Paulo Freire (1972) talks about 'the awakening of a critical consciousness' (P. 36) such that once a learner becomes hyper-aware of the way in which they sufer within these workplaces, they then look to devolve the systems that they are oppressed within. In order to achieve that kind of change from within, from the core, we're talking about those that are in positions of power, changing their position, such that the systems that they monopolise would fall. Sarah, you and I talked about that. You spoke about meritocracy, it would be the same idea, that it would require some people to wish to destroy the systems that favour their position, don't you think? So here the issue is within whose hands can *care* even become potent or disruptive. Is care from the margins enough?

Sarah D: My response is that care has to be taken into the centre. It has to be, otherwise we're thinking about care in opposition to other resources. At the moment care is the oil that makes some really creaky machines work; keeps organisations going at the expense of the people who do the caring. And so, I think that it's really important to think about how care could be taken into the centre of organisations.

Tere's a whole spectrum of what it might mean to be a caring organisation. It may not be politically radical. We can imagine an organisation that sees care as part of capitalist production; that says, *well, actually, I see that care is required to deliver this service, and therefore resources are allocated to that caring. Terefore, I remunerate the people who are doing this care; those who make these other things possible in the institution, these people who give these students an amazingly creative, transformative education*. It feels like this would make *good business sense* and would perhaps not be so exploitative of the people who do care work in organisations. It does pose questions about whether our understanding of care and exploitation in capitalism mean this is sustainable. I think you can move the dial. It's not an either/or.

We were in agreement that there is a perceived scarcity of care in the contemporary workplace. While not exclusively the concern of HE employees, pressures such as contract precarity, oppressive workloads, shrinking pensions, the cost-of-living crisis, and adjusting to pandemic and post-pandemic working conditions were all seen to be taking their toll on the physical and mental health of staf (Davies & Preston, 2021). Tis combination of societal and organisational stressors has predominantly been met with institutional solutions that emphasise individualised eforts (such as yoga and apps) and has yet to recognise either the collective and communal necessity for care, or those individuals who are taking on de facto caring roles for their colleagues and students.

Considered in relation to marginality, informal care by staf members was seen as operating in the power hinterlands—relied upon as the *oil* of goodwill that kept the organisation functioning, but coming at substantial personal cost and inadequately acknowledged. In this context, vulnerability—usually considered an important prerequisite to creativity (Robbins, 2018)—was felt to be potentially unsafe as it risked overburdening individuals with a never-ending requirement to care more.

Criticality also came up in our discussion and is interesting to consider in relation to both care and creativity. Robust honesty and critical refection, with one's self and others, can be seen as acts of care that support greater self-awareness if handled constructively (Amaechi, 2021). In relation to creativity, criticality is vital to ideas-development, where testing and honing are means of progressing initial inspiration into fnished work (Design Council, 2023). On a larger scale, the arts recognise marginality as a valuable space to foster criticality (hooks, 1992, p. 343); it is a well-established trope to refer to the arts as a 'mirror on society', a mode of refecting back that, by its very nature, must exist outside the core.

 Te protestors sit outside senior leadership, and the action is critiquing the norms of remuneration. It is a space that promotes new thinking, making it a natural habitat for ruptions. As ideas become accepted and routinised in the core, new thinking springs afresh from the margins to challenge again, and the cycle is repeated (Mulgan et al., 2007). However, the margins are not solely occupied by progressive change-agents and creative agitators, they are also a form of power *oubliette*, where work perceived as low value—such as care—is relegated. Working from the margins can be a space of freedom (when people are liberated by that position), but it can also be a space of disempowerment (when people are kettled into that position).

## **Care: Vulnerability**

River writes movingly on their project website about *why* they wanted initially to focus on social and professional constructs through the CF, and tapped into their own vulnerabilities as a means of circumventing these barriers in others to engage in a deeper and more personal form of dialogue.

I was interested to invite a space of vulnerability, or at least lack of being guarded and self-reliant, in order to counter the tendency toward the kind of professional performativity that is specifcally born of masculinist and capitalist values. I believe professional performativity to be similar to the social construct of 'gender performativity' (Butler, 1999); that we both act, and is acted upon us.

Tere is a connection in my mind between this sense of being misaligned and dissociated professionally, disconnected from others, and my experience of gender dysphoria. As someone who has experienced the oftentimes excruciating vulnerability of gender transition and simultaneously what the ramifcations of a willingness to be vulnerable has brought to my life alignment, exploration, intrigue, surprise—I am curious to explore how socially constructed professional roles can also be deconstructed and unlearnt, and what surprises, if any, might emerge from that vulnerability?

Teir interest was in transposing their experiences of vulnerability in art making and as a Trans Queer person into the culture of academia. Trans and Queer communities are often spaces of disruption, resistance and creativity based in aesthetics, but also in radical human ecologies. Due to the 'conditions of extreme precarity' and the need for 'survival through strategies of collective care', these communities can be hotbeds for *avantgarde* forms of 'kinship and world making' (Horak, 2018, p. 96).

Vulnerability is a familiar state of existence to Trans and Queer communities, both in terms of the personal and exposing experience of *coming out*, or *disclosing* in heteronormative society, and in the political vulnerabilities of being a marginal group susceptible to prejudice, discrimination, and even persecution. 'Te concept of vulnerability has become central to Trans activism in terms of both the political work of survival … and political organising that centres the experience and leadership of the most vulnerable' (Horak, 2018, p. 95). Vulnerability in this sense is both a site for harm, and paradoxically a powerful political tool and site for new imaginaries. Halberstam and Halberstam (2011), undermines heteronormative defnitions of success, to argue that the failure to live up to societal standards by Queer and Trans people can open up more creative ways of thinking and existing in the world. Tey point out that Queer and feminine success is always measured by male, heterosexual standards. Te failure to live up to these standards, Halberstam argues, can ofer unexpected pleasures such as freedom of expression and sexuality. Tis 'project of failure' (Halberstam & Halberstam, 2011) was a subject that River and Sarah C could recognise as welcomed in both the arts and Queer expression.

Sarah C: Te art world loves being in this space of the unknowing, and failure, and knowing through doing. Tere's real interest and curiosity in that space, because everyone's trained in that way of working. It's okay, when you're surrounded by people going 'look at all the great unknowing you're doing', it's very diferent [in academia].

For Sarah C, the invitation inherent in the Creative Fellowship programme is one of playfulness and trying out new ideas. Deliberately, there is no expectation for a fnal, fully realised artwork or output. Te intention is to alleviate the pressure to resolve an idea, and to embrace opening up one's thinking as a form of respite and inspiration. Te invitation is toward unknowing, process, and reconstituting ideas of success.

However, in applying the question of vulnerability to HE beyond the arts, we asked whether the conditions of employment and the culture of academia allowed for vulnerabilities also to be experienced positively. Questions that emerged were: *do we need to make ourselves vulnerable? And is that a reasonable thing to require of people?* Tis line of enquiry situated this interrogation into the broader consideration of the politics of vulnerability, and realities of the emotional landscape in neoliberalist and capitalist workspaces.

Sarah C: I was thinking about vulnerability - whether it's practical, and what environments are suitable within the workplace, so that it will be acknowledged and rewarded through support. In a complex organisation like the university, you'll have a lot of pockets where that happens, and you'll have a lot of pockets where that doesn't happen. And maybe it's impossible to speak in any kind of absolutes about what an institution of 5000 people can ever achieve. It's more (about) fnding and creating the possibility to build a community. So what channels are available for staf to be in spaces where - should they seek it - that vulnerability is there, and is being met in an honest way?

