I was once frmly told in a college administration department: 'Just tell those trainee-teachers to stop asking questions and teach.' I was somewhat taken aback by this comment but it also got me thinking. What is teaching if it is not about asking questions? (Fig. 4.1) Moreover, what kind of questions are teachers asking? If they already know the answer is this really questioning? Tere are situations where transmission of existing knowledge is vital—ranging from learning to read to how to fy a plane. In these instances, asking questions when the teacher knows the answer—often called Socratic questioning—is valuable. However*,* is this *all* education *can* or *should* be*,* especially in this era of climate and ecological emergency where the emergence of new ways of thinking and being are urgently needed? Tere needs to be space for *bewildering questions* where no-one yet knows the answer; space where letting go of certainty and acceptance of ambiguity is possible; space which encourages creativity and new ways of knowing and being in the world together. In addition, there needs to be space for positive conceptions of 'the wild' and a *be-wilder-ing*1 of education processes themselves towards more demanding, rebellious, ruptive educational futures which can burst through framings of the world dominant in current Westernised education. Tis is a challenging move for such Westernised education, dominated as it is by anthropocentric, androcentric and Eurocentric conceptions of 'man' (see discussion in Braidotti, 2013) and an increasing desire to 'sanitise' knowledge (Suzawa, 2013). Moreover, such Westernised pedagogy is not geographically limited. Instead, as Braidotti (2013, p. 2) highlights, 'it is a structural element of our cultural practices, which is also embedded in both theory and institutional and pedagogical practices' which have spread around the world, driven by colonialism and its continuing efects.

In this chapter, I explore how a shift towards bewildering/be-wildering education can be nurtured. I examine how encouraging *aporia*—literally lacking a *poros*, a path, a passage—can contribute to opening up educational spaces where creative, holistic thinking and new ways of being in the world can burst through: ruptural spaces which embrace *doubt* and see within such doubt 'the questions that make a new understanding possible' (Burbules, 1997, p. 40). I fnd it hard to pin down in words what such ruptural spaces are but suggest that they are combinations of physical spaces and the physical actions and mental responses arising in these physical spaces. For me, Lefebvre's (1991) conception of 'lived spaces' is helpful here. Lefebvre posits that space is not a neutral, empty entity. Instead, it is constituted from 'perceived space', 'conceived space' and 'lived space'. Perceived space is what (Westernised) humans experience with their senses as they move through the world. Conceived space is how the original designers and political powers conceptualised and planned a particular space. Ten there is 'lived space' which, as Zhang (2006) highlights, can be harder to understand. To help here he turns to Elden (2004, pp. 186–188 cited in Zhang, 2006) and his discussion of Lefebvre's early work in which Lefebvre critiques the seventeenth-century Western philosopher Descartes' binary—*res cogitans* (the realm of the mind) and *res extensa (*the physical realm of matter*)*. Elden argues that Lefebvre may have frst formulated his conception of conceived space as a response to *res cogitans,* with Lefebvre denoting such abstract knowledge with the French word *savoir*. Perceived space, on the other hand, corresponds to *res extensa*. Pursuing this line of thinking Elden suggests that in his later work, Lefebvre introduced his conception of lived space to form his triad as a way to reconcile his own thinking and Descartes' binary. Lived space combines (Westernised) human external experience of the space and the power relations within it with (Westernised) human inner mental life as one responds to these perceptions and conceptions of inhabited space around one. Lefebvre denotes knowledge in these lived spaces with the French word *connaître*—the things a person is acquainted with and knows locally. Tese three spheres—perceived, conceived and lived are not separate 'slices of a pie'. Rather they act, shift, fow together, forming experiences of space in everyday life.

In this chapter, I argue that ruptural 'lived spaces' have potential to emerge when students can play with bewildering ideas and questions without expectations of reaching pre-set outcomes or solutions and when there is openness and attentiveness to others, both human and more-than-human, within the space. I also like the word 'wallow' here: space and time to wallow, to deep-dive into ideas and feelings, luxuriate in them as well as time to share these ideas with others in an unhurried atmosphere. Tere is a sense of indulgence. Wallowing is something which humans, especially those in fast-paced Westernised societies might even have been bidden *not* to do. Playful, attentive actions as well as wallowing with ideas can occur in activities often called 'creative' such as art, craft, music, dance and creative writing but also stretch beyond and are *not* limited to these. As Ken Robinson (Mindshift, 2015) highlights, 'creativity is in everything… in science, the arts, mathematics, technology, cuisine, teaching, politics, business, you name it'. It involves 'putting your imagination to work' and is something which can be cultivated and honed, including, crucially, in educational settings. Cremin and Chappell (2021) identify that key characteristics of creative pedagogies include opportunities for student playfulness, independent thinking, problem-solving, risk-taking (learning by 'mistakes') and co-construction and collaboration as well as teachers demonstrating their own interest in creative processes. I argue in this chapter that exploring bewildering questions has an important role to play in creativity understood in this broad sense. Such creative approaches have potential to combine and 'open a window', as a friend of mine put it: a window through which novel ideas and ways of being can break free and contribute to living in the new ways so needed in this era of biodiversity loss and climate emergency.

## **Embracing Bewilderment and** *Aporia*

According to the Merriam-Webster (n.d), 'bewilderment is the quality or state of being lost, perplexed or confused'. Such confusion has long been accepted as a starting point for education with the aim to then lead students to places of certainty. Adopting the approach Socrates used in Plato's *Meno* (circa 385 BCE/1961), bewilderment can also be a mid-point of the educational process. A student is nudged by a teacher along a pathway aimed to undo their previous certainties. Tis leads the student to a place of puzzlement, a place of embodied discomfort as well as mental uncertainty—an *aporia*—where they do not have a path or passage forward. Te teacher can then show the student a path out of this place of confusion towards an accepted answer. What happens, however, when there isn't a solution or where it is hard even to form a question as language and existing dominant conceptions are insufcient to allow its articulation? Can teachers and the curricula and policies which frame their practice tolerate such ambiguity where there is no 'answer', where students' bewilderment, confusion, puzzlement cannot be addressed and solved by the teacher?

Suzawa (2013, p. 234) argues for the value of *embracing* ambiguity and bewilderment, rather than merely tolerating or actively avoiding it. He stresses the importance of 'being open to alternative ideas, never being very narrow in our thinking as we practice the art of teaching'. Reading this reminded me of an experience from my own teaching practice which has spanned over 30 years in vocational, adult and university sectors, teaching languages, economics, business studies and teacher education. In an observation I undertook in my role as a teacher-educator of a plumbing lesson in an inner-city vocational college the students were revising for a multiple-choice exam. One question, on energy generation, asked which option was carbon neutral. Te answer required was 'wind turbines'. A student challenged this, saying that due to the transport of turbines as well as the materials needed for their construction and maintenance it is disputed whether they are carbon neutral. I sat forward, interested to see how the trainee-teacher would handle this dilemma. He paused for a moment then responded 'Well, in your exam please select "wind turbines" but I take your point, these things are complex and there isn't a simple answer. You could, however, research this for the presentation you are doing for your communication module'. Te teacher could so easily have closed this student down but instead embraced this opportunity to encourage students to grapple with bewildering issues and sought ways that this could be done within the constraints of his tightly packed, highly regulated curriculum. His *attitude of mind* kept a space open for exploring bewildering concepts such as carbon neutrality, reconciling the restrictive modes of thinking and classifcation imposed by multiple-choice assessment with opportunities within the communication module for more 'holistic modes of thought opened by dialogical reasoning and artistic practices' (Suzawa, 2013, p. 232).

Burbules (1997) highlights how artistic creative practices can open spaces to explore bewildering questions. He considers how dance has potential to open an embodied 'gestural space' for exploring bewildering issues as an alternative to deductive cognitive thinking with its tendency to classify and move from A to B in a straight line. Other creative choices such as musical composition/performance, art/craft, poetry and creative writing also have potential for embodied holistic exploration of *aporia* and topics across subject boundaries. As a teacher-educator I was privileged to observe such a creative activity which was part of a vocational music qualifcation. Students aged 16 to 18 had been tasked with creating a song and music video as well as refecting on the experience. One group of teenage students had produced a song called *Shadows,* which explored thoughts and feelings around love and relationships. I found their song, video and refection very moving. Tese activities highlighted their creative, musical and technical skills but in their refection they also drew in another, unexpected aspect. Tey explained that whilst flming they became very aware of the movement of the sun and the physical shadows it created in their video. Tey had to re-record certain scenes as the shadows cast by the sun did not match up with the words in particular verses. Tey realised that they were approaching 'shadows' as metaphor but the *physical* act of recording opened up their awareness of existing in a physical world. Tis allowed them to explore what this meant for their relationship with and responses to physical phenomena. Tey also became more aware of the transient nature of long shadows and what this could mean for coping with the often-bewildering relationship challenges, explored in the song, which they faced as they entered adulthood. Te creative processes of music and flm-making enabled the students to explore these challenges which are hard to articulate in existing language and where there are no clear solutions.

I am not suggesting that *all* teaching needs to engage with bewilderment. Tis could be overwhelming for students as well as neglectful of certain existing useful skills and knowledge. However, exploratory spaces are important if, as the thinker Hannah Arendt (1961a/2006a, p. 193) argues, education is where:

we decide whether we love our children [*and young people—*my addition] enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chances of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us.

## **Arendt and the Potential for Opening Spaces of Appearance Through Intersubjective First-Hand Encounters**

Drawing on Arendt introduces another dimension to exploring bewildering questions. For Arendt, rather than being pre-formed 'selves', *who* one is emerges intersubjectively (between subjects) in frst-hand encounters when one speaks and acts with others under what Arendt terms 'conditions of plurality'. Such conditions can potentially occur in encounters when others are receptive to one's speech and actions and one is receptive to theirs. Tis opens potential for 'spaces of appearance' through which *who* one is as a *unique* being emerges, bringing possibilities for new ways to be, know and act in the world (for further discussion see Chave, 2020). Creative activities exploring bewildering questions provide time and space for such intersubjective encounters, for sharing one's positioning and for openness to the speech and action of others: encounters through which *who* one is can begin to emerge anew.

I experienced such an encounter at a craft workshop I had co-organised as part of an arts-based project in higher education. Adults were making notebooks from recycled paper using the Japanese craft of momigami. Te slow creative, embodied repetitive action of crumpling and smoothing paper central to momigami opened a lived space and time for sharing diferent ideas and perspectives. A wide range of bewildering issues connected to climate change was discussed. As the session progressed, a respectful atmosphere, a more secure space opened up. One issue which arose was more sustainable farming methods: a complex bewildering issue with many diferent opinions and possibilities for change. As the activity progressed, a participant from a farming family spoke up to explain how her brother was committed, for various practical and emotional reasons, to a single breed of cattle he had kept on his farm for 40 years. Moving to a diferent breed would be a huge challenge, and understanding such starting points needs to be taken on board in any change processes. Tis perspective inserted a new way of thinking about change. It caught my attention and stayed with me, humbled me, encouraged me to fnd out more, challenged and changed me and took my thinking and actions in relation to nature-friendly farming in new directions. Creative activities had opened a space for speaking and being open to others and a window in my existing framings through which new ideas and ways of being could bubble.

Arendt focuses her thinking on encounters within the human realm. However, it is important to remember that she died in 1975 and it would be unfair to judge her for not engaging with recent posthuman ideas. Arendt emphasises the importance of engaging with thinking of the past, learning from these 'threads' without letting them become 'chains which fetter us' (1961/2006b, p. 94). I would like to believe she would be interested in extending her theorising in response to recent posthuman developments and the possibility of intersubjective encounters with(in) the wider natural world. Tis possibility is complex, bewildering for several reasons. In Western Modernist thinking only humans possess subjectivity—which it defnes narrowly as having a sense of self, of who one is, and capacity to refect and have higher-order (abstract) thoughts and feelings (see discussion in Braidotti, 2013). However, Lyvers (1999, p. 5) makes what is for me a key point, when he comments that to acknowledge subjectivity beyond the human does not demand that it is 'similar in all respects to one's own'. Tis poses a challenge for many of how to approach the more-than-human without categorising them or ftting them into Western understandings of the world. Buber provides a helpful insight here (1958/1923) with his idea of *I-it and I-Tou relationships.* In *I-it* relationships the other is an object—an 'it'. In contrast, in *I-Tou* reciprocal relations 'I' recognises the other as a subject with whom one engages in their entirety rather than as a sum of their qualities. He highlights how:

Te primary word *I-Tou* can be spoken only with the whole being. Concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it ever take place without me. I become through my relation to the *Tou*; and as I become *I,* I say *Tou*.

