexandra Lasczik, Lisa Siegel and Tracy Young 3 Walking the Mandala: A Big-Little Way of Being and Knowing in Disrupted Worlds
Raoul Adam, Thilinika Wijesinghe, Yaw Ofosu Asare and Philemon Chigeza 4 The Risky Socioecological Learner
Jemma Peisker, Ben Ryan, Billy Ryan and Ziah Peisker 5 Vortex(t): The Becoming of the Socioecological Learner-Teacher-Researcher
William Boyd, Marie-Laurence Paquette, Shae Brown, Euan Boyd and Adrienne Piscopo 6 Big (Hi)Story: Experimenting with Deep-Time
Marilyn Ahearn and Teresa Carapeto 7 Sight/Site/Insight-ful Socioecological Learning Revisited: Further Collaborative Arts-Based Experimentations In-Place
Alexandra Lasczik, Adrienne Brown, Katie Hotko, David Ellis and David Rousell 8 Playing with Posthumanism with/in/as/for Communities: Generative, Messy, Uncomfortable Thought Experiments
Maia Osborn and Helen Widdop Quinton 9 Agency, Power and Resistance from the Perspectives of All Beings: A Visual Ethnographic Inquiry
Marianne Logan, Thilinika Wijesinghe and Ferdousi Khatun
Afterword: Entangled Found Poetry as Afterword
Alys Mendus Index
This collection will be of interest to researchers, educators, community practitioners and research students and to practitioners in early childhood, schools, higher education, and community settings.