Tere are certain needs that must be met around security too. I don't quite mean safety, but you've got to be secure enough to be vulnerable in order for the creative process and learning to happen. For me, promoting care, and how universities can care as part of supporting a creative process, is about heightening people's awareness of what vulnerability means and what role self-awareness can play.

Sarah D: Vulnerability is interesting. I did some training on nonviolent communication, and we were taught that, if you're in a place where you're going to impose how you are feeling on the conversation, then you need to not have the conversation… You don't meet [another person's] emotions and energies [in order to] put your own stuf on it. You need to meet it from a place of [enquiry]. Tat is one model. To be there for somebody is *not to be vulnerable* in that way. It's to be ready to hold what comes at you from a place of care and concern.

What you need to care are boundaries. You need to frst and foremost care for yourself, and if you're not in that place where you are comfortable and grounded, you need to attend to that frst. It's interesting in that sense of professional ethics and professional identity but also work regimes.

Many questions arose; what resources are required to allow for vulnerability to feel safe, and a place of power and growth? When does vulnerability cause further harm to those already exhausted, or depleted in HE? As Alyson Cole (2016) states 'all of us are vulnerable but some of us are more vulnerable than others' (p. 260). Women and racialised communities are more frequently in positions of care, and at the same time Trans and Queer communities are far more vulnerable to harm within our society, due to victimising forms of power (Butler, 2016). So, is it reasonable to expect people within these identity positions to aspire to further vulnerabilities in educational settings? As Alyson Cole states in 'amplifying the generative capacity' of vulnerability, do we simultaneously run the risk of diluting perceptions of inequality? (Cendeac, 2022, pp. 9:21). We also need to be mindful that vulnerability is often associated with weakness from patriarchal positions, therefore could embracing vulnerability also be detrimental to job security, progress, value, respect in an industry that is largely still dominated by men? (Janjuha-Jivraj, 2019).

## **Care: Comfort and Discomfort**

Tis section draws on our discussion about how discomfort plays out as part of the process of creativity and learning, that discomfort is central to both, and what requirements that makes of *care*. Te aim is to identify similarities and diferences and also to identify that the focus on care draws attention to the embodied and emotional, and highlights the power relations, complexity, and ambiguity (Mumford et al., 2020) of what is in the room.

Sarah D: I'm concerned that wrapping someone in cotton wool won't necessarily further their learning, it won't give them an opportunity to work creatively, that what you need to be creative has an element that can feel uncomfortable. I think it's ultimately a caring act, if what you want to do is broaden somebody's horizons. It might not feel that way whilst you're transitioning through the learning process and having your worldviews shifted. How do we navigate that when the relationship is potentially one of provider [staf] and customer [student]? I feel that a lot of the graft of learning requires that discomfort.

River: Some of the most valuable learning happens from positions of discomfort. In terms of my own creative practice, often it's my discomfort, it's the things that I struggle with that end up becoming the fuel or the drive for creative expression.

I've come to understand over time that that discomfort is incredibly valuable, whereas many students may be entering the institution and don't have any kind of value for that, or appreciation for what might come of being uncomfortable. And, therefore, pushing back immediately to any sense of discomfort within an institution, you know, like *I'm paying for this, and I don't expect to be unhappy or uncomfortable or in this space.* What work is being done to explain the importance of safe discomfort in educational settings?

Sarah C: Tere are also tensions around it—when do you [invite discomfort]? When don't you do it?

Sarah D: It's a similar balance when you're teaching as well, that people need to be uncomfortable, they need to embrace some level of ambiguity, they need to know that they don't know. You need to take someone to a place where they know that they don't know the answer, for them to want to learn what the answer is, but that's really challenging. Particularly when you've got quite big classes or you're not teaching them for very long, and half the student population are managing mental health issues (Abrams, 2022), it's this really difcult thing to navigate.

Halberstam (2017) discusses the *politics of discomfort* in their article *Trigger Happy,* analysing the current *trigger warning*, and censorship debate within academia. Halberstam (2017) also draws attention to overly *paternalistic* approaches to education that shield students, their ability to critically analyse and attempt to understand their own reactions of shock or discomfort. Tey poignantly ask what efect this may have when a generation of students would prefer to opt for censorship in favour of safety, when they participate in a world outside of universities—what other liberties would an individual surrender in order to avoid experiences of discomfort?

Te distinction between discomfort and harm, and discomfort and safety here is crucial, and the question of care again becomes so pertinent. Care-ful educational environments may provide the social conditions of creative, transformational learning. Tere is, of course, a responsibility of the institution and the staf to ensure that students are safe and wellresourced enough, to provide certainty of infrastructure, and (ideally) genuine concern for their mental and physical well-being and intellectual development. However, that is not to say that care always feels pleasurable, or the experience will always be comfortable. In fact, it may be that there is something amiss if the learning experience is without discomfort. As stated by bell hooks, in Teaching to Transgress:

In reconceptualising engaged pedagogy I had to realise our purpose here isn't really to feel good. Maybe we will enjoy certain classes, but it will usually be difcult. We have to learn how to appreciate difculty too, as a take in intellectual development. Or accept that cosy, good, feeling may at times block the possibility of giving students space to feel that there is integrity to be found in grappling with difcult material. Not every moment in the classroom will bring immediate pleasure, but that doesn't preclude the possibility of joy. Nor does it deny the reality that learning can be painful. And sometimes it's necessary to remind students and colleagues that pain and painful situations don't necessarily translate into harm. We make that fundamental mistake all the time. Not all pain is harm, and not all pleasure is good. (hooks, 1992, p. 154)

## **Care: The Institution, and the Individual**

In this fnal section we return to the positioning of care within the institution. Our discussion centres on whether caring individuals can be enough. We raised the issue of responsibility and duty of care, and what forms it takes between staf, between staf and students, and between staf and the institution. We circled around the question of whether an institution can care. Our conclusions reinforce the framing of care as a political act.

Sarah D: We were talking about co-counselling, and it made me think of the adult-to-adult communication. Universities are traditionally paternalistic organisations. Tat has changed. It is in tension with needing to sell their services, so it's not moved into an adult-to-adult relationship, because that takes a lot of emotional maturity. It requires a lot of support for educators to communicate in those ways… It requires a real rewriting of the institution. So maybe some of what we're talking about is actually the need for a diferent kind of conceptualisation of the relationship between universities and students.

Can you have adult-to-adult relationships between educators and students if you don't have an adult-to-adult relationship between an educator and their head of department, or an educator and their vice-chancellor? Do we just need a real shift? Do you think the problem is that universities are individualising the idea of care when it can't be? Or is that a distraction?

Sarah C: When thinking about that responsibility of care, the climate crisis comes to mind. If that's pushed down to an individual level, and it's [about] your recycling, then it removes the responsibility for big business and government and regulation to make the changes. Tere's something about, *you're responsible for your own welfare. You need to fnd the hotline and do some yoga on the weekend, and then your unbearable workload will be fne*. If there's a problem around care, does it require an individualised response, which is *get counselling*, or does it need a collective response? Maybe there's something wrong with how it's being run?

River: I would agree with what you've said. My thinking was that individualising care just seems like an implausible option to me. It's putting not just caring on the shoulders of individual students… but also putting the responsibility on the personal/tutor relationship, where it feels like another kind of individual burden of responsibility of care. I would worry about that outcome.

It makes me feel like these are responses to the aftermath of systemic problems, [triggering] the need for care and providing for someone when they're in a state of distress, rather than creating the conditions under which the distress is less likely to occur. So, in that sense, I feel like it's returning [the responsibility] too much to the individual, rather than the structure.