All real living is meeting (encounter). (24–25)

Buber does not limit *I-Tou* relations to the human realm, giving the example of contemplating a tree: He recognises how in Western thinking there are several diferent ways to understand a tree—as an object to be used/consumed, as an object for contemplation or as an example of a particular species category but to address the question of whether a tree has subjectivity Buber comments:

I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this of in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself. (59)

Refecting on Buber's ideas, Walsh et al. (1994, p. 151) argue that 'now the [Western] worldview that presupposed an objectifed nature has run its disastrous course… we are open to a diferent way of relating, a diferent way of life, beyond the subject/object dualism, beyond the *I-it* relationship'. All, both human and more-than-human in this our shared planet can strive towards what Buber (1958/1923, p. 79) called "tenderness" and an acceptance of the ethical responsibility this then places on each of us.

**Fig. 4.2** C/artography: Meandering, encountering, attending with Thames (2023)

It was with these ideas on intersubjective encounters in mind that I set out to walk beside meandering River Tames2 between Lechlade and Buscot in Oxfordshire, UK, recording the experiences in a c/artography (Fig. 4.2) and refection. Tese cannot fully capture encounters which happen between 'I and Tou'—but are an attempt. It might seem strange to explore bewilderment and *aporia* (the lack of a path or passage way) by following a river. However, rivers are vital forces, life-givers, they meander, food, change: new routes, and habitations emerge.

## **Meandering, Encountering, Attending with Thames**

Stepping down onto the riverside path my husband, Peter, and I are enveloped by the tall grasses and reeds that fourish near the bridge which stands beside the Trout Inn near Lechlade. Te hubbub of people quickly fades and, on this sun-flled day, we enter a world of insect buzz and bird call—surprised to hear immediately the distinctive sound of a woodpecker. Eager to see if this is still a place where damselfies thrive, we make our way to where a wooden bridge crosses a lily pond. We stop, flled with joy and wonder to see the iridescent deep blue of the male banded demoiselles with distinctive dark spots on their wings and the smaller, lighter common blues darting above the lily pads and settling on the reeds. As we look closer, we begin to see more—the well-camoufaged green females as well as entwined mating pairs. We feel the 'tenderness' that Buber (1958/1923, p. 59) describes. We are drawn into attentive caring relation with these damselfies who cease to be 'its' – mere examples. Instead, it is with these damselfies 'on this occasion that I engage into a relation and this flls my world' (59).  Along the way we enjoy birdsong—the repetitive calls of jackdaws and chifchafs and melodious blackbirds, goldfnches, wrens and reed warblers. We pause to appreciate the alders and willows leaning outwards from the bank, the waving teasel heads, the yellow wild brassicas, tiny pink geraniums and vivid blue alkanets. Damselfies and butterfies fit across the path. Reaching Buscot Lock we resist the urge to power on to Kelmscott where William Morris once lived, pausing instead beside Tames to enjoy the sunshine and the moorhens swimming between the reeds. We retrace our steps, hot and tired now but still open to this special place and the calls of the more-than-human all around us. We stop once more at the lily pond, sad to leave the damselfies as they dart, settle, entwine, but heartened that this place still exists for them and aware of the importance of protecting it and other places like it.

Such embodied encounters open something beyond articulation. Spending time with these damselfies on this occasion opened a new way for me to be in the world. Returning home, I learnt more about them from the *British Dragonfy Society* website. I became more aware of damselfies and many diferent coloured bees, butterfies, moths, greenfy and ants in my little garden. I am now less afraid of these creatures, more absorbed in their never-ending dance. I tend fowers which support them and which the insects in turn support through pollination, an ecosystem in which humans are both entangled and dependent. I have learnt the shocking statistic that fying insects have declined by almost 60% in the UK over the last 20 years (Ball et al., 2021). I have investigated actions to reverse this trend and support their lives such as nature-friendly and regenerative farming. On sun-flled days, damselfies sometimes enter my home through the open kitchen door then become trapped against the windows. On one such day, I stand on tiptoes and reach across the worktop, all the time aware of the frantic damselfy beating his delicate wings against the glass. I manage to push open the stif window and joyfully watch as the damselfy fies free: an embodied happening for us both and a reminder too of other lived spaces where caring inter-actions can open a window through which new ideas can take fight.

## **A Pedagogy of Be-Wilderment**

Intersubjective encounters and the ethical responsibilities these raise, for example with Tames and with all that live within and beside his water, open space to explore what Snaza (2013, 2020) calls a 'pedagogy of bewilderment': an approach which aims to rupture existing educational framings and open possibilities of new educational futures. Snaza highlights how Westernised education is a humanising project. In this framing, children are not fully human and education is a way of bringing them to a fully human state. Snaza outlines how this conception is seen in educational writing dating back to Plato's *Republic* (1961) frst published in the fourth century BCE. In this work by Plato, Socrates refers to the 'uneducated' as an 'unintelligent philistine' who has 'no use for reasoned discussion and [has] an animal addiction to settle everything by brute force' (177). Te 'philistine' needs to be brought out of this state through educational processes. Almost 2000 years later, although at frst sight more sympathetic to the wildness of Emile*,* Rousseau (1972) argues for the necessity of forming 'man' through education and emphasises the importance of doing this according to *human* nature rather than social institutions. For Kant (1960, 3), man needs to be 'turned aside from his animal impulses' and through education be led towards 'humanity, his appointed end'.

Snaza (2013, 2020) challenges this conception of education where the *telos*—endpoint— is to learn to be fully 'human', particularly where what it is to be human is based on Western conceptions of 'Man'—white, European, male, heterosexual and able-bodied. Such centring of Western Man has been performed for so long in education it has become normalised, disappearing from view. Snaza calls instead for education in which the concept of Western man is taken as a *starting point* for enquiry, for exploring what it would mean to let go of being human as separate from and superior to all that is more-than-human and what it would mean to accept, reconnect and value the part of ourselves which is animal. Tis be-wildering is itself a bewildering process—a letting go of a clear path towards Westernised conceptions of becoming 'fully human'. Yet, it is this unsettlement and the doubts this engenders that open up 'the possibility of love beyond the human'.

As an academic I feel that perhaps I should reach here for some learned texts such as bel hooks' (2000) refection on love, compassion and healing; Freire (2000) on love as a commitment to others; Donna Haraway (2007) on our entanglement with the more-than-human and Snaza's recommendation of *Education out of bounds* (Lewis & Kahn, 2010). I do encourage you to explore these texts and I will examine hooks' ideas later in this chapter. However, it is the flm *Paddingto*n (King, 2014), particularly its ending, which comes strongly to my mind at this moment.  Judy, the Brown's daughter, defends Paddington passionately, declaring that even though Paddington is from a diferent species he is still a member of their family. Te flm is problematic in many ways, for example it does anthropomorphise bears and use species classifcation. However, it also allows for possibilities of humans encountering bears, learning from bears, resisting killing bears and other animals for human glorifcation and advancement. It challenges limiting notions of kinship. Tese are all issues which can be discussed with students as *starting points* for exploring the possibilities of love as forging a 'new kinship bestiary that is strange, and in that strangeness opens itself up to new forms of learning out of bounds' (Lewis & Kahn, 2010, p. 147).

## **Be-Wilder-Ment and 'Wild Pedagogies'**

Te Crex Collective (2018, p. 6), who include Te Hebrides as a coauthor, provide another interesting way to consider bewilderment/ bewilderment, exploring opportunities for what they call 'wild pedagogies'. Tey argue that:

If we take seriously the notion that the natural world is not made up of inert entities; but rather, it is flled with active, self-directing, and vibrant participants, then our attention towards the afordances of place-based education changes. In seeking to teach with nature, educators become open and available to the range of facts, knowings, and understandings that places have to ofer.

Tey highlight how 'Such attention involves carefully listening to available voices and building partnerships … and it will, at times, involve actively de-centring the taken-for-granted human voice and re-centring more-than-human voices' (6). A starting point for such listening can be as simple as encountering, attending to a plant breaking through the tarmac in a school playground. Opportunities to be found further afeld could include at an urban or rural farm, a river meander, a local or national park, a forest, a seashore. Te Crex Collective provide what they call six touchstones, or jumping of points, for wild pedagogies. Tese are nature as co-teacher; engaging with complexity, the unknown and spontaneity; relocating the wild (which can be found everywhere); the need for time and practice; socio-cultural change (and the recognition of education as a method of political activism) and the need to build alliances within the human community and beyond. Tey emphasise that these are starting points rather than a prescriptive list. Tey include questions to encourage teachers to refect on their existing practices in relation to these touchstones. Wild pedagogies foreground a role for intersubjective frst-hand encounters, for care-ful and attentive entanglements with the more-than-human, for embracing the wildness within each of us and the bewilderment and doubts this can engender. Tis is not an easy move, or one that is guaranteed. However, with encouragement, feeting moments can emerge, moments to treasure rather than shut down, moments which open possibilities of rupturing existing Westernised educational framings and supporting the bursting through of new ways of knowing, being and acting in the world.

## **Returning to the River**

I place my feet in the cooling water of Tames. I see the fowing water glittering in the sunshine, the spikey reeds, the mossy stones and thick trailing weed. I am lulled by birdsong, the buzz of insects and the occasional distant sound of a car. Refecting on Te Crex Collective's touchstones my mind turns to the poem *At the River Clarion* (2009) by Mary Oliver. In this, Oliver emphasises the importance of giving time and patience to listening to the voices of the more-than-human, highlighting how one does not hear them in a mere hour or day. As she comments, it is as though 'selfhood has stufed your ears'. Whilst visiting the countryside I have seen primary-aged (four to eleven) and secondary-aged (11 to 18) students on feld-trips, busy, busy, busy in the landscape, measuring, weighing, making notes, urged on by their teachers. But even amongst this busyness, moments of encountering, entangling and care-ful listening emerge when a student is caught up in the intricate pattern in a stone, the smoothness of a rock shaped thus by a river, the swaying movement of grasses rustled by the wind. As teachers we can encourage such moments and support students to fnd ways to respond holistically, tenderly, creatively to these in ways which, to use Suzawa's (2013) phrase, exceed narrow cognitive processes. As I continue to listen, I feel the love, stretching back through deep time, that this life-giving river gifts. I refect on Arendt's (2006a) words, introduced earlier in the chapter, that education is a place where, as teachers, we decide whether we love our children enough neither to abandon them to their own devices nor 'to strike from their hands something new, something unforeseen by us'. Introducing love into education runs a risk of sentimentality but here Khatibi's (1995) conception of *aimance*—which brings together friendship (*philia*) and love (*eros*) is helpful. Zembylas (2017, p. 23) describes how Khatibi's *aimance* is a 'constructed term for afnity, afection, tolerance and friendship' and a 'powerful concept for invoking love as a force for social change' (23). Love, understood as *aimance*—'opens possibilities for afective solidarity toward and with otherness' (Taylor & Gannon 2021, p. 120) and introduces ethico-political practices in education by encouraging educators to develop pedagogies that attempt:

to address wound, injury and sufering within a frame that takes into consideration histories of violence, oppression, and social injustice. (Zembylas, 2017, p. 23)

Tese ideas resonate with Te Crex Collective's (2018) touchstone six which emphasises building community with others and 'extending the number of communities to which each of us belong' (33). Te Collective highlight the importance of refecting on 'the complex inter-dependent composition of those communities that always implicates the more-thanhuman' (33). One is both supported and challenged by the members of these diferent communities. Such communities are 'lived spaces', to use Lefebvre's (1991) conception, which combine one's external conceptions and one's perceptions of a space, including the power relations within them, with one's inner mental life. Tey are spaces where one can depart from the status quo and fnd 'belonging, friendship, and joy' and the supportive communities we all need 'as we attempt to re-wild our lives, pedagogies, and the places where we live' (Te Crex Collection, 2018, p. 34). Tey are spaces where together, as members of such supportive communities, we can take risks; where we can explore bewildering questions which do not have ready answers and also fnd embodied, creative ways (understood in the broad sense discussed in this chapter) to explore questions and issues we cannot even put into existing language. Such, supportive communities have potential to open 'an orientation to the future that admits of the possibility of future transformations that exceed and resist colonisation by the constraints of the present' (Facer, 2016, p. 69). Such transformations can open *unexpected, unforeseen* ways to address the ecological and climate threats currently destroying both more-than-human and human life and fourishing. Supportive communities can be spaces to practice what hooks (1995) calls 'beloved community' where 'loving ties of care and knowing bind us together in our diference' (hooks, 1995, pp. 263–264 cited in Snaza, 2020, p. 119). As humans, especially those raised with Westernised conceptions of the world, we need to extend this love to include the more-than-human as well as challenge the so-called boundaries between the self and the other. 'Saturating' spaces of learning with love (Snaza, 2020) opens potential for students to overcome the possible fears and barriers which bewildering and be-wilder-ing education can engender. Practicing beloved communities can encourage students to respond attentively and afrmatively to the opportunities which can burst through when existing androcentric, anthropomorphic, Eurocentric (Westernised) educational framings are ruptured. Tis is not an easy move, but as hooks identifes in *Teaching to Transgress* (1994, p. 207):

Te classroom [and other learning spaces - my addition], with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that feld of possibility, we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. Tis is education as the practice of freedom*.*

## **Notes**

1. Te word bewilderment has its origins in the word 'wild'. First recorded in the 1680s it is a combination of 'be*'*, 'thoroughly' and 'wilder' i.e., 'lead astray' or 'lured into the wilds' (Vocabulary.com, n.d.). In this original understanding there is a negative connation of the wild which this chapter challenges.