Tere must be a way of creating an educational system where you don't leave people feeling so depleted or dispossessed or isolated. It is the model that creates it. Tere are very caring people within academia, there are incredibly caring people. And the issue isn't with those people… I feel like the environment, the conditions, are such that they are not cultivating care, or a feeling of value.

When you were talking about individualising care, it made me think about decentralising care and [moving away from] the expectations of either a family unit, or just a single student-staf dynamic as provider of support.

Donna Haraway said, 'make kin not babies', and Sophie Lewis wrote about the abolition of the family unit. Tese things are not destructive acts towards our current relationships… but expectations of care exponentially extended. Inversely, that actually means that your personal sense of responsibility towards care, to any given person, is actually diminished … It's also something I think about because as a Queer person, I don't have expectations of a family unit in my life. I don't have that expectation to biologically reproduce. If I was to be a parent, it's likely in the context of being a foster parent. It means that my whole life… where I fnd that intimacy, or that tenderness, or that expectation that someone will care for me, is not formed through the idea of the family unit. It's always been a much wider sense of community, and I've always been very focussed on friendship, and really tried to maintain my friendships. As I get older, my friends are going to be sustaining me.

Our discussion about care and community-building in the university also incorporated the importance of *holding space* for creativity. Sarah C and Sarah D spoke about their roles as providers of care and how their programmes support others in their own creativity.

Sarah C: I was also thinking about Tronto (1993) [writing about] being responsive to care, 'care-receiving' (p. 107), and that can be incredibly diffcult. It's not reciprocity, it's not about *you've done this for me, so I'll do this for you*. It's just taking it, just receiving care. Trough [programmes like] the Exeter Education Incubator, and what we try to do with Arts and Culture, these are spaces where you are receiving care. Somebody cares, someone's listening, someone's paying attention, someone values what you need. We're creating space for that, and—to my mind—that can be very restorative.

Sarah D: Being part of the CF process has reinforced some of my own sense of what care can look like in an organisation. It includes things like smooth admin processes. It sounds stupid, but I think it's so powerful, having a thought-through, smooth process where it's like, *I've been on this journey before with others. Tis is a guide. It might be diferent, it might not look like this for you, but here are some things to help you in this process.*

Tis applies to teaching too.  So, they're there, they're holding space, but they're also responding to that actual person going through that actual discomfort in its particularity at that time.

But then you want that care and creativity—connected again, through that educator—being resourced. I guess I see care as a resource, [so that] those educators are resourced enough to have bandwidth to be able to creatively respond to changes, to be future making in their educational practice. So, they're not just *doing more, doing it faster*, that's where the complete exhaustion comes from. Te article on 'pedagogic frailty' (Kinchin et al., 2016) was written nearly ten years ago. Tey were saying there's such pedagogic frailty in universities; it's such a stressed system that any small thing is going to see it fall apart. Well, Covid was not a small thing, and for the most part, education didn't fall apart. But it didn't fall apart because of all of that efort and energy and adrenaline that everybody gave it. But we're now at this point, *where do we go?* because people don't have any more to give. Now what do we do?

Joan Tronto (2010) has written that for an institution to care there must be a focus on politics—dialogue about relations of power; particularity and plurality—an attentiveness to human activity as particular and an openness to other possible ways of doing things; and fnally, purpose awareness and discussion of the end of care. Tis framework provides us with possible points of leverage for change in the face of the tensions we discuss. Institutions don't—can't, perhaps—care, but we can create and maintain institutions with systems, roles, and relationships which address these elements. As we acknowledged in our discussions this would create ruptures in the current institution (Fig. 11.1).

**Fig. 11.1** Image credit: River Jean Nash, 2022. 'Bumper Sticker'. Funded by Arts & Culture, Exeter University

## **Conclusion**

In our discussions we have refected on the forms of resistance that are both inevitably a creative as well as a caring act, the types of caring that in their non-traditional trajectory are creative and resistant, and how creativity and the arts are able to contribute toward ruptions in educational practice as proponents of risk, failure, unknowing, and discomfort.

If the desire is to build care-ful, ethical education futures, there must be institutional recognition that the foundations are collective and collaborative. As we have discussed, institutional barriers are built on individualised, anodyne, and marginalised framings of care, and an expectation of gratis goodwill on the part of those providing informal care for their colleagues and students. In addition, teaching risks becoming toothless as discomfort and vulnerability are viewed as undesirables, and the edges of the learning process are smoothed away to generate a frictionless consumer experience. In this space, care becomes a political act through the resistance and challenge it presents to the status quo.

Our discussions led us to conclude that care has both an incremental and radical capacity for ruptures. Care as radical is an idea that originates in the feminist Black rights movement, as Audre Lorde declared in *A Burst of Light*, 'caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is selfpreservation, and that is an act of political warfare' (2017, p. 95). In economic and political systems that centre human dynamics in relation to free market economics, therefore, values of accumulation and productivity over personal and collective well-being, we see care, when centred in the dynamics of existence, as *always* the radical alternative. A fundamental change can occur within any individual educator or student when they choose to morally and ethically centre care. Incrementally, care can cause a radical efect in exactly the same way the neo-liberalist policy changes have transformed education. Care, decolonial thinking, and posthuman thought has the potential to make future educational environments as unrecognisable to the academics of tomorrow, as neoliberalism has made the educational environment unrecognisable to the academics of today.

Care, learning, and creativity are not synonymous. For us though, in undertaking this CF, working through their symbiosis has been incredibly productive and indeed nourishing. Te time we made, despite our busy working lives, during the CF for open-ended conversations itself felt like an enactment of the themes we were exploring. Our discussions have drawn our attention to learning as embodied, relational, and always political. Discussing labour, exploitation, and organisations as part of these same conversations proved a really important context for exploring hopes and strategies for how we work to bring about a better future.

## **References**

Robinson, K. (2001). *Out of our minds: Learning to be creative*. Capstone.

**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.

# **12**

## **Steps Toward a Decolonial Feminist Ecology**

**Katie Natanel**  *with* **Hamza Albakri, Asha Ali, and Arthur Dart**

## **Introduction**

View from Stoke Hill Farm, Exeter (UK); 11 September 2021

K. Natanel (\*)

Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Tis chapter is as much an imagining of *what we might do, who we might be* and *where we will have gone* as it is a story of *what we have done*. It is a tale of aspiration and interruption, of deliberate design and letting go, of walking and wondering.

We invite you to walk with us—to meet students and storytellers, organisers and educators, dreamers, activists and cherished friends. Te pages before you recount a journey with creative pedagogies, where ruptures make possible emergent educational futures—new ways of teaching and learning, connecting to each other and the land, and working toward material and epistemic decolonisation. We begin with a module designed to centre project-based learning, whose intended trajectory was upended by a period of industrial action. While strikes seemingly threatened to limit our experience of the course, we became open to meaningful spaces of education that enable us to reach toward an ecological politics and practice. By taking a broader view of our roots and routes, we understand this ruption to be an important step toward developing a decolonial feminist ecology, grown locally in the wild/er spaces just beyond our door. Te story in this chapter tentatively conceptualises our practice, though it can only be an attempt to trace the contours of something not yet fully formed.

As the principal author, I (Katie) write from the position of having structured our teaching and learning, as well as possessing embodied knowledge of the wooded trails that became spaces of education and community. I know the paths, trees, plants and hillsides not through reading or research, but from regularly moving upon and within the landscape. With each step and season I have gained an understanding of this natural world—I know which creek beds hold the most delicate wild garlic, just as I know where to fnd the wood anemone that sparkle like starlight in the dusk of early spring. I learned this through sense and feeling, by opening to wonder and discovery through touch, sight, smell, sound and taste. By being on and of the land. Yet I also write as a student in the space/time of a collective pedagogical and activist practice. Troughout this chapter the narrative voice moves between 'I' and 'we', refecting a shared journey. With Asha, Arthur, Hamza and others, I am becoming attuned to how sharing paths, stories, practices and knowledge in less structured and more unpredictable ways opens us to educational futures that nourish political organising. Tese activities feed and sustain resistance, while ofering moments of rest, joy and solace.