2. Rivers are often associated with river gods and nymphs with Tames known as a male deity - Old Father Tames (Te Londonist, 2015). Just as we do not place 'the' before a name (i.e. the Susan), I do not place an objectifying 'the' before Tames.

## **References**

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328615912\_Chapter\_5\_Six\_ Touchstones\_for\_a\_Wild\_Pedagogy

**Open Access** Tis chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Te images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## **Part II**

**Dialoguing**

## **5**

## **Journeying with Affective Embodied Empathy for an Ethical Understanding of Environmental Education**

**Heather Wren**

## **Introduction**

To watch the sun sink behind a fower clad hill. To wander on in a huge forest without thought of return. To stand upon the shore and gaze after a boat that disappears behind distant islands. To contemplate the fight of wild geese seen and lost among the clouds and, subtle shadows of bamboo on bamboo.

Zeami Motokivo

With increasing stresses being put on the planet due to climate change, it is important that issues relating to the efect of the Anthropocene are addressed as quickly and as efciently as possible. Empathy is a key characteristic of the complex relationships between the human and the morethan-human which can be explored to address these issues when conducting environmental education (Gruen, 2015). However, historically empathy has been seen as only a human characteristic in

H. Wren (\*)

School of Education, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© Te Author(s) 2024 **95** K. Chappell et al. (eds.), *Creative Ruptions for Emergent Educational Futures*, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52973-3\_5

environmental education which means the issues have only been addressed from the human perspective (Clarke & McPhie, 2020). Increasingly, research argues that trying to understand the world from the human perspective only is not conducive to a deep understanding of the problems of the Anthropocene. It is for this reason that this research looks at environmental empathy in education from a more-than-human perspective (Abram, 1996) by seeing empathy as afective and as emerging relationally. In this chapter, I invite you to join me on an exploration of an afective environmental empathy to create a space of co-creation between the more-than-human where new beginnings and new ways of understanding environmental education can emerge.

Tis chapter explores a novel perspective on environmental empathy in education that emphasises afective relationships between humans and the more-than-human elements of the environment. Te concept of empathy is used as a catalyst for change within ethical environmental education. Tis form of empathy goes beyond human-centric perspectives and instead focuses on afective empathy that encompasses diverse ecological connections which express numerous ecologies of belonging (Braidotti, 2013). Te notion of afect is understood as a range of bodily relations that mutually impact each other (Massumi, 2015). By adopting this viewpoint, the chapter creates ruptions by moving away from traditional Western environmental philosophy, which tends to separate humans from other species and perpetuates human dominance over nature (Lindgren & Ohman, 2019). Instead, the emphasis is placed on the more-than-human, while still recognising the essential role of humans in the research (Büscher, 2022). Te chapter argues that by understanding the emergence of this type of empathy, it becomes possible to cultivate an ethical mindset that involves thinking and acting in harmony with the environment, aiming to address the adverse consequences of the Anthropocene.

I argue that the shared environment we will entangle ourselves within contains afective empathetic relations between the more-than-human which make up assemblages containing many groups of connections, and which are further connected and disconnected through each other (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980). Tese assemblages emerge as part of my research process, which are then difracted. Difraction is a method of reading insights through one another in attending to and responding to the details and specifcities of relations of diference and how they matter (Barad, 2007, p. 71) and is a way to begin to create ruptions through shifting thinking in new directions. It also maps the efects of diference within them when theory is read through the data alongside the experiences (Barad, 2007), creating new becomings.

I invite you to join me on my research journey through co-creation to gain a richer understanding of the entanglements between the morethan-human in environmental research (Fox & Alldred, 2022) so that you too can create ruptions in your own institutions. Te invitations draw from my PhD research site where students took part in a 'Ecosceneography' session making art from outside environmental materials to create a scene as part of the Global Science Opera: a project which creates productions within a global community using science, art, technology and creativity. Te research is conducted under the guidelines of BERA (BERA, 2018) and ethical approval is provided by Te University of Exeter ethics committee. Consent is gained from all participants to include photographs, recordings, quotations and artefacts which are anonymised, and the right to withdraw at any stage is given. Te ecosceneography session is designed by the Norwegian teacher to provide an insight into what it is like to attempt to creatively think-with-the-environment to shift old ways of thinking about environmental education.

## **N.B—You May Need a Smartphone or QR Reader to Participate**

As we (me and you, the reader) construct assemblages and difract together it is important to see the process, as an enfolding of nonlinear time, space and matter takes place through what Barad (2007) refers to as intra-activity. Intra-activity is where subjects are seen as entangled rather than separate from each other in which objects emerge. Within intraactions time, space and matter are relationally constructed between bodies from which continuously changing boundaries emerge. I see this as a lively space from which new thoughts, ways of seeing and new beginnings arise. We also need to be aware of the agency of the entities which emerge from phenomena within the intra-actions which have their own life force (Braidotti, 2013) or vitality (Bennett, 2010) where things act to disrupt usual ways of being and thinking.

Because I see myself as part of the assemblage of my research, I draw from Taylor's (2016) difractive musing which ofers an approach for academic writing through a series of sensory experiences. Tis draws upon slow theory (Ulmer, 2017) to think about how to become aware of my body in relation to the more-than-human whilst writing, to take time to contemplate and let things emerge. Taylor (2016) suggests that this allows for the spreading of knowledge rather than the reduction of it. In normative research it is usually elements of human agency that are drawn from to justify phenomena (Pickering, 2001), however in Taylor's (2016) embodied difractive musing, 'Individual agency is reframed as the coconstitution of confederate agencies in which agency is a becomingtogether in an ongoing ebb and fow' (p. 140). In my research this includes the ebbs and fows of agency within the intra-actions between students/teachers/researchers/environment during sessions in Norway as well as the intra-actions between researcher/data/materials/theory following the sessions. By paying attention to these ebbs and fows of agencies in my research, it helps to make me aware of where power lies and if there are any concerns in relation to human subjectivity. In doing this it brings to the forefront the boundaries, properties and the emergences of diferentiation whilst remaining entangled as phenomena within the research apparatus. I then ask myself what 'becomes' from this?

Agency is not defned as belonging to something or someone but is seen as a 'force, fow, afect and intensity distributed across a multiplicity of diferent human-more-than-human modalities' (Taylor, 2016). Tis means that when I am discussing particular human or more-than-human agencies within the research process alongside the emergences that have appeared throughout the research, I acknowledge that agencies that are brought to the forefront are afected by other agencies.

In the following sections I will highlight moments that have glowed to me (Maclure, 2013) throughout the journey, both within and beyond the ecosceneography making workshop. Whilst explaining the intra-actions during my research process, I attempt to understand the ebbs and fows of agencies by thinking about where they lie in relation to the human and more-than-human and what this means for agency. Tese are explained at the beginning of each section using italics. Tere are also invitations throughout for you as a reader to immerse yourself further into my research so that you can also begin to understand how to think-with-theenvironment. I am hoping that if you grasp this idea, you will take it to use within your own teaching/research so that a new understanding of environmental empathy can help to change the future of education incrementally. Instructions to take part are written in capital letters.

*In the following sections there are diferent degrees of the enmeshing of agency between the human/more-than-human when the human opens their senses to allow the more-than-human to come to the forefront. More agency fows towards the human when I invite you to do the task.*

## **Opening up Bodies…**

To begin, I open my body to begin practising embodied difractive musing. To do this I open my senses and move slowly around the site and wait for invitations from the environment to emerge. Invitations from water (Fig. 5.3), wind, colours and movement emerge, which I record using photography, video, sound recording, drawings and note taking.  Creativity emerges from this when I feel compelled to create a page relating to the intra-actions (Fig. 5.1).

  RECORD THE EXPERIENCE IN A WAY THAT YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE WITH: WRITE THINGS DOWN, TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS AND RECORDINGS, DRAW PICTURES…*

**Fig. 5.1** Thoughts and invitations

Use the page I created (Fig. 5.1) as invitations for you to take too: *BY ENGAGING IN THIS, I AM HOPING THAT YOU WILL NOTICE NUANCES WITHIN THE INTRA-ACTIONS BETWEEN THE MORE-THAN-HUMAN AND DIFFERENT FEELINGS ABOUT IT WILL EMERGE FOR YOU.*

**Fig. 5.2** Snapshot of the PADLET

**Fig. 5.3** Ripples and refections in the water

*In the following section I see assemblage building as more of a fuctuation between the degrees of enmeshing of human/more-than-human agency as more people are trying to think with the environment thus fore-fronting it in diferent ways. However, thinking in relation to subjectivity means that the degrees of enmeshing of human agency begins to increase again.*

## **Assemblage Building Together**

Creating the assemblage in the PADLET creates a snapshot of the past/ present/future where each ofering's 'past is never left behind, never fnished once and for all, and the future is not what it will come to be in the unfolding of the present moment' (Barad, 2007, p. 234). However, if the PADLET is not being continuously intra-acted with, or not viewed, then there is a possibility that new becomings will cease to emerge and it will become stagnant because, as I discovered earlier, it is only through intraactions that new becomings are produced. It is for this reason I have chosen to ask you to contribute to the PADLET.

*READER INVITATION—FIRST LOOK AT THE SNAPSHOTS OF THE PADLET BY SCANNING THIS QR CODE FROM YOUR PHONE OR CLICKING* HERE*.*

 Tere are also places where I feel unable to describe the afective/empathetic moments of the experience between the human/more-than-human so this is where I ask you to try to experience this to gain a deeper understanding of the afective intra-actions encountered.

*ONCE YOU HAVE INTRA-ACTED WITH THE* PADLET*, PLEASE TAKE A SNAPSHOT OF IT AS SHOWN IN Fig. 5.2 AND PLACE IT IN THE SNAPSHOT FOLDER SO THAT OTHERS CAN SEE THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE NEW BECOMINGS THAT WILL EMERGE WITHIN EACH INTRA-ACTION*.

By placing your own experiences of the intra-actions you have recorded in the task above into the PADLET, we together (and with the students, teachers and environments) are not only learning about our own places but also each other's. Here, place is viewed as a continual process of the learning and performing of meaning where a sense of place is connected to an embodied way of knowing about socio-material practices (Page, 2020). When many bodies (both human and more-than-human) are involved in creating this *place-world*, a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge building emerges because both the human and more-thanhuman from diferent areas of knowledge, expertise and experiences are intertwined within the research rather than separate from it (Sadownik & Gabi, 2021) in what Haraway refers to as *webbed existences* (Haraway cited in Sadownik & Gabi, 2021). Here, I argue that an afective environmental empathy is emerging from diferent senses of place which can alter usual ways of thinking about the environment.

*Suddenly, in this section, I feel that the degrees of agency increase abruptly towards the human because I begin thinking about myself in relation to place to understand where I sit within the entanglement. However, thinking about self is still connected to thinking-with-the-environment which means that more-than-human agency is still present because it is forefronted.*

## **The Invitations of Water**

*READER INVITATION*—*THINK ABOUT THE PLACE YOU LIVE OR A PLACE YOU HAVE VISITED FOR YEARS. WHAT DRAWS YOU TO IT? WHAT INVITATIONS EMERGE FROM IT?

Following a pause for thought where I refect on the place where I live, my relationship with water (sea and freshwater ley) and my positive experiences I have had here, I notice that the sea draws me to it on a regular basis. Ahmed (2004) argues that afective bodily memories are *stuck* to places and specifc bodies which could mean that my attraction to the sea could be related to my positive embodied experience of this place over the years. It is for this reason I begin to create another assemblage attending to the invitations of water (Witt, 2018) by gathering photographs, recordings and writings relating to the glow moments of water in my data, whilst thinking about the entanglement of bodies that brought this to the forefront.

Following this, I am drawn to reading about water which makes me feel closer to it. Consequently, I choose to swim with the data to cut through the assemblage created by the invitations of water. By swimming at my place of home whilst thinking-with-water-data I am afectively intra-acting with water which holds the past and is enfolded with the present and the future (Barad, 2007). Te 'lapping of waves' enacts the vitality of the world (Piotrowski, 2020) through vibrant afective matter where political potentials such as activism emerge from agentic assemblages such as this. Tis is because they contain past, present and future relationships between the social and the cultural which, when entangled, can bring out new and diferent beginnings (Bennett, 2010).

To begin the wild-swimming-thinking, I turn to 'wild-thinking' (Witt, 2018) to ensure that I continue to read-data-with-environment, for continuing agency of the more-than-human. In this way I see data moving, me moving with data and data moving me (Ulmer, 2017 in Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2017). For wild-swimming-with-data I turn to Shefer and Bozalek (2022) who argue that using a wild-swimming methodology allows you to explore how talking about subjects (such as environmental justice relating to my research), would change within difering environmental situations such as the ocean. Tis helps to give me a new perspective of afective embodied empathy in diferent environments. Swimming-writing-thinking draws from slow scholarship (Ulmer, 2017) and hauntology which intimates that bodies of water are entangled with the past, presents and futures which speak in particular ways to the impact of humans on each other and the planet. Terefore, by swimmingwith-data-thinking I am again embodied and entangled with the intraactions between data/environment/subjectivity. Immersing in water allows the body to move in diferent ways, and because the sea is constantly moving, this means embodied thinking becomes fuid and shifts and changes with the movement of the sea.

Before I enter the water, I read each quotation and look at the images which make me think of diferent questions related to environmental empathy for environmental justice. For example, the quotation: 'And the sound. When we were in the woods and heard the water rushing …I think that was one of the strongest sensory things I can remember. I can see a lot around me, but sometimes it's almost too much. So hearing is… it goes in, while what I see, it becomes too much' (Norwegian Student) makes me aware of the fact that certain senses may become overloading whilst swimming and that I need to stay aware of the others. Te quotation: 'Te drops on the way into the cave, the water drops in the roof and right outside the cave there was moss around, but it was very wet, it was so weird, it looked like green jelly. It was very… touched it and was like "Ugh!' (Norwegian Student), makes me think about how the sea is a part of the bigger picture of life. Bennett's (2010, p. 107) quotation '…do sandstorms make a diference to the spread of so-called sectarian violence? Does mercury help enact autism? …Can a hurricane bring down a president?' together with Fig. 5.3, which shows refections and ripples in

**Fig. 5.4** Looking out to sea

the water makes me wonder about how the sea afects other matter which afects other matter in political activism? Furthermore, Shefer and Bolazek's (2022, p. 129) quotation: '…we are not only concerned with thinking about the sea or oceans as object of research, but as space, place and medium to think with and through, to difract knowledges of ocean/s through other knowledges', and the image looking out to sea (Fig. 5.4):

flls me with curiosity about what water 'knows'. Finally, the quotation:

…sea swimming as a hauntological, re-storying project for a justice-tocome scholarship; sea swimming as eco-critical feminist scholarship for thinking the interrelationality of current planetary ecological and social challenges; and sea swimming as Slow, wild scholarship for disrupting normative scholarly logics towards an ontology of relationality and response-ability (Shefer & Bolazek, 2022, p. 130).

and Fig. 5.5 which shows remnants of other things and shadows in the water makes me wonder about the political implications of water.

**Fig. 5.5** Shadows and remnants in the water

Following these thoughts, I prepare myself to go into the sea with the following questions in mind:

I go to swim…

*In this section, agency shifts between humans and more-than-human entities in three cycles. Each cycle begins with a description of matter from the more-thanhuman perspective, accompanied by my refections on its signifcance. I then search for research related to these refections, which tends to prioritise human agency. Tis*  *cycle resembles Pickering's (*2012*, p. 4) concept of a 'dance of agency,' where actions and reactions occur between humans and the world, emphasising agency distribution and power imbalances. Kipnis (*2015*) suggests that humans often make choices when uncertain, which brings human agencyto the forefront, as seen in my research. However, the author argues that this type of agencyis not about power dynamics but rather a diferent form of agency. Terefore, the afective and empathetic interactions in the 'dance of agency' revolve around diferences and their outcomes.*

## **Swim 1**

When I return, I feel compelled to write down as much as I can about the intra-actions (Fig. 5.6):

I feel that the sea is relentless and, when I think about this in relation to the question 'what does the sea know?' it makes me think about how knowledge building is relentless. I also think about how the water moves around my body and that the force of the waves is dislodging some of my skin cells which are carried of. I feel that I become part of the sea and it makes me think about the question relating to what the sea can tell me about the world. It tells me that it carries a lot of diferent bodies and parts of bodies even though they can't always be seen. Tis means that when intra-actions take place with the sea, they are not just with water. Wunsch (in Duncombe, 2019) argues that the ocean holds memories from past climate states, and this is evidenced through difering states of matter in the deep sea. Tus, the intra-actions take place between water, visible and invisible bodies and parts of bodies. For example, at the beach where I live, a signifcant accident took place during Operation Tiger, a Second World War exercise for D-Day landing where many American soldiers were killed. When this event occurred, the soldiers' blood spilled into the sea, and it was dispersed throughout it. I argue that it is still there, parts of the soldiers still exist within the ocean, so it holds the history of the horrible event that took place that day, even though it can't be seen anymore. Interestingly, a tank, which sat at the bottom of the sea since Operation Tiger has been raised and sits in the local car park as a memorial for those who lost their lives. Te tank, rusted by the sea but preserved with a special paint, is a visual representation of the lives that were lost that can no longer be seen. But the tank, which was present during the moment of

**Fig. 5.6** Notes

bloodshed, was rusted by the sea which contained the blood of the soldiers. Tis means that as a memorial to the dead soldiers:

It alludes to the complex entanglement of the unrepresentable and the representable, or the narrative and the bodily, that is, a mixture of procedures that form together a multidimensional set of information stored in the representational-corporeal memory, translating into a complex recollection of the traumatic event. Te memorial character of the site is in fact inscribed into its deep and hidden materiality, which, nevertheless, cannot be accessed through visual means. It remains subcutaneous, enfeshed, etched in the materiality of the place, yet—in fact—its physical traces or material wounds could not be easily narrated in visual terms. (Golanska, 2017)

So, the tank memorial becomes part of the entanglement of my research because it holds memories of place, not just of the shocking events of operation Tiger, but also of every memory the sea obtained throughout history which played a part in the rusting of the metal. In this way, when thinkingwith-the-sea in relation to place and its history, it can help to answer the questions relating to the political implications of water through afective, empathetic intra-actions because it can bring to the forefront invisible histories and events which have been forgotten about but are relevant to the present and future of the place in question (Fig. 5.7).

I feel like the sea's behaviour is warning me of its power, through its actions. Bawaka Country (2022) argues that the sea (water) has its own language which is understood through its patterns of behaviour such as

**Fig. 5.7** Notes

sounds and movements of which they call 'wäŋa'. However, it is important for me to understand that 'wäŋa' (p. 272) consists of more than just water. Te ever-changing tides and winds are also part of the patterns of behaviour of the sea (Gooley, 2017), meaning that when I open my senses to think-with-the-sea, I need to be aware that there are things beyond sounds, things I can see and can taste, feel and smell that are also emerging. Interestingly, some Indigenous peoples (Te Anangu) have adopted an embodied type of synaesthesia (when senses merge together), which is culturally constructed through being-with the land (Young, 2005). For example, when the rain falls in the Western Desert the ground becomes a bright green and a strong odour is released from the leaves of the trees on the ground. Te Anangu, therefore, understand bright green and the strong odour to mean water and the beginning of growth. Te Anangu believe that all bodies on the land are animated and have the potential to be absorbent of one another (Young, 2005). Terefore, Young (2005) argues that all bodies are equally formed with the land through social relations which the author calls a 'Western Desert Synaethesia' (p. 66). Tis can act as a form of sensory mapping which can be used to help to understand how both human and more-than-human are connected to the environment (ibid.). To this end I argue that paying attention to afective empathetic intra-actions within a local environment could lead to a bodily experience of the land in which the senses merge, leading to a deep understanding of the environment. Tis helps to answer the question above relating to what emerges from my senses in relation to afective empathy (Fig. 5.8).

Here, it feels to me as if the sand is now demonstrating its power, the power to slow me down. In environmental research it is often claimed that slowing down leads to more attentiveness of the surrounding area, increasing sensitivities to the possibilities of other-than-human (Witt, 2018). Interestingly, the stones and sand alert me to its presence by slowing me down so that when I fnally sit down, I start to think about them more. I start to wonder how the stones have eroded through meetings between sea/other stones/rocks/wind, which leads me to thinking about how long it has taken for the sea to erode a stone to a piece of sand? Linking this to the questions above relating to the political implications of water, I think about how matter meeting matter kickstarts political

**Fig. 5.8** Notes

activism because the more-than-human is eroding evidence of political bloodshed at this place. Here, I believe that the more-than-human becomes a silent activist alerting me to the fact that it has hidden evidence of a horrible past through the awareness of afective empathetic meetings between matter. Once alerted to this, I then begin to think about other evidence the sand has hidden over the years which leads me to read about the political history of this place which, in time, could be brought to the forefront of discussions about this area. However, opening the idea of more-than-human activism reminds me that I need to be aware of how the research is used from the position of the researcher and that power relations remain neutral even when it is published. Tis means that if hidden political histories are brought to the forefront, I need to ensure that they are discussed in such a way to ensure that the more-thanhuman is part of the discussion.

*In this section I feel shorter, degree changes between the ebbs and fows of human and more more-than-human agency. First, I try to write poetry based on immediate feelings whilst deciding to record the swim so that the weighting of agency is shared more with more-than-human. Te degrees of agency seem to shift back towards the human when I use thought to consider what emerges from the poetry writing and then thinking about how the digital mediates flm making. During the making of the flm, these shifts seem to get even shorter and quicker as decisions are made by me to an extent but what the camera captured is purposefully left as it is. I feel that agency is then extended to the reader, environ-* *ment and technology as the flm is played and watched. Here, human control, thought and action mean that shorter, quicker degrees of enmeshing of morethan-human become present. Human consciousness means that they can see themselves as separate from everything else in the world and can therefore make choices about things that can have an efect on others. However, if agency is understood to be part of all things but as a diferent type of agency as I have discussed above, then ethical choices and actions need to be made with this in mind. (Kipnis,* 2015*)*

#### **Swim 2**

Because I felt that the sea pushed me back for the frst swimmingthinking-with-data activity, I decide to swim again on another day. Te day I choose to swim is a calmer day, so I am able to immerse myself in the water. Tis time, taken from the emergences of the frst swim, I swim with an awareness of the memories of place; of embodiment relating to my senses; of understanding the environment as an activist with the things it brings to the forefront; and of power relations and ethics. Tis time, I strap a Go-pro camera to my chest to record the experience.

As I immerse myself in the water, I pay attention to how my body reacts in relation to my senses. I feel compelled to create a poem relating to the experience so I can show how the senses are connected to the moment of immersion (Fig. 5.9).

I write the poem as one sentence because it refects the experiences of all of my senses which are engaged in the moment. I think about how I understand the environment through the socialisation of my embodied senses (Young, 2005). I write again (Fig. 5.10):

To this end, the awareness of my embodied senses activates my memory to bring to the forefront what I have previously learned about place. It is commonly known that senses such as smell are linked to the memory of autobiographical experiences which can also be evoked by pictures and words (Mouly & Sullivan in Menini (ed), 2010). Tis means that when experiences emerge through the senses, they are pedagogical because they teach something that is then ingrained to memory. However, Mouly and Sullivan in Menini (ed) (2010) also state that many of these sensing memories are ingrained between the ages of 11 to 20 which may explain

**Fig. 5.9** One-sentence poem

**Fig. 5.10** Notes

why Indigenous peoples such as the Anangu have a deeper understanding of their environment due to them being connected to the land from birth. To this end, by being aware of my senses as embodied through afective empathetic intra-actions, it has alerted me to things about the sea that I wouldn't normally notice which has, in turn, activated my memory of what I have previously learned about place. In this way, I have become entangled in the process of activism by opening myself up to more things being brought to the forefront.