In the pages that follow, we build on a practice begun in the spring of 2022 with students on the course 'Gender, Sexuality and Violence in Palestine/Israel' at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter. We glean lessons from a single springtime walk, introduced as a break from the difculty and weight of study—a rupture in classroombased teaching and learning—that unexpectedly drew us deeper into grappling with the meaning and materiality of colonialism. By taking steps beyond the classroom, we are compelled to consider how our feet fall upon land marked by colonial violence and to ask what decolonisation means in a context where coloniality is obscured.

Trough bodies and minds in motion, colonialism, decolonisation and anticolonial struggle emerge as terms within a lexicon of transformation—grounded in land-based praxis and connective modes of study. By colonialism we mean a history of interaction and model of political organisation characterised by practices of invasion, settlement, extraction, exploitation, domination and elimination of territory and indigenous populations (Young, 2001; Wolfe, 2006; Mignolo, 2007). We understand Israel to be a contemporary settler colonial regime that violently exerts power over historic Palestine and Palestinians, just as we acknowledge and experience Britain as a state of ongoing coloniality. British colonialism cannot be relegated to a historical past limited to the sixteenth–nineteenth centuries. Rather, the structures and privileges of colonialism endure through present-day politico-territorial control (e.g., over the north of Ireland), as well as through narratives of Western modernity and nostalgia for empire (Mignolo, 2017). Decolonisation responds by recognising and taking action to redress the powerful ways that colonialism shapes the past and present through territorial, political, social, economic and cultural conquest. At the same time, this practice and knowledge project entails a commitment to new futures—decolonisation refuses colonial structures and logics to build anew based on principles of justice and self-determination (Lugones, 2010; Mignolo, 2017; Vergès, 2021). Te work of anticolonial struggle is a shaking of of domination: '[…] rebuilding and reexisting under new conditions and modes of existences that are your own' (Mignolo, 2017, p. 44).

Stepping forward, this chapter frst follows the imprints of those who have gone before us, whether in redefning study or engaging with the natural world as a space of learning, community and resistance. We (readers and writers, together) will walk with scholars, activists and organisers whose work increases access to the land and raises questions of power, privilege and violence. Following these guides, the chapter then traces *landlines* across the space/time of teaching and learning as an embodied relational practice. Here we meet students whose paths cross continents and communities, converging momentarily in Devon. By moving together through local woods, lanes and felds, we begin connecting the (present-day) coloniality of Britain with legacies and trajectories of colonialism in other contexts—in ways that insist on accountability and action.

Rather than arriving at a destination, the chapter closes mid-journey to refect on how these imprints and landlines might lead us toward a politics and practice of decolonial feminist ecology. Drawing from their work on 'planetary humanism' and 'planetarity', we turn to walk with Paul Gilroy (2000, 2004) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2013, 2015), who suggest that our relationship to the environment and the more-than-human necessarily connects us to each another. With them, we consider how *ecology* is not purely the management of systems—in which humans are embedded—with the aim of creating and sustaining balance, but the practice of cultivating and nourishing relationships. Moving, breathing and sensing open us to new forms of encounter and collectivity, which ground us in a broader ethic of care and sense of shared struggle.

## **Imprints and Footsteps**

Message posted to our virtual learning environment in preparation for a 'rest and restoration' session

I did not know what to expect as I laced up my boots, but really that was partly the point. A reminder sent to the class the day before our planned walk revealed both my excitement and my determination to let things unfold—to see where the path would take us, literally and metaphorically. In previous writing (Chappell et al., 2021; Natanel et al., 2023), I detail how the course 'Gender, Sexuality and Violence in Palestine/Israel' was meticulously re-designed in 2018 with a colleague from the UoE School of Education, Professor Kerry Chappell. During the frst year of teaching in 2017, I had the almost painful sense that a lecture-style format failed to do justice to the complexities of violence, resistance and everyday life in Palestine/Israel, no matter how committed we might be to dialogue following the taught portion of a given week. A radical redesign pivoted the course to emphasise project-based learning, shifting students' creative work from a form of assessment to the driver for study.

In the years since our redesign, I have grown to understand *study* in the sense proposed by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013, p. 110):

…[S]tudy is what you do with other people. It's talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, sufering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. Te notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. Te point of calling it 'study' is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present. Tese activities aren't ennobled by the fact that we now say, "oh, if you did these things in a certain way, you could be said to have been studying." To do these things is to be involved in a kind of common intellectual practice. What's important is to recognize that that has been the case – because that recognition allows you to access a whole, varied, alternative history of thought.

Harney and Moten alert us to the creativity, playfulness and relationality that underpin knowledge as an already living practice—it ceases to be a static object that can be held or attained. Instead, knowledge is *what we do* and *who we become* with one another. It is active, unfolding and unfnished. It exceeds and even refuses the confnes of an institution, becoming more than the structure can hope to capture and deliver.

Yet at this point in my journey as an educator, organiser and researcher, it is the fnal sentence of this passage that strikes me most. If we approach study in the manner suggested by Harney and Moten, we become sensitive to a history of thought previously denied recognition as *knowledge*. Tose who guard the gates of theory and epistemology (see Million, 2009) are knocked of balance, ambushed by a cadre of dreamers, workers, musicians, healers, artists and organisers whose ways of knowing *have always been here*. In a (re)new(ed) practice of study, we are opened to being, sensing, feeling, moving and doing as inherently intellectual activities—parts of a larger and longer story made un-known and unknowable through the institutionalisation of heteropatriarchal white supremacy (Smith, 2020).

Tis story reveals that there is nothing radically new about the realisation that a walk in the woods might usher in a deeper, more meaningful mode of study. Te notion that our class could break from the active and difcult—work of learning only makes sense if education is framed as something to be done in specifc times and places, for particular reasons. Tis assumes that teaching and learning are practices that we can turn on and of at will. Instead, if study is a speculative practice that we undertake in pursuit of understanding, growth, pleasure and community, then walking must surely be a conduit to new meanings and modes of action.

## **A Braided Path**

On that bright March day, we followed the footsteps of those who studied and walked before us—not only in Devon and the UK, but also in Palestine and beyond. Our journey intertwines with paths traced across distant places and struggles, honouring how ways of knowing, being and doing might meet and be woven together in a 'braid of stories' that enables us to imagine diferent relationships with each other and the world (Kimmerer, 2020, p. x).

I felt my way with the session in its frst incarnation, attending to intuition and responding to my own need for breath, space, refection and motion. At the same time, I drew upon existing actions and initiatives lived experiences and collective imaginings—that reassured me of the value in taking our class out of its institutional setting. I reached not for peer-reviewed articles or monographs published by university presses, but to memories, conversations and my own practices of movement in my efort to follow an active 'alternative history of thought' (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 110). Tis history is largely absent from scholarship on project-based learning, though the intersection of walking with decolonial pedagogies is an area of increasing academic exploration (see, e.g., Wane et al., 2004; Butterwick & Selman, 2012; Batacharya & Wong, 2018; and WalkingLab, 2019). We must search elsewhere, whether due to epistemic omission or the deliberate design of practitioners who exercise their 'right to opacity' (Glissant, 1990/1997, pp. 189–194)—the right to not be grasped.