To further this entanglement, it is essential that I also include the digital which has emerged through the assemblage building and difraction process through the various ways I have captured and arranged 'data'. Adams and Tompson (2016) argue that '[t]he digital is encroaching on and penetrating our fesh, infecting all aspects of lifeworlds and has thus inaugurated persistent questions about our relationship with more-thanhuman and the "more-than-human" world' (p. 5). To this end, during data collection, it is difcult to move away from using digital objects to assist so it is necessary for humans understand technology as co-creating beside them. By me understanding digital technology as both a coresearcher and a participant in my data collection and flm making sees technology as having an *essence* which replaces the concept of *being* with the concept of *form* where the *essence* of technology is a process of formation, and essentially a new becoming (Hoel & van der Tuin, 2013). In this way, the data emerging from my data collection, assemblage forming and thinking comes into being through the mediation of technology by also being agentic. I place questions emerging from this into digital software to create an image I can use to remind me of the agency of the digital (Fig. 5.11):

I decide to put the recordings of my intra-actions with the sea and water data together in a flm to see how agency emerges from the digital and to provide you with a multisensory experience of the swimmingwith-data activity. First, the digital devices record parts of the wild swimming and associations with the thinking around it as an emergent process as I leave the flm to record throughout the whole experience. Individual flms from the frst wild-swimming-thinking place themselves into a

**Fig. 5.11** Digital notes

folder at random when I attach wires between devices. Tese are imported by me linking communication between the computer and the software and each individual flm is organised in no order within the software. Te flms are left in this order. Te flm from the second swim is overlaid over the flm from the frst swim using the same process so that the entanglement between the two is recognised. Te sound is left to merge from each flm which means that the dominant sound is heard more.

   OPEN THE WINDOW TO FEEL AND HEAR THE BREEZE OUTSIDE. SCAN THE QR CODE BELOW TO ACCESS THE FILM AND KEEP IN MIND THE QUESTIONS IN THE IMAGE ABOVE (Fig. 5.11).

OR CLICK HERE

QR Code 5 Film QR Code

## **Starting from the Middle for a Non-conclusion**

By sharing my journey with you I am hoping that this chapter has given you an insight into what I mean by an afective, embodied environmental empathy through a sensory engagement with your environment. I also hope you were able to feel the entanglement of matter whilst feeling part of it at the same time. When experiencing this deeply, there may have been moments when you could not explain what you were feeling. It is within these moments that I like to think of this entangled empathy as similar to the Japanese theory of 'Mono no aware' (Prusinski, 2012, pp. 27–28). Mono no aware is described as an empathy towards things and is 'the ability to discern and bring out the unique inner charm of every existing phenomenon or thing, to identify oneself with the object being contemplated, to empathise with its mysterious beauty' (Prusinski, 2013, pp. 27–28). Also, in relation to the Japanese term 'Yugen' which means a deep understanding of the mystery and aesthetics of the universe which cannot be described but should remind you of the complexity and the simplicity of the entanglement of life. Tis moment is:

Hidden behind the clouds, but not entirely out of sight, for we feel its presence, its secret message being transmitted through the darkness however impenetrable to the intellect. Te feeling is all in all. (Suzuki cited in Prusinski, 2013, pp. 27–28)

If you did not arrive at these moments, go back and do it again or keep practising daily. You will get there.

Furthermore, by practising and understanding my process in relation to empathy I hope that you understand how knowledge is relational and that activisms emerge from the afective relational intra-actions you have experienced:

Practices of knowing and being are not isolable; they are mutually implicated. We don't obtain knowledge by standing outside the world; we know because we are of the world. We are part of the world in its diferential becoming*.* (Barad, 2007, p. 185)

In this sense, I argue that this practice can be actioned in any situation and through any educational subject by sharing the tasks I have set out in my chapter and adapting them to any classroom and outside environments alongside using creative methods for afective intra-actions to come to the forefront. If this is followed, I argue that ruptions which shift normative ways of thinking can emerge in all types of education going forward. In this sense, I understand afective empathetic relations as emerging from creativity and as a catalyst for ethical educational futures. Give it a try.

## **References**

**Open Access** Tis chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Te images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## **6**

## **(Ma)kin(g) Sympoietic More-than-Human Educational Futures**

**Sharon Witt and Helen Clarke**

## **Living and Learning with a World of Relations**

Te authors of this chapter are inspired by living and learning with a world of more-than human relations as kin. Our kin come in 'all shapes and sizes…' (Van Horn, 2021, p. 2); we are entangled with multispecies plants and animals, materials, features and phenomena that shape the world. We are informed by traditional ecological knowledges and stirred by Wall Kimmerer's (2022) wise message, of pedagogical signifcance, that 'we've forgotten we're surrounded by kinfolk'. We propose kinship as a verb of relating rather than a noun, where 'we are not human beings, but humans being' (Krawec, 2022, p. 124). From this perspective, 'Earth - and everything within it - including all that creates what we call earth - is a verb', where 'all is in motion; all is relating' (Van Horn, 2021, p. 3). So, we are careful, yet playful with language, and we endeavour to

S. Witt (\*) • H. Clarke

School of Education, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© Te Author(s) 2024 **123**

K. Chappell et al. (eds.), *Creative Ruptions for Emergent Educational Futures*, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52973-3\_6

experiment with languages of kinning—generative, yet imperfect, incomplete and in formation.

Relationality is at the heart of our educative practice with children, teachers, and wider communities. In a kinship world view, humans are part of, rather than separate from, the world, and active in transforming how they relate with more-than-human kin. Troughout this chapter we apply the term *more-than-human* to suggest to readers that humans are always in relation, 'never outside a sticky web of connections or an *ecology* of matter' (Whatmore, 2006, p. 603). Te world is not a scene or backdrop, but has potential for dialogue, if we are receptive.

## **(Ma)kin(g) in a Kincentric Worldview**

Our work is positioned within posthumanist perspectives, which disrupt human exceptionalism. A kincentric view is a way of thinking and living with 'a world of kin, grounded in a profound sense of the connectivities and relationships that hold us together, vulnerable and responsible to one another' (Van Dooren & Chrulew, 2022, p. 2). A kincentric worldview requires a shift away from anthropocentric modes of living, being, and doing, which privilege humankind. In more relational and inclusive approaches, place is a creative companion that invites multiple engagements in a mesh of 'intra-action' (Barad, 2007), and where entities simultaneously co-emerge in new relationships (Rautio, 2014).

In this chapter, we explore ruptions in educational practice that open cracks through which learners might respond diferently. Our practices put Chappell's posthumanising creativity to work to 'create and generate new ideas, actions, and phenomena' (2012, p. 496). We implore educators to attune and attend to more-than-human kin in pedagogic practices that shift focus to include *all* participants, more-than-human and human. Close attention expands dialogue with the world; 'responsive listening and dwelling-with that lingers, notices the particularities, variances, and nuances of things, and attends to the hesitant, temporal, and transitory' (Kind, 2021, p. 1). Close engagement with more-than-human kin includes collaborative and collective making: making conversation, making time, making marks, making kin, (ma)kin(g). Our (ma)kin(g) plays with Haraway's (2016) idea of sympoiesis (or making-with) to create spaces of collective enquiries. Experimentation energises our activities and enables emergence of surprising and unexpected possibilities through sustained proximity with places. Tis chapter purposefully draws the reader into productive and provocative questions, which may resonate with their experiences and encourage attention to more-than-human kin. Attending to intra-activity is embedded in our creative pedagogic practices—in dialogue, making, following emergence and generating questions.

#### **We wonder:**

**What might kinning practices look like in a kincentric worldview?**

## **Attending to Kinning Practices**

'Relationality is a principle that is sustained and strengthened through practice' (Tynan, 2021, p. 601). Kinship is rooted in practices of attention. It is a way we can attend to 'what's happening' in spaces by noticing absences and asserting presences (Krawec, 2022, p. 102). As Kimmerer (2023, p. 1) believes, 'deep attention calls us inevitably into deep relationship,' and into richer understanding of places. Ingold (2013, p. 1) explains, 'It is, in short, by watching, listening and feeling - by paying attention to what the world has to tell us - that we learn.' To bring children directly into relationship with the world through afective, embodied, and sensory encounters is to bring learners into dialogue with more-than-human kin. Embracing a pedagogy that presents the 'world as multi-vocal, important, diverse, and deserving of respect' (Blenkinsop et al., 2017, p. 363) is a joyful practice for hopeful futures. We seek to turn up the colour and tune into the world so we can move forward, 'with a positive energy and an attention to the exploration of alternate possibilities' (Geoghegan & Woodyer, 2014, p. 219) for responsive educational futures.

Our *Pedagogies of Attention* (Clarke & Witt, 2017) are ethico-ontoepistemological practices (Barad, 2007, p. 185), that is, an entanglement of ethical caring, doing and knowing. Figure 6.1 illustrates the three

**Fig. 6.1** Pedagogies of attention (Clarke & Witt, 2017)

foundations of *Pedagogies of Attention*: to *care* with places attentively is an ethical stance; to *be* with places attentively is to cultivate relationships; to *know* with places attentively is to value diferent ways of knowing, both literal and lyrical. A kincentric worldview underpins each foundation.

Within our educational context we put these pedagogies to work through *feld-visiting* (Clarke & Witt, 2022), a new way to engage

**Fig. 6.2** Engaging in practices of kinning

learners in worldly encounters. Field-visiting is a deepening of relations that makes places visible and tells rich narratives that include more-thanhuman voices. Knowledges emerge from situated, material, and embodied encounters. In entanglement with more-than-human kin *Pedagogies of Attention* invite children and teachers to engage with the world in practices of kinning, including (Fig. 6.2):

**We wonder: What might unfold when we attend-with kin?**

## **(Ma)kin(g)-with Creative Attention**

*Pedagogies of Attention* are place-responsive, and value diverse ways of knowing. We engage in arts-based practices to dialogue-with worldly kin. In our pedagogies, making-with includes (Fig. 6.3):

**Fig. 6.3** Making with

Ingold (2013, p. 6) describes the relationship between thinking and making as an:

… art of enquiry … where the conduct of thought goes along with, and continually answers to, the fuxes and fows of the materials with which we work. Tese materials think in us, as we think through them.

Making-with more-than-human kin is a radical act of ruption to change and transform knowing, thinking, and being. Our work is attentively creative—making-with new knowledges, generating questions, and fnding agential cuts—as learners go feld-visiting, attend to provocations, and reveal new combinations, connections, and relations.

To practise this method is not to describe the world, or to represent it, but to open up our perception to what is going on there so that we, in turn, can respond to it. Tat is to say, it is to set up a relation with the world. (Ingold, 2013, p. 7)

**We wonder: What educative stories unravel when kin yarn together?**

## **Stories of Kinship Encounters**

Tis section explores stories of place encounters as pedagogic intraactions; opportunities to bring children into dynamic relations with more-than-human worlds in space and time, in generative ways. Our intention is to draw readers into proximity with places and practices, as 'relationality is learnt from stories' (Tynan, 2021, p. 597). We share two lively elemental, accounts that involve lake, garden, children, teachers, student teachers and researchers.

Both stories share commitment to creative feld-visiting, as examples of emergent learnings—unforeseen and serendipitous engagements and responses—(ma)kin(g)s with place. Collaborative 'research creations' combine generative and scholarly practices in thinking-doing-making together, and experiment with relational responses (Springgay & Truman, 2018). Te examples bring together a cacophony of materials, ideas, images, and questions. Our stories reveal exchanges of gifts in relational reciprocity; gifts of attention, insights, creative wisdoms, and makings. Trough creating collage with Hiltingbury Lake and curating journal pages with Gilbert White's Selborne Garden, we commit to putting our *Pedagogies of Attention* to work (Clarke & Witt, 2017). Each gift is an eventful and celebratory story, through space and time, guided by questions of kinship. Our difractive stories demonstrate growing responseability—new ways to be attentive and grateful with kinfolk, in '… making through thinking …thinking through making…We cannot make the future without thinking it' (Ingold, 2013, p. 6).