Our path leads immediately to Palestine—the focus of our course and the primary inspiration for moving our bodies toward the land. Years before designing the module and just prior to feldwork for my doctoral research, I learned about the work of Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian lawyer, human rights activist and writer who published *Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape*. I eagerly read his account of walks that took place between 1978 and 2007 (Shehadeh, 2008, p. xii), seeing through his eyes how the landscape has been altered by politics and violence. Here I mean expulsion from villages; annexation of territory; construction of settlements; destruction of homes; devastation of arable land and crops; killing of livestock; prohibition of harvesting wild plants; and control of water. Yet Shehadeh (2008, p. 206) also shows readers the beauty of Palestine and Palestinian land, richly layering his stories of legal, territorial and material harm. For example, he writes of walking with a friend (Louisa) who had recently moved from Edinburgh:

We arrived at the spring of A'yn El Lwza (Spring of the Almond Tree), the abandoned *qasr* a little distance away. Across from us was the beautiful rock that early in the year is studded with cyclamens. Te spring itself still provided much-needed water for the focks of goats and sheep that grazed in these hills. Te water had made a small, murky-green pond in which we heard frogs and saw thick growths of spearmint and the common reed. But the meandering path nearby was almost totally obliterated, blocked by the large boulders that had fallen from the terrace when this illegal road had been built in 1992. A beautiful spot that had remained unchanged for centuries had been destroyed with no one raising a storm. I sat down on the dislocated rocks, trying to recall how it used to be, silently lamenting the destruction of our once-beautiful valley. I wondered how it must all seem to a newcomer like Louisa, who had not known this valley before its ruin.

Shehadeh insists that we see, hear and feel the spring, the rocks, the plants and the animals—that we begin to understand the delicate relationships that connect them and the world they sustain. Tat we understand what has been lost and what is at stake.

During feldwork in 2010–2011, I was based not in the occupied West Bank where Shehadeh's feet meet the trail, but in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem where my Jewish Israeli research participants resided. I felt myself very much inside Israel, though I know it to be historic Palestine. A quality or texture emerged through language, social interaction and relationship to the land that confrmed my location *elsewhere* (if the abundant Israeli fags were not enough to tell me so). Yet on occasion, I would feel myself in Palestine. Tis was not always a matter of crossing material borders, though indeed checkpoints, barriers and soldiers marked division in political, social, economic and spatial terms. Rather, the feeling of *being in Palestine* materialised through language, symbols, cuisine, behaviour, architecture and landscape (Natanel, 2016). Palestine was always already present, despite the concerted eforts of the Israeli state and society to demolish, erase, obscure and assimilate. Within the borders of Israel and its largest cities, I increasingly found that I could move through an alternative or parallel geography once attuned to people, places, encounters and sensations.

Tis ability to travel—to exercise my right to movement—enabled me to join a walking excursion near Ramallah after giving a talk at Birzeit University in the occupied West Bank. We gathered at the trailhead just after dawn with rucksacks, boots and sustenance, listening to the volunteer leaders as they described our route. Once walking, it came as a surprise to me that our pace was unhurried—due in part to the children among us, but also openly declared as an intention. Our aim was not to clock miles, but *to be on the land* in the fullest sense. We were encouraged to share stories, to stop frequently for plants and fowers, to help each other pass more difcult sections of terrain. In this way, I learned about wild herbs, terraced farming, signs of passing seasons, ephemeral sources of water and the stunning scale of abundance. So too I remained aware of how settler colonial violence marks land and lives, as if journeying again with Raja Shehadeh. Walkers' stories revealed diferent degrees of constrained mobility, with some able to cross (with permits) between Jerusalem and the West Bank, while others were confned to the immediate locality. I was gently asked not to photograph the Israeli settlements that appeared on distant hilltops in blocky formation, oozing across the landscape in a way that underlined their permanence. If someone were monitoring us from a distance—settler or soldier—the act of photography could have serious repercussions.

Tus, while our walk was certainly for pleasure, health and community, it was also an insistence on presence: *"We are here, together."* Moving through the land was a means of teaching, learning, being and doing study—rendered necessarily political given the struggle for liberation from settler colonisation. However, we did not need to name or mark our walk as *political* for it to already hold this 'incessant and irreversible' quality (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 110). We could rest and share sage tea under the cover of olive trees, knowing that the nourishment sustained much more than contented, weary walkers.

\* \* \* Stepping onto the wooded path in Devon with students years later, I brought this embodied knowledge of Palestine with me. We carried it, together, as we walked. Yet we also found inspiration in other initiatives, experiences and imaginings, braiding these modes of activity together with each footfall on the dampened earth. When frst designing the session, I drew on the wisdom and vision shared by Sabah Choudrey, a UK-based trans youth worker and psychotherapist whose love of walking and wild spaces I frst encountered on Instagram. Sabah visited Exeter in January 2022 to launch their book *Supporting Trans People of Colour: How to Make Your Practice Inclusive* (2022) and generously agreed to facilitate a day-long workshop for LGBTQ+ young people (Exeter City of Literature, 2022). Based on their experiences of building and supporting community in part through nature, Sabah designed a day of activity encapsulated by words such as 'opening', 'walking', 'exploring', 'documenting' and 'sharing'. Tey attended to difering degrees and modes of mobility as best they could given the terrain, plotting routes that provided access to wild spaces on foot and by wheelchair. For all, the day's practice included breathwork, writing, reading, feeling, sensing, moving, eating and drinking—studying and nourishing. I watched as young people arrived with nervous excitement, just as I registered their reluctance to leave at the end of the day with windswept hair and muddied boots or wheels. I heard participants describe what they had found on the path: greenery, community and new horizons of possibility.

Tis experience of land-based praxis—communal, intellectual and political—became woven with the vision of other organisers and initiatives whose work is made knowable through social media. Self-expression and representation on platforms like Instagram enabled us to learn from groups such as Land in Our Names (LION), a grassroots collective that pursues reparations for Black people and people of colour in Britain. LION connects racial justice with food, land and climate justice, confronting colonialism through increasing access to the land and challenging its concentration—as property—within the hands of the privileged (white) few. As a collective they build capacity and networks among growers, developing 'ecologies of care' that enable healing and promote land stewardship (Land in our Names, 2023). LION are clear that their work is *by* and *for* Black land workers and land workers of colour—like the space held for queer youth by Sabah Choudrey, these initiatives are not about integration within existing structures of privilege and violence. As Sara Ahmed (2012) and Sarah Keenan (2013) remind us, representation and participation do not mean radical transformation. Instead, LION and Choudrey insist on access to rights, knowledge, community, security, justice and land—existence—on their own terms. Shared by other UK-based groups such as Gendered Intelligence, Queer Botany and Sole Sisters, this work demands that we pay attention to the histories, conditions and trajectories of heteropatriarchal coloniality, and at the same time refuse them as totalising.

To our dissent line (Smith, 2012, p. 13) we also added the visions and actions of organisers based in the United States, taking inspiration from Rising Hearts, Pattie Gonia, Brave Trails, Te Black Foxes, Brooklyn Bell and Alison Mariella Désir. Tese athletes, artists, activists and community organisers diferently confront the logics and efects of American settler colonialism, particularly in shaping access to the outdoors and wild spaces. Te colonial past and present are often engaged directly but sometimes obliquely, signalling the development of a politics-inbecoming. As dialogue within and across these groups makes clear, resistance is imperfect—it is a process of striving, responding to criticism, confronting limitations, adapting, renewing and resurging. Te work of these organisers was again made knowable through social media, where following an account on Instagram or Twitter/X revealed a universe of aligned activities and imaginations of the future. Whether under the name of an individual or grounded in a collective, these initiatives point toward an intersectional politics capable of transforming social norms, political policy and even global circuits of power.