#### **We wonder:**

**What if we attune and attend to the presence of more-thanhuman kin**

**in education spaces and curricula?**

## **Research Creation 1—Collaging with Lake-Kin**

Research Creation 1 (Fig. 6.2) is a gathering with Hiltingbury Lake, Hampshire. On a hot July day, we visited with sixty 9- and 10-year-old children, with ethical permission to include their data contributions. Tis more-than-human entanglement experimented with creative ways learners might be present and participate with multispecies worlds through acts of attention. We share research creations as we introduce assemblages as intra-acting entities in place. We bring readers closer to feld-visit happenings through research creations, where data, theory and questions meet each other in unforeseen ways.

Collages are collections of found texts, images and textures that are arranged and re-arranged … to produce new possibilities, new ways of thinking and knowing that have not been previously thought. (Franklin-Phipps and Rath in Kuby et al., 2019, p. 147)

Research Creation 1 (Fig. 6.4) is a collage of photographs, writing, theory, patterns, artwork, questions, and voices as modes of relational kinning. Children co-created connections as generative co-emergent data stories (Koro-Ljungberg, 2016).

Research Creation 1b (Fig. 6.5) is an invitation to access a short flm of the collage (via QR code), and entangle yourself, to zoom in on some emergent happenings and provocations. We invite you to get up close, move around, and share moments in place and time.

Te collage is a deep map of multiple layers and dimensions, which presences lake assemblages. It is difcult to contain the collage as an abundance of joy, weavings, wateriness, and knottings spill out to fow through this story:

#### **Lake as a gathering of relations**—**assemblages of:**

water - sunshine - children - leaf litter - ripples - gulls -

boat - heron - trunk - fowers - grass - ducks - shadows-

**Fig. 6.4** Research creation 1a: The always (in)complete collage

We grapple with assemblages as kinning in action, attuning to '…relations – vital, wild processes – that are always present yet not always visible' (Van Horn, 2021, p. 2) in everyday places and worldly encounters. Our enacting of kinship practices may seem a minor act of ruption but is an important step to acknowledging Earth as lively, 'embracing mystery rather than asserting mastery' (Macfarlane, 2017).

#### **YOU ARE INVITED TO CONNECT WITH … HILTINGBURY LAKE … JULY 2021**

**https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=dlFaXQm10yM&feature= youtu.be**

*We invite you to navigate across this 'deep map', to intra-act with the collage – to lift, to fold, to twist, to open in order to immerse yourself in 'Lively Lakeside Stories' and search for new perspectives in threads that glowed for you (Maclure, 2013).*

*This 3D collage shares a simultaneity of spatial, material, and temporal stories woven in cartographies of field-visiting experiences to Hiltingbury Lakes in July 2021. Within the collage, there are stories of growth, journeys, presences, absences, distractions, embodied learning, community, and in the moment noticing. The collage seeks to make present the mesh of relations entangled within geographical field visiting. A cacophony of voices share their stories– materials, ideas, images, more-than-human communities, and children's voices…We diffract theory with practice, so images speak to materials- speak to theory- speak to words creating threads of many stories that are just part of the whole. These threads move across the collage in rhizomatic ways in diverse directions and are woven into multiple, unexpected connections. The collage has intentionally left unresolved ideas, openings, and holes. This is to allow space to invite participation to explore new possibilities and potential for geographical and transdisciplinary learnings.*

#### **Fig. 6.5** Research creation 1b: An invitation to attend

It is a low-key, ordinary, everyday kind of response that values and trusts the generative and recuperative powers of small and seemingly insignifcant worldly relations… Tese are the kinds of non-divisive relations that many young children already have with the world.  We can learn with them. (Taylor, 2017, pp. 11–12)

Te feld-visit to Hiltingbury Lake exemplifes our situated engagement with everyday places and local more-than-human communities as we, 'lean a little on the complexity and mystery of the natural world' (Macfarlane, 2017). However, 'you cannot demand a relationship' (Tynan, 2021, p. 599), it takes time, efort, and sensory engagement to connect, build familiarity and respond-with a world of more-than-human relations. Entering into dialogue with entities in a world of kin and being open to the world is not easy. Te path is not clear; and we stumble, we encounter tensions, we negotiate diferences, we redirect. When we wayfnd we attend, create and connect in relationship, rooting our educational stories in the local and in the moment of the here and now. Tis is a generative dialoguing-with the world.

'Response-ableness … cultivating collective knowing and doing' (Haraway, 2016, p. 34), connects kin and strengthens kinship bonds between children and places. Educators have a role in creating and mediating learning spaces where learners come into relationship with place. Humans are not the sole knowledge makers at the lake (Stengers, 2012). Opportunities to learn and think-with the world as kinfolk ofer possibilities for collective fourishings*.* Te more we dialogue with the world the more, and the deeper, we learn together.

Te reader is now invited to engage with a series of difractions—where data meet and new insights generate—within place assemblages that, 'spread thought in unpredictable patterns … productive emergences producing diferent knowledge' (Mazzei, 2014, p. 742). Te following difractions are led by three guiding questions: What kinning practices were enacted? How did response-ableness manifest? What thinking of pedagogical signifcance (ruption) was set in motion?

Difraction 1 (Fig. 6.6) shares examples of lake-kinning practices in action.

Happenings in feld-visiting spaces were intra-actions between kinfolk. When we attend to hands, bodies, and traces we reveal there is more going on than we might imagine. Here, place-children intra-actions show that '… in making new knowledge we will come to inhabit and know the world diferently than we did before' (Somerville, 2008, p. 209).

**Fig. 6.6** Lake diffraction 1: Kinning practices in action

## **Guiding Question—How Did Response-Ableness Manifest?**

Making-with engages in inclusive, enacted relationality. Everything is relevant in children's responses, including perceptions, feelings, inventories, patterns, stories, doodlings, and foldings. Difraction 2 (Fig. 6.7) is a gallery of creative gifts, which emerged intra-actively between children and place-kin.

Each of the gifts is evidence of time given, attention paid, and processes enacted. Each is a celebration of experience, intra-action, and companionship with kinfolk. 'Emergence, as a process of wondering and generating … cannot begin with logic but comes from a place of not knowing, informed by intuition and responsiveness' (Somerville, 2008, p. 209). As a research difraction, the gallery shares children's emergent noticings of colour, texture, shape, pattern, detail, and makings with kin.

**Fig. 6.7** Lake diffraction 2: Gallery of creative gifts

## **Guiding Question—What Thinking of Pedagogical Signifcance (Ruption) Was Set in Motion?**

In difracting happenings at the lake, three ripples of signifcance (amongst many others) provoked us, set us thinking, wondering, and questioning: kinship as nested; kinship as embodied; kinship as ceremony.

## **Kinship as Nested**

Te place revealed tales, which the children were committed to telling tales of animals, plants, materiality, life, death, and action. Lively stories are inspired by witnessing (Blaise et al., 2017). Difraction 3 (Fig. 6.8) is an anthology of children's noticings expressed as tales of the lake.

Multiple tales are nested within the lakeside setting and reveal complex possibilities in this place. As a collection of speculative noticings, gathered and embedded, they draw us closer as place-kin. We can create stronger relationality within educative practices, inspired by children's lively encounters and their 'propensity to ascribe liveliness to all manner

## **Kinship is nested -tales within tales**

**The story of the annoying goose The story of the blue hat The story of the curious dog The story of jumping fish The story of dying beetle The story of hurtful nettles The story of rusty gate The story of statue seagull The story of disruptive boat The story of theheron that went fishing.**

**Fig. 6.8** Lake diffraction 3: Lakeside tales

of things that matter to them in the environment' (Merewether, 2019, p. 235). We can learn from, and with, children in their world making.

## **Kinship as Embodied**

Te place invited tactile engagement. 'A relational reality… is an afective force that compels us to not just understand the world as relational, but feel the world as kin' (Tynan, 2021, p. 600). Difraction 4 (Fig. 6.9) shows collective makings that emerged as a Momigami (Japanese papermaking method) lakeside installation, composed of materials and thoughts, in hessian, paper, words, and natural items. Bodies gathered around to share, peer, lean in, nestle, jostle, and hustle—a moving together in 'co-motion' (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 4).

**Fig. 6.9** Lake diffraction 4: A Momigami art installation Iorio et al. (2017)

Te art installation brought together place, materials and ideas in a careful weaving together of wordings and placings in intra-action, as 'emergent workings out of afective material and spatial happenings of curriculum practices…' (Taylor, 2016, p. 21).

#### **Kinship as Ceremony**

We gathered for ceremony—a performance of ritual, sharing, chanting, dancing, and processing—in gratitude and celebration for the 'right here, right now'. Ceremony 'helps emphasise and perform the transformative potential between entities rather than focus on entities as separate and individual beings' (Tynan, 2021, p. 601). Difraction 5 (Fig. 6.10) is an annotated record of the ceremony in image and words. We invite you to access a short flm (via QR code or by clicking here and here).

Te children walked slowly around the installation, chanting aloud lines of found poetry, in 'a moving, sonorous, gestural, textural, material, improvisational' parade (Kind, 2018, p. 9). Tis 'dance of attention' (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 5) emerged as a bridge between place and people. Ceremony connects, builds community, and strengthens belonging – both more-than-human and human – in reciprocity.

**Fig. 6.10** Lake diffraction 5: Lakeside Ceremony

'Ceremony brings relationships together' (Tynan, 2021, p. 601). Te curated video documents this event, (re)-immersing viewers in movements and sounds, places and times, and provokes new wonderings.

 Making kin is not always straightforward. Some invitations are not possible to follow. Some invitations are discomforting. Inclusive, non-colonising pedagogies involve conficts, difculties, and disruptions. We have to learn to work with, and balance, these tensions to consider how to dwell with oddkin and badkin (Haraway, 2016).

To respond to the complexity of the world in this way, including ourselves with/in it, we need to perceive without looking away, without reducing the world for our comfort. We must actively refuse to exclude or ignore even that which is uncomfortable and difcult, contradictory and painful. (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., 2020, p. 108)

Our lakeside visit was not without incident. Te initial disruption of soil, and the turning to generative ruption, is told through found poetry:

A lively story of Soil and Children On a very hot day of Sunshine We came for Hiltingbury Lake. Yet Soil demanded our attention …. Te children sat on dry rich Leaf Litter Becoming soil as outdoor classroom. A welcome place of shade Of Shadows playfully dancing telling stories of Leaves, of Pens, of Paper, of Children Imprinted on Soil foor. Leaf Litter announces its presence entangling-with Child-Pine Wood relations. Leaf Litter searches out encounters with others. Leaf Litter clings, spreads, covers, envelops, disrupts. Soil permeates everywhere. On Trousers, in Boots. Water Bottles, in Hair, over our Hands, under our Nails and in our Bags. Soil interrupts our collective collage responses, intercepts, interferes and travels. Soil clings, holds, grasps, embraces… Tiny particles infltrating the smallest of spaces. Soil stories grow as Leaf Litter-Children move, touch, smell, feel. As Children become marked and make marks with Soil. Disruption becomes ruption as Earthing, grounding, Co-mingling, Co-composing, Composting, Soil generates happenings.

Tese lakeside encounters illustrate practices of kinship, and stories of deep knowings with place. Tinking of pedagogical signifcance was set in motion—of kinship as nested, embodied and ceremony. Hiltingbury Lake became a 'pedagogical contact zone' (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020), where children learned in entanglement with place. Responses generated feelings of belonging within a lake community becoming-kin.

**We wonder:**

**What sorts of gifts are exchanged in research creation with morethan-human kin?**

## **Research Creation 2—Journalling with Garden-Kin**

Research Creation (Fig. 6.11) is a gathering with Gilbert White's Garden, Selborne, Hampshire on another hot July day, in more-than-human entanglements. We, as researchers, experimented with ways to be present with multispecies kin through emergent acts of attending and noticing.

Gilbert White (1720–1793) was a naturalist-clergyman, whose way of relating with nature was 'reverent and attentive'. White's days were 'packed with incident', he spent a great deal of time in his garden and 'nothing was too small or humble to escape his investigation' (Martin, 2021, p. 10). White regarded nature as a subject not a backdrop, with a cast of more-than-human characters as relations (Martin, 2021). His writing was a combination of scientifc precision, poetic narrative, conversational anecdote, and his journal is full of whimsy, things that crop up, reminders, and idiosyncrasies (Mabey, 2006).