Tis critical labour demonstrates how racial, gender and environmental justice are inextricably entwined—one piece cannot move without the others. Yet so too this is collective work of joy and pleasure, from the feeling of recognition and community that comes with staging a Pride March in Yosemite National Park to the healing that might emerge when we ask "Whose woods *are* these?" and move through them together. It is strengthened through rest and recovery, as much as through activity. Here we take lessons from Te Nap Ministry, whose mantra 'Rest is Resistance' initially gave us permission to pause—to breathe and to be, to step back from institutionalised teaching and learning (Hersey, 2022a). To reach for something deeper, something more. As Tricia Hersey (2022b), founder of Te Nap Ministry, reminds us:

Tis is about more than naps. It is not about fufy pillows, expensive sheets, silk sleep masks or any other external, frivolous, consumerist gimmick. It is about a deep unraveling from white supremacy and capitalism. Tese two systems are violent and evil. History tells us this and our present living shows this. Rest pushes back and disrupts a system that views human bodies as a tool for production and labor. It is a counter narrative. We know that we are not machines. We are divine.

Ten we come full circle in our story, following braided paths that reveal study to be a layered practice of *doing*—where we meet despite structures that seek to divide and exploit, where time is recursive, folded and polyrhythmic rather than linear (Rifkin, 2017; Allan, 2018). From this place we position walking as an invitation to teach and learn in decolonial ways, where an ecology emerges that connects us to each other, to the land and to a shared struggle for justice.

## **Landlines**

Stag sculpture at Stoke Hill Farm; 4 March 2022

"I want you to close your eyes. Feel the ground beneath your feet, the air moving softly across your face. Listen to the sounds around us – what do you hear? Register all of this. Hold it gently and let it go*.*

We will breathe together, present with each other and on this hillside. Tree times, in and out*.*

Breathe in one … and out one*.*

Breathe in two … and out two*.*

Breathe in three … and out three*.*

Be still. Feel. Open your eyes when you are ready*.*

We are here."

To begin the walk I led our class in grounding, an exercise that would be integrated within all teaching sessions the following year. In March 2022 breathwork enabled us to become present in our journey, to register our intention and to feel ourselves in place—on the land within a wild/er space just beyond the university campus. It enabled us to let go and take up the invitation that walking extends: to think, move and be diferently. Grounding set the tone for sensation and intimacy to be the basis of our experience, rather than ways of knowing whose epistemic value must be fercely fought for within academia and Higher Education. For two hours, embodied and felt knowledge could be the centre.

Arriving later to the metal stag at Stoke Hill Farm, we were fush with energy, stories and ideas—new knowledge that emerged as we marvelled at the diversity of green and growing things, laughing at our failed attempts to avoid the deep, sticky mud. As we walked, we talked across Devon, Cornwall, London, Palestine, Kashmir, Dubai, Germany, Wisconsin and Colorado, connecting our lives and learning through the ground beneath our feet. Landlines appeared with each step and word, materialising in my mind's eye as shimmering, silvery threads that spread behind and before us—a snail's trail of memory and imagination. Tese lines followed the contours of our stories and the topography of the land, creating a new kind of map that we sensed might be ephemeral but hoped would be lasting.

Te activity of drawing landlines made us breathless and happy, even as it opened uncertainties and old hurts—such is the promise of study, as Harney and Moten (2013) propose it. Te substance of our exchanges and observations was not written down that day; we did not record it as 'data' to be kept for analysis. Instead, our teaching and learning was stored within hearts, leaving us with a feeling of what had transpired. An imprint lovingly placed alongside those shared above.

As we paused beneath an oak tree to listen to poetry, I understood that walking was much more than the break that I had planned for our class. It was an opportunity to rest and restore, but it was also a means to resist and connect. We resisted the neoliberal capitalist drive for individualised productivity by insisting that pleasure had a place within our module, that a week framed by an invitation to wear suitable shoes and pack refreshments was as valuable as assigned readings or an assessment deadline. Following the route along lanes, through woods and across felds as a nascent public, we accessed land in ways that defed notions of private property and ownership. We resisted heteropatriarchal white supremacy by tracing landlines that made us aware of how race, gender, class, ability, generation, religion and location shape our everyday lives and experiences of nature. By sharing stories and poetry as we moved through the countryside, we named the forces that constrain opportunities and foreclose futures. Walking was an exercise of mobility that provided a language to describe often violent inequalities; at the same, it became a practice of equity as we claimed the right for all to roam.

On that day, we planted the seeds of a decolonial feminist ecology—a way of relating to each other and the land that attends to power and violence, but at the same time enables us to rehearse *the world that might be.* Te promise of *what we might do* and *who we might be* shone brightly on the horizon, casting a golden glow on the rolling green hillsides that flled our feld of view. Our study was diagnostic and world-making. Knowing was doing and being, together.

## **Ruptures**

Yet as the introduction to this chapter foreshadows, ours is a story of interruption—of hopes upended and beginnings unfnished. We could not know it then, but these tentative steps toward a decolonial feminist ecology would meet obstacles that meant suspending our practice in the spring of 2023. Intrigued—and admittedly awed—by the lines that had unexpectedly emerged, I intended to deepen and extend our walking sessions with a new cohort of students. Tis time, our module would include a week on *land* that was taught not in a university classroom, but in the wild/er spaces previously explored. We would explicitly ask what connects coloniality in Palestine with other contexts, struggles and communities in hopes that our landlines would gain thickness and permanence. Tis experience would come early in the course, enabling us to regularly return to walking as a lens to engage and understand subsequent topics, from embodiment and control to emotion and futurity. Our presence on, in and with the land would not be a break but the driver of our study—the centre to and from which all landlines fowed.

Tis imagining of *what we might do* was ruptured by a period of industrial action that lasted the duration of our academic term. Instead of exploring and connecting in expansive new ways, we focused on consolidating—making the most of the limited time in which we could meet for teaching and learning. My energy went toward recuperating rather than speculating, trying to enable the module to do the powerful work that I knew it capable of. Gone was the session on land and with it the invitation to develop walking as a means of exploring a decolonial feminist ecology. We grieved these changes to structure and content, just as we mourned lost opportunities to simply think and be together. We focused on *what we could do*, given the conditions and the stakes.

But still something powerful happened in those weeks, a kind of teaching and learning that attuned us more sharply to the work of decolonisation and its relation to ecology. Despite the cancellation of classes, students continued to show up—on picket lines and in teach outs, rather than university classrooms. We danced *dabkeh* joyously on the campus boundary, following the careful steps and tuition of Hamza Albakri. A doctoral researcher, musician and theatre practitioner from Al-Khalil (Hebron) Palestine, Hamza taught us how to place our feet and fnd rhythm through the knowledge that *dabkeh* mimics the act of planting on Palestinian land. A hand extends downward to release a seed, a jump moves us forward to repeat and create a row—a feld is sown through collectivity and care, through cultivating and sharing knowledge. Our synchronised steps momentarily connected lands and peoples, dissolving the distinctions between here and there, memory and futurity, even as more immediately they brought us pleasure and release. Days later, Arthur Dart and Asha Ali invited us to walk from that same site—our picket line dance foor—into the wooded valley below. Tey led us over a turnstile and down a thin, muddy path to reach the narrow brook that runs the length of Hoopern Valley, a wild/ er space previously unknown to me despite six years of residing in the city. With the university campus barely visible through dense tangles of branches, Arthur and Asha told the valley's story as a place of community and refuge—for students and for travellers. Traces of the previous summer's encampment could be seen nestled among the wild garlic: the stream had been widened and deepened to provide a basin for washing; a pallet reading "Want change, not change" spoke to a sense of politics; the stump of a felled tree bore signs of use for cutting and cooking. Our guides—walkers, researchers, organisers and teachers from Devon and Somalia—encouraged us to imagine and claim this land as 'the commons': a resource belonging to all (see Right to Roam, n.d.). And for which we all must care.

Trough an experience of rupture we continued to move toward something, tracing new lines that radiated not from the limits of the university or its classrooms but from the land itself. Tick, silvery threads extended from our relationship/s to the natural world and to each other. Tese landlines did not draw us back to institutionalised teaching and learning; they were not the product of redesigning course content to better capture a feeling that threatened to slip away. Rather, these were lines of resistance, connection, rest, care, pleasure and transformation *in action* meaningful and powerful in their/our defance of structures, boundaries and categorisation. Landlines mapped a mode of study that grew in the following months to include foraging, cooking, singing, playing and giving; so too these lines were drawn through grieving, supporting and healing. Our 'various modes of activity' enabled us to rehearse the world that we might build together, 'walking around with other people, working, dancing, sufering' (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 110)—while refusing to be contained.

## **Whose Woods Are These?**

Stoke Hill Farm, 15 October 2022

A strip of eucalyptus bark. Tangled hair. Flushed cheeks. Steady heartbeat. Calm.

I opened the door to my ofce after our walk in March 2022 unable to take in all of what we had experienced, but sure of its signifcance. Something had happened—we had been somewhere, done something. We had moved and been moved. We returned changed.

Our landlines shimmered in the woods, lanes and felds where feet and words had taken us. Tey called us back, up and out of the university, with the promise of new knowledge—of breath, adventure, storytelling and connection. Yet they also traced through our campus, spilling from the ridge into land cultivated as *property*. Distant views and wooden gates disappeared at the university fence line, where a sign claimed private ownership and warned against trespass. And still our lines glimmered—down paved paths, beneath towering buildings and past tags naming trees by genus and species.  For some reason, I opted not to bring back a sign of the wild/er spaces in which we had journeyed. Instead, I collected this shaggy remnant—an indicator of campus biodiversity curated in the 'excellent mix … of original exotic [tree] species introduced in the middle of the 19th Century' (University of Exeter, n.d.). Native to Australia, growing in Devon and gathered during a course on Palestine, the eucalyptus conveyed a storied life—it spoke of colonialism layered across space and time. But it also told of study, walking, rest and resistance.

Perhaps this is the point to which we arrive: returning mid-journey to the places from which we departed, changed. Our landlines draw us out and in, gently insisting that we stop, listen, ask, share and feel. Tat we learn deeply of our connections to each other and the land/s we are not *on*, but *of*. Tis strikes me as an emergent kind of ecology, one potentially aligned with the ways of thinking and being made knowable by scholars like Paul Gilroy (2000, 2004) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2013, 2015) who argue that our felds of view, care and action must broaden in pursuit of the just world/s we might build. 'Planetary humanism' (Gilroy 2000, 2004) and 'planetarity' (Spivak 2013, 2015) alert us to the scale of our work, marking 'the limit to what we do' (Spivak 2013, p. 2). Tese frames suggest a kind of non-imperialising universalism that makes space for 'the geographical imaginations we bring to the planet become the very fabric, possibility and potential for progressive and humane (co)habitations of modernity' (Jazeel, 2011, pp. 83–84). Our landlines are world-making.

At the same time, a planetary awareness and imagination raises questions of alterity, attending to how otherness and abjection are produced, sustained and justifed. We are urged to be wary of 'one-worldism' and its capacity for violence (Jazeel, 2011, pp. 87–88), not least in determining who is known, who is know-ing and who is know-er (Kilomba, 2016)—what is thinkable, writeable, readable, sayable and doable. In becoming hegemonic or claiming the universal these frames threaten to erase and eliminate, aligning with the colonial knowledge whose logics we confront and refuse.

Our grounding and connectedness bring us back from this edge. Concerned with the efects of 'belonging and its multiple ecologies' on political communities and solidarities (Gilroy, 2000, pp. 2–3, 328), planetary humanism envisions a future in which 'race-thinking'—manifest in borders, identities and national cultures—is supplanted by deeper ethical and political bonds. If the planet is our horizon of possibility, humanism reminds us of the routes we walk and the stories we share. Our paths and histories are not universal; rather, they momentarily converge, brushing and overlapping in ways that permit experiences, sensations, memories, struggles, communities and visions to meet. In the space of a classroom, on a picket line, beside a brook, atop a hill—our landlines will lead us there.

A decolonial feminist ecology emerges from this confuence of energies. In developing this chapter, I began to doubt whether it needed to be written and, if so, whether I am the person to record it. It seems to me that a decolonial feminist ecology is a matter of *doing*—being, becoming, resisting and connecting in ways that will always be unfnished. A tension or ambivalence accompanies my attempt to capture it (imperfectly), as we sow our frst seeds in Devon. And yet, Paul Gilroy (2000, p. 335) reminds us as a matter of urgency: 'We need to look toward the future and to fnd political languages in which it can be discussed.'

Ten the steps traced here are indeed a rehearsal—study as a speculative practice that yields a grammar for the future. A decolonial feminist ecology is our way of talking about how our entanglement—the state and knowledge of being braided together—might move us toward a future in which care and justice underpin social organisation, political practice and economic policy. It begins to give breath and word to a way of life that does not seek balance, but acknowledges connection, fow, interdependency and mutual constitution. It is a language that attempts to describe how my future cannot be separated from yours or ours, and what is at stake in that relation. In 'Violence, Mourning, Politics' Judith Butler (2004, p. 22) writes,

When we lose some of these ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do. On one level, I think I have lost "you" only to discover that "I" have gone missing as well. At another level, perhaps what I have lost "in" you, that for which I have no ready vocabulary, is a relationality that is composed neither exclusively of myself nor you, but is to be conceived as *the tie* by which those terms are diferentiated and related.

A decolonial feminist ecology gently steps toward creating that vocabulary, recognising how our bonds extend to the land, the plants, the animals, the rocks and the spring of A'yn El Lwza—the world/s that together we sustain.

Our landlines reveal *what we might do* and *who we might be*, as much as a story of *what we have done* and *where we have gone.* But perhaps more importantly, they make clear *that which will have had to happen* for a decolonial feminist ecology to grow*—*'a performance of the future that hasn't yet happened but must' (Campt, 2017, p. 17). Tis is our emergent educational future. Trough ruptions and resistance, a decolonial feminist ecology becomes '[…] a creative, peopled re-creation' that requires us to ask 'How do we learn about each other? How do we do it with without harming each other…? How do we cross without taking over? With whom do we do this work?' (Lugones, 2010, pp. 754–755) and to answer with reference to a planetary horizon. Walking and dancing, we move toward a practice and politics rooted in shared struggle and an ethics of care; in pleasure and community; in accountability to each other and to the land that holds us.

## **References**

Ahmed, S. (2012). *On being included*. Duke University Press.