White's garden is a place where voices and provocations abound. On the day of our feld-visit, it was the hollyhocks that unexpectedly drew our attention, so we went 'hollyhocking' for the day. We made journal pages, with garden, as sympoietic gifts:

*Journalling is proximity, intimacy, connection. Journalling is a verb of attending, cherishing, conversing, remembering, creating. Journalling takes you deep into noticing minute particulars and nurtures sense of place and spirit.*

**Fig. 6.11** Research creation 2 Journal as sympoietic gift

Our journal (Research Creation 2) is not an art book as such, but a curation of responses in photographic, linguistic, and artistic forms as research creation. As a gift, the journal includes observations, doodlings, speculative thinkings, emergent lines of enquiry, threads followed and new questions that invite further musings.

Te journal pages are a deep map of multiple layers and dimensions that presence garden assemblages. Tere is an abundance of colour, texture, light and fourishings that grow as this story:

#### **Garden as a gathering of relations - assemblages of:**

 lawn - sunshine - hollyhocks - researchers - shadows bees - robin - poppy seed heads - tulip tree - seats - clouds gardeners - pollen - blue sky - petals - paper - breeze - scent and …

**Fig. 6.12** Garden diffraction 1 Kinning practices in action

In this place, we drew on Kimmerer's ideas of 'seeing with both eyes' (2023), a simultaneous thinking with both indigenous and scientifc wisdoms, engaging multiple ways of knowing Gilbert's Garden. At this time and place, a multiplicity of wisdoms intra-acted: hollyhocks turned their fowers to the light, bees sought pollen, breeze carried scent, skin greeted petals, fallen fowers suggested characters and stories, height and aspect allowed faces to meet blooms.

## **Guiding Question—What Kinning Practices Were Enacted?**

Garden Difraction 1 (Fig. 6.12) shares examples of garden-kinning practices in action:

Happenings in the garden were intra-actions between kinfolk; 'It was the collective and collaborative which we wanted to nurture, creating a relational space of investigating and creating together; constructing, making, and composing understandings' (Somerville, 2008, p. 8). When we attend to hands, bodies, and traces we reveal there is more going on than we might, at frst, imagine.

**Fig. 6.13** Gallery diffraction 2 Gallery of creative gifts

## **Guiding Question—How Did Response-Ableness Manifest?**

Making-with engages in inclusive, enacted relationality. Like White himself, within the broader horizon of the garden, we watched narrowly, in relation. Responses included doodling, playing with colour, tracing, naming, smudging, rubbing, imagining, photographing, drawing, sorting, noting, and magnifying. Garden Difraction 2 (Fig. 6.13) is a gallery of creative gifts, which emerged intra-actively between researchers and place-kin (QR Code or click here). Each shows a desire to get closer; to get to know hollyhocks.

Each of the makings is evidence of time given, attention paid, processes enacted. Each is a celebration of experience, intra-action, and companionship with kinfolk. As a research difraction, the gallery shares our learnings with colour, texture, shape, pattern, scent, change, pollination, and makings with kin.

## **Guiding Question—What Thinking of Pedagogical Signifcance (Ruption) Was Set in Motion?**

In difracting happenings with the garden, these buds of inspiration (amongst many others) provoked us, set us thinking, wondering and questioning: kinship as temporal; kinship as attuning to multiple voices; kinship as reverence.

## **Kinship as Temporal**

Te place revealed notions of time. Tis garden is a legacy of thinking, making and being; a combination of past and presence, past and present; of formality and wilderness. We are regular visitors to this place, meeting one another in diferent garden moods, throughout the year. For:

… becoming kin… consists of repeated intimacies, familiar encounters, and daily undoings and transformations that are dependent on visitations and conversations within a smaller circle of place. (Van Horn, 2021, p. 9)

Garden Difraction 3 (Fig. 6.14) is a play on garden time and resonating oices (QR Code or click here)

Tis difraction helps us to wonder about rhythms and patterns of time and place in the company of hollyhocks. It holds echoes of ancestors—more-than-human and human—noticing the past, with thick attention to the present. Tis summer encounter is one of a repetition of meetings: ongoing cartographies of stems, blooms, eyes, footsteps and… It shares commitment to ongoing hollyhocking practices and speculative fabulations for possible futures.

## **Kinship as Attuning to Multiple Voices**

Te place reveals and values the voices of hollyhocks as summer companions.

**Fig. 6.14** Garden diffraction 3 Journal page of temporal connections

Earth language is never monological; always relational, it is a call to enter into encounters, to be co-present and engaged. We know that nonhumans communicate in multiple registers, and perhaps it is necessary, therefore, to be able to listen in multiple registers. (Rose, 2013a, p. 107)

Garden Difraction 4 (Fig. 6.15) plays with voices in the moment (QR Code or click here).

Tis difraction animates garden-kin in speculative voicings, suggesting pedagogical openings for others to attend to, and think with, hollyhocks. To amplify a voice is to hear diferently, grow relations, and build understandings of hollyhock worlds. (Ma)kin(g) together transforms hollyhock–human relationships, in sympoietic processes of mutual becoming, 'we become-with each other or not at all' (Haraway, 2016, p. 5).

A kincentric approach requires us to listen to and dialogue with morethan-human kin. However, building relations is always a political act. Tere will always be an element of 'directional selectivity' (Hannah,

**Fig. 6.15** Garden diffraction 4 Journal page of speculative Hollyhock voices

2013, p. 35) as you consider who and what you pay attention to, whose voices you dialogue with and whose voices you ignore.

## **Kinship as Reverence**

Te etymology of journalling originates in daily prayers, as records of day-to-day living. So, with this place, we engaged with kinning practices as ritual and with reverence. Tese included: meeting hollyhocks, recognising uniqueness in each, noticing softness of petals, radial patterns of colour, glow of pollen, hum of bee-kin visiting, collecting fallen petals, holding with care, responding with journal pages that celebrate relations. Garden Difraction 5 (Fig. 6.16) is a gesture of reverence, and a gift of deep respect (QR Code or click here).

Tis difraction celebrates hollyhocks as garden-kin in their moment of summer glory. As Morris (2022) observes, 'Each act of creativity is a form of prayer if the heart is in the making'. Trough journalling, and

**Fig. 6.16** Garden diffraction 5 Journal page as a record of garden reverence

celebrating beauty, we amplify kin relations and create openings for future fourishings. On another visit to the garden several months later we shared the journal with the garden as an act of reciprocity and gratitude. Together, in proximity, we marked passing of time, seasonal change, promises of fresh growth, and new wonderings.

Tese garden encounters illustrate practices of kinship, and stories of deep knowings of place. Tinking of pedagogical signifcance was set in motion—of kinship as temporal, multi-vocal, and reverent. All that was in assemblages became pedagogically signifcant. Responses generated feelings of belonging within a garden community becoming-kin. We will visit again.

**We wonder: What does gifting generate?**

## **Kinning Practices Entangle and Implicate**

Our kinship encounters with both lake and garden, entangled and implicated us. Being implicated is 'a commitment to life: to exploring the living world in its beauty and its challenges and to making a stand for fourishing, for inclusive possibilities' (Van Dooren & Chrulew, 2022, p. 10). Bryan (2022) identifes the need for pedagogical models that illuminate the complex layers of worldly relationships; her *Pedagogy of the Implicated* (2022) prompts critical refection on one's own positioning as an implicated subject, whose everyday non-innocent actions afect morethan-human kin.

We put our *Pedagogies of Attention* to work as feld-visiting, through engagement with arts practices as pedagogical experimentations that have potential to transform relationships. A relational pedagogy is an afrmative ruption:

#### **Don't give up on the world.**

*To refuse to turn away to remain true to the lives within which ours are entangled, whether or not we can accomplish great change* (Rose, 2013b, p. 9). *To turn away, to disavow, to forget. All are modes of abandonment Tat must be resisted in times of colonisation and extinctions. when living beings and their ways of life are under threat on mass.* (Van Dooren & Chrulew, 2022, p. 10)

As 'place-lings', (Van Horn, 2021) we are implicated with locality. We are committed to a kincentric worldview and propose making-with as generative practice.

#### **We wonder: What relations might arts-based kinning practices craft?**

## **(Ma)kin(g) More-than-Human Educational Futures**

In cultivating (Ma)kin(g) within education we suggest a shift from individual, human-centred approaches to pedagogies of kincentric, collective, co-creation with feld-visiting spaces. In this chapter, research creations of lakeside and garden happenings are sympoietic (art)efacts created as post-qualitative responses to place (Ma)kin(g)s. Tey are both incomplete and mark the beginnings of ongoing kinship happenings.

Relational pedagogy does not end when we leave a place. Relationships and implications continue in dialoguing, making, new thinking and transformations. *Pedagogies of Attention* call us to attune to diferent voices, engage in new relationships with more-than-human kin, and ask fresh questions. Tis is the work the world needs right now, a radical yet gentle activism (Burnard, 2022) that brings learners close to the world (St Pierre, 2017), through small, yet signifcant, actions. A kincentric worldview ofers possibilities to reimagine local areas as meeting places of lively entities; possibilities that disrupt contemporary feelings of alienation, disconnection, and separation. You are never alone in a more-than-human world.

Sympoiesis is a creative practice that fosters inclusive, non-colonising pedagogies. Making-with the world can be challenging to put into practice, yet positions creativity as a powerful and provocative agent of positive change. As celebrations of specifc local encounters these are not intended to be a 'how to' guide or a script to support teachers to go a-kinning when feld-visiting. 'It would be contrary to the spirit of postmodern emergence to try to come up with a list of principles or a recipe through which to describe or enact these ideas' (Somerville, 2008, p. 212). Instead, our ruption opens a 'crack in the here and now' (Anderson, 2006, p. 705) in traditional school place-based practices. We propose a shift to focus on learning for place attention and responses through acts of reciprocity, care and response-ableness. (Ma)kin(g)-with is a radical commitment to generative multispecies relationality for more-than-human and human futures.

#### **We wonder:**

**What opportunities will you embrace to make kin with the world?**

## **References**

**Open Access** Tis chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Te images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

# **7**

## **Sensing in Liminal Spaces: Words, Music and Dementia**

## **Ursula Crickmay and Caroline Welsh**

## **Introduction**

QR Code 6: Audio 1: Poised at the edge—Bass note D

*Considering dementia as a site of learning raises some critical questions about the relationship between education and the future. Placing learning within a context of cognitive decline causes a 'ruption' (Chappell et al.,* 2024*) in the prevalent Western logic that considers education to be a process in the present leading towards more knowledge or skills for the individual learner in the future. It leads us to question what is involved in the education-future relation-*

U. Crickmay (\*) • C. Welsh

School of Education, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### **156 U. Crickmay and C. Welsh**

*ship: if it is by necessity no longer a primarily cognitive matter, then how might we come to understand it diferently? If the logic of centring the relationship on the individual is undermined, then how can we consider instead what a person (with dementia) might contribute collaboratively, communally or intra-actively (Barad,* 2007*) in their own becoming in a space of learning? And if we loosen the pull of the future on education, then what diferent possibilities may be released in the present? Drawing attention to these questions through a posthuman (Taylor,* 2016*) reading of a practice involving dialogues between music, words, images, voices and people, some of whom are living with dementia, we will argue that diferent possibilities emerge that are relevant both within and beyond this context: a ruption in our perception of education. Quinn and Blandon (*2020*,* 2017*) have articulated eloquently the potential for using posthuman theory with its questioning of binaries and boundaries, of hierarchies between diferent orders of people and things, to broaden our perspective on dementia, contesting a defcit understanding which places those of us with dementia solely within a context of loss. We build on their arguments for including people with dementia as essential participants in lifelong learning and extend this line of thought to focus on learning as a response-able encounter in other words, an encounter in which we responsively and ethically open ourselves to change (Beausoleil,* 2015*). We invite you into our exploration of this learning as a co-creative emergence: a joint, collective or entangled (Barad,* 2007*) making of something new, in an in-between or liminal space that opens towards the unforeseeable future.*

Tere is an emerging interest in posthuman ideas in relation to music education, which highlights embodied, afective and relational understandings of music-making and learning within musical ecologies (Cooke & Colucci-Gray, 2019; Woods, 2020; Crickmay & Ruck Keene 2022; de Bruin & Southcott, 2023). An engagement with the materiality of sound (Wilson, 2021; Powell & Somerville, 2020) also contributes to revealing hierarchies in knowledge and ways of knowing and being in music (Woods, 2020, 2019; Koopal et al., 2022). Te understanding of posthumanism that we adopt in this chapter builds on a number of these themes.

## **Introducing the Posthuman Framework**

Here we draw out some aspects of posthuman theory to provide a defnition of posthumanism in relation to music and dementia, describing what we consider to be its potential to create ruptions, developing new understandings in this feld. We present each part of our defnition in response to a short description of musical practice in action, drawing on the moment recorded in the audio accompanying this section (Audio 1, https://on.soundcloud.com/jMMFK).

*John (who has dementia) has an embodied engagement with a bass bar, the momentum of the beater drawing his arm up and down, 'oooooo,' the vibrational afect of the sound, his animation, his being alive to it, his immersion in the moment of making the music, of embodied becoming with the music as it emerges (See Fig.* 7.1*).*

Understanding music-making as a fundamentally *embodied* experience, one located in and contingent on the body, is by no means unique to

**Fig. 7.1** Musician's drawn response to this moment

posthuman theory, but posthumanism guides us frmly in this direction. Braidotti (2013) argues that it is the duality of mind and body in humanist thinking that leads us to equate subjectivity primarily with consciousness and universal rationality: a measure of subjectivity that may easily exclude people with dementia. If we allow posthumanism to lead us beyond humanist assumptions, then those with dementia can guide us in deconstructing this binary, body/mind, helping us to experience our musicking, our multiple participations as performer-listener-composerdancer in music-making (Small, 1998), with attention refocused on 'acts and bodies… materiality… and the agency of things' (Quinn & Blandon, 2020, p. 25).

*Space is made for the human participants of the group (both those with dementia, and their family members who are also participating) to respond to the material invitation of the instruments, to discover what might be interesting about them.*

We are making explicit here the agency not just of the human participants, but also that of the instruments, highlighting how the instruments might themselves be a source of creative action. We are recognising what Bennett (2010) describes as the 'vibrancy' or 'energetic vitality' (p. 5) of diverse materials as active players in a creative endeavour—in other words, recognising their creative agency.

Within the music-making, the agency of the instruments comes together, entangles with that of the human participants and also with the emerging sounds and many other materialities to form a fuid emerging collective or 'assemblage' (Bennett, 2010, p. xvii)—a bit like an openended musical ensemble that is made up of all these things. Tis is signifcant in the practice we describe since it spreads the idea of creative agency further beyond the bounded, or impaired, cognition of the individual, and disperses it amongst a diverse material-musical ecology (to borrow the term from de Bruin & Southcott, 2023). In our ensemble, music emerges from our agentic assemblage, which may at diferent times include a variety of sounds, instruments, bodies, afective fows, musical journeys of becoming, spaces, the weather that day, dementia and much more.

*Te emerging harmonic framework exerts a pull on us, suggests that we might progress somewhere, we're not quite sure where, it is thick with ambiguity and hard to put into words but in the moment we know that something special is starting to happen and we are care-ful in our sounded response, tending the potential.*

Murris (2016) describes the limitations of a 'dualist epistemology' in which education is focused on knowledge *about* the external world, rather than a material engagement *with* it. In her critique, she highlights how a hierarchy is established in which representation, and in particular language, is given power over matter, which has a number of consequences. First, it puts other material engagements with the world—aural, oral, visual, afective—outside of the domain of knowledge. Tis might include our feeling of being pulled by the music, our collective awareness of 'something special starting to happen'. Second, it positions those of us with fully functioning linguistic abilities above/ outside the material world and away from those without such skills. Murris (2016) places children in this latter group, but we could apply the same insight to highlight how those who have dementia might be disadvantaged by such power being given to language and representation. A third consequence, drawing now on Maclure's (2013) argument, is that language, as a dominant tool of representation, has a 'categorical and judgmental' quality. She is commenting on the tendency of language to hold the material world *still* in order to label it, suggesting it is thus poorly equipped to deal with the fow of 'diference, movement, change and the emergence of the new' (p. 659) in the material world. In our discussion, we explore how dementia may help us to engage more broadly with the materiality of both sound and language. Tis creates a ruption, not only in disturbing traditional understandings of education, but also by making spaces for unanticipated further change as we choose to engage with the endless mutability of the present moment.

Bringing posthumanism, music and dementia together in our discussion of a musical/educational practice in this chapter, we are therefore describing an embodied practice that emerges within a musical ecology or assemblage and engages with a variety of diferent ways of knowingwith sound and dementia.

## **Introducing the Musical Practice**

QR Code 7: Audio 2: Opening music

*'Tis is for you, our opening music… just to warm you in…' (from feldnotes). Each Music for Life workshop opens with music improvised by the professional instrumentalists in the group. Our introduction to this musical practice begins with the opening music from a recent session.*

Te specifc practice that we are discussing has been developed through a music project that has been *becoming-with* people living with dementia since it began 30 years ago. Te project is called Music for Life and discussion throughout the chapter draws on our own involvement in the work over an extended period: Ursula in developing the project between 2005–2014; Caroline as fute player in the team from its foundation to the present day. Innovative as a feld of practice at its inception in 1993, Music for Life now sits in the context of a rich and varied fourishing of musical work involving people with dementia yet still retains its character of discovery and innovation (Clements-Cortés, 2019; Smilde et al., 2014). Te following short account of the project describes something of this character, written from our own experiences as members of the collective Music for Life team.

Te work of Music for Life is specifcally situated amongst people living with dementia, their families, carers and supporters, with and in response-ability to whom we have been learning to become in music over many years. Te project is managed by Wigmore Hall, a concert hall in London, and takes place in a range of care settings and community spaces; a long running partnership with social care organisation Jewish Care has been an intrinsic part of its development over the years. Trough a range of improvisatory approaches, our practice comes alive in the quickening in-between of dialoguing, of emerging connection and exchange, amongst the multiple participants in words, music, voices, bodies, images, material encounters and ideas. In this practice, all participants, musicians and facilitators, people living with dementia and their family members and carers, are invited to contribute their voice, their presence, in their own way: we try to capture something of this spirit by describing participants collectively as 'player-pieces' in this chapter. At diferent times this includes playing instruments, singing, directing other musicians, sharing ideas, listening, making eye contact, being in a space together, contributing words, breathing, bringing images or objects, dancing.

Music for Life team members are improvisers of connection. Using musical skills, communication skills and deep attentive listening, we draw a group into a consciously uncertain space where we can hold each other in a care-ful, or ethical response-ability. We see this as an 'ethic of encounter' (Beausoleil, 2015, p. 2) exploring connection, acknowledgement and belonging, and allowing ordinary barriers of communication to fall away. Situating all such encounters in Beausoleil's (2015) 'delicacy of openness' (p. 6), where the perspective of each player-piece can only ever be part of an unknowable and dynamic whole, gives the work a frm footing in what she calls 'a dispositional ethics' (p. 8).

We experience the practice of Music for Life as one of entangling (Barad, 2007), one with another, with all 'others' indebted to diference (Beausoleil, 2015); meeting in improvisation, staying with troubling uncertainties (Haraway, 2016) and holding open the possibility of transformation for everyone involved. Te whole Music for Life programme seems to us to be poised on the live edge of continuous becoming, within each interaction as well as each project, each new strand of our programme of work, and each year of our story. Tere is an ongoing striving to stay on this edge, between knowing (shared trust and confdence in our skills, our experience of what has happened before) and conscious unknowing (choosing, in Beausoleil's [2015] words 'to remain receptive and responsive within the encounter, despite the challenges it might present to our worldview and implication of our role within it' [p. 2]). Tere is a commitment both in the ethos of the practice and embedded in the structure of the work to questioning and refecting. Tis supports our intention to stay in the vulnerable in-between places, questioning and inviting, without certainty and with the potential for all to be equally important in the making process. From the earliest days of this longstanding programme, it has always been the way of Music for Life to tease out questions from our refection, individually and as a team; to enrich our awareness of the nuances of co-becoming and create a deepening reservoir of possibility from which to risk ourselves anew in every interaction.

## **Introduction to Diffractions**

Te discussion that follows takes the shape of a series of difractions that cluster around diferent aspects of the practice. Following Mazzei's (2014) description, we have understood 'difraction' in our research to mean a reading of data through theory, a threading through or plugging in of 'data into theory into data' (p. 743). Each of our difractions takes a different form, but within each you will fnd extracts from the data, fragments of creative work by participants and others, extracts from a series of readings which we have completed as part of our process of researching together, and echoes of a longer collaborative difractive process of dialogue or making with (Ingold, 2013) the materials.

Our difractions draw on data generated during one Music for Life programme in Autumn 2021 as part of a PhD research study. Ethical permission for this research was granted by the Health Research Authority Social Care Research Ethics Committee. All human participants gave their consent to be part of the research and pseudonyms are used throughout so that participants remain anonymous. Words from our participants are presented here not only as data, but also appear integrated, sometimes one at a time, into the more descriptive aspects of this chapter. It has not always been practical to credit the source of single words, so we therefore acknowledge their presence here, each one entangled with the practice, and travelling with us in our co-writing.

## **Diffraction 1: Words/ Sense**

putatively represent it.' (MacLure, 2013, p. 658-9)

### **A Refection on Diffraction 1**

Difraction 1 began with Rose's reading of the poem *Sing to me, Autumn* by Patricia Cisco (2016), which took place during an online Music for Life workshop. Te text is transformed by Rose's reading, becomes something entirely new as the words form in her mouth, some words exchanged for others, Irish lilt emphasising their musical qualities, an unequal metre in the reading adding new sense to the moment, and an aptitude for telling a story drawing the rest of us into her telling of this story, now. But what is the meaning of this transformation? What does it tell us about Rose? About her dementia? We ask you to let go of these questions, to sit in not knowing, to rest alongside a while, to breathe (Cammock, 2021).

Now re-experience the wildness of this language: listen for it.

Back to the workshop, Elena, a musician, sets the same poem to music, singing above a rhythmic double stopping on her violin, a pulsing. Ursula's sound assemblage 'Sense' Audio 3 (https://on.soundcloud. com/6ddiy) starts with this pulsing. Allow yourself to feel it through your own pulse. In the assemblage you will hear other words, a 'word salad' (Veselinova, 2014), magnifed here through layering, whispering, and a stretching of Rose's own words, 'breathe, on, me' which you can hear only as a distorted electronic backdrop—their meaning obscured, or perhaps released to become something new.

What we are invoking here is a diferent intra-action with language, a material-sensorial-communication-creation, playing with materials, as poets and musicians might do when expressing themselves. We are elucidating how, in this musical practice in which some participants have dementia, this same artistic and expressive process fnds this a natural kind of happening, in response to circumstances, to the context, the situation of all the participants. We are wondering if it is perhaps a quality of their dementia that opens a certain kind of listening in those of us whose speedy cognitive capacities might propel us to unwittingly overlook the work of language on the world, jumping forward to interpretation and meaning before we have really listened to the experience of the words and their capacities in and on our own bodies.

#### **7 Sensing in Liminal Spaces: Words, Music and Dementia**

We allow the propositional meaning of words to fow more freely in and around our dialogue, listening to each other with the intention of fnding something to revel in, something to overlap with, a connection or co-becoming that can be found in the voice of the other when joined by ourselves. It provokes a listening 'in the pulse and pause of attentiveness' (Beausoleil, 2015, p. 2), alongside stillness and space, listening as an ongoing shape-shifting willingness to be reinvented, reimagined, renewed, remade, reoriented, repositioned, re-birthed.

## **Diffraction 2: Response-Ability**

### **Shall We Dance in the Space Between Us?**

Te project of responsibility as responsiveness asks and ofers insights regarding not *what* we do, but *how:* how can we be more receptive and responsive to that which challenges our worldview and implicates our place within it? (Beausoleil, 2015, p. 8)

In this difraction, we return to the moment with which we started this chapter, John and his bass bar D. Tis time we put the moment back into its slow unfolding to respond to the question of *how* through the selection of three audio excerpts from a 15-minute section of a workshop. Te writing here emerges in both description and response to these excerpts, drawing attention to the tide of response-ability that can be heard waxing at its own pace, moving softly between the skittering of everyday banter, into something deeply resonant and unmistakeably shared.

### **Invitation—Into 'the radius of an invisible circle of belonging?' (O'Donohue, 1998, p. xv)**

QR Code 10: Audio 5: Starting out: White noise?