**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 IV**

**Changing Education**

# **13**

## **Inhabiting the Cracks: Accumulating Creative Ruptions to Change Education**

**Kerry Chappell, Chris Turner, and Heather Wren**  *with* **Sharon Witt, and Helen Clarke**

In Chap. 1, Chappell, with Turner and Wren, made a number of claims: that authors would show how ethical, care-ful educational futures might emerge through creative ruptions; that we would provide hope and show how to do education diferently; that we would provide direct educational responses as examples and tools; and that we would show how diferent authors create productive ruptions. Across Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, to 12 we ofer all these elements, but as an authoring team, we have walked a fne line between staying true to the implied practices of emergentist philosophies and post-qualitative methods, and the desire inherent in neo-liberally infuenced educational systems to provide an answer and to demonstrate efcacy and impact. By their very nature, posthuman, new materialist, decolonial and feminist thinking will not provide textbooks and guides on how to do education diferently, nor will they ofer visions of future education models. As exampled in

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K. Chappell (\*) • C. Turner • H. Wren

School of Education, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

this book, they will create new kinds of space and do so ethically; they will acknowledge the entanglements of researcher-teacher-learnerenvironment; they will ofer provocations and enact new ways of doing; and they will indicate likely trajectories. For some readers this may be frustrating, but engaging in these ideas and practices requires a fundamental change of approach to teaching, learning, research and relationships, and to the forms of quality judgement that we use in relation to these entangled elements. Tese shifts in thinking and practice can make it more complicated to put new ideas and practices into conversation with existing theories, policies and pedagogies but nonetheless, we argue that these actions need to be taken to gain the most from the new ideas.

To open the doors on these conversations from our editorial team's point of view, next we ofer a short reminder of the diferent approaches taken across the chapters. Whilst we know that the book can be read sequentially, journeying through ideas and practices which show how to create spaces for ruptions, to then ofer dialogues within these spaces and fnally to set a more activist tone through resistings, we will not here ofer thematic insights from each of the three sections. We choose instead to deal with bigger questions regarding what we have learned about how we handle creative ruptions and what they in themselves 'do'. We go on to demonstrate how the creative ruptions in this book respond to various wicked problems, and then end by ofering ways of thinking-being-doing to push matters forward. Tis includes considering how we can expand our emotional repertoires from anxiety to also include hope and courage, positioning the contribution of this book in relation with colleagues working in decolonisation and possibilities studies. As ever, these are the throughlines that have emerged for us, undoubtedly multi-dimensional, but there are many other ways that you can travel through this book and enter into new trajectories from it.

So, on to a brief reminder of the diferent approaches taken across the book. In Chap. 1, we introduced the key ideas of posthumanism, new materialism, decolonialism and feminism. We took a critical stance towards liberal humanism (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2016) and positioned posthumanism in education as entailing the fundamental de-centring of the human as the educational driver and the removal of the false binary between human and other-than-human1 (e.g., Braidotti, 2013). And, with this, we argued, comes consequences that shift us to an 'ethics of transformation' which entails enacting power and relationships diferently. We argued for New Materialism as ofering a renewed focus on the dynamics of materialisation involving corporeal life and material phenomena (Sencindiver, 2019); and also fore-fronted Barad's (2003) notion of 'intra-action' to ofer new considerations of the intertwined agencies of all kinds of others through an ethico-onto-epistemological positioning. We also opened up framings through decolonising theories and practices (e.g., Andreotti, 2011; Mignolo, 2007), which reveal colonialism, colonisation and coloniality (Pirbhai-Illich et al., 2022) in order to decolonise minds and bodies away from colonial ways of being, doing, knowing and valuing. In part, authors also draw in decolonial feminist ideas and practices which recognise how colonialism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism and racism interlock to produce and sustain violence and domination, and therefore refuse these structures and logics and commit to diferently structured futures (Lugones, 2010; Vergès, 2021/2019).

Bearing these in mind, we now go on to consider the six ways in which the editorial team have learned how to work with creative ruptions and what it is they do.

## **Working with Creative Ruptions**

How do the 11 chapters help us explain creative ruptions further? In Chap. 1, we laid the ground for authors to create these meaningful and productive creative ruptions—disturbances or commotions. We saw ruptions as a breaking or bursting open, a breach or rupture, importantly with more change to follow, rather than just an interruption. In terms of understanding the creative nature of these ruptions, the chapters reinforce and support the idea that creativity is both a powerful learning tool within education and also a means to change education from within. Creativity is understood as dispersed and dialogic (Chappell, Chap. 2), with diverse materials recognised as agentic (Crickmay and Welsh, Chap. 7), with a focus on questioning how creativity occurs rather than who owns it (Witt and Clarke, Chap. 6) and as grounded in relationality and connectivity (Katingima-Day, Chap. 9). Ben-Horin (Chap. 8) discusses the tensions of managing a portfolio of creative research and development projects while ensuring that ethical futures emerge responsively through the generative potential of creativity. Campbell, Dyer and Nash (Chap. 11) also alert us that marginality is a strong vantage point from which to critique the status quo and to drive change.

Many of the authors write from positions of marginalisation and we aim to fnd strength in this for creative change. Trough our readings of the chapters, we have gleaned six crucial insights into how we might work with creative ruptions in a way that balances care and risk (Fig. 13.1).

Firstly, we are strengthened by repeated examples of how to live with unpredictability and discomfort. Crickmay and Welsh (Chap. 7) show us how to pay attention to unforeseen possibilities in their posthuman reading of a co-creative music education practice, providing improvisation as a dialogic process through which to experience bodies, sounds and other materialities as generative of new teachings and learnings. Chave (Chap. 4) urges us to be ready for unexpected and unforeseen ways to address the ecological and climate threats through educational practice that pushes back against the colonizing constraints of the present by focusing on bewilderment; the very act of which generates the unknown. Tis idea and its practice are intensifed eloquently by Campbell, Dyer and Nash (Chap. 11) who charge us not to let our teaching become 'toothless' in service of a neo-liberal transmission of knowledge to student-as-consumer; they ask us to take risks with feelings of discomfort and uncertainty. Ghemmour (Chap. 10) equally shows how decolonising approaches can encourage uncomfortable but purposeful self-questioning to challenge the educational status quo. And Natanel (Chap. 12) shows how to use

**Fig. 13.1** Working with creative ruptions to balance care and risk

<sup>-</sup> finding ways to live with unpredictability and discomfort

walking and sensing to break from the difculty and weight of normative study and to extend the space for learning.

Secondly, we can see that practicing in ethical spaces plays an essential part in our collective handling of creative ruptions. Activism based on an ethics of care enshrines what Walker (2007) describes as an expressivecollaborative ethics in which negotiation, collaboration, expression and agreement are foregrounded and highlight power relationships as a political concern in pedagogical contexts. Consequently, as Bozalek and Zembylas (2016), point out, it is impossible to separate theories of epistemology (of knowing), from ontology (being) and from ethics. Tis is illustrated well by Crickmay and Welsh (Chap. 7); they describe their work with music and those with dementia in which people with dementia are valued for their diferent and creative ways of being and knowing; Turner (Chap. 3), discusses his theory of aesthoecology, emphasising the symbiotic, ethically bonded relationship between aesthetics (the afective) and ecology (the connected); and, Witt and Clarke (Chap. 6) talk of pedagogies of attention that exhibit ethico-onto-epistemological practices that appreciate the entanglement of caring, doing and knowing. As editors, we can see spaces are created to provide for alternative futures to emerge ethically. Spaces represent opportunity and potential—a dynamic liminality from which the new arises spontaneously and can be valued for its own expression of uniqueness—with the possibility to counter injustice and marginalisation. Being equipped to engage multiple perspectives allows for meaningful dialogue in ethical spaces of engagement (Ermine, 2007). A clear example of this is apparent in Chave's Chap. 4 which examines the notion of *aporia*—literally lacking a path—she considers how spaces which are creative, invite doubt and are uncertain so that new understandings become possible, which re-centre more-than-human voices and allow transitional and marginal perspectives to be asserted more strongly.

Tirdly, our co-authors show us how to live and work with entanglements without becoming lost in over-complicated relationships. We can then understand their power in relation to fast-moving challenges, by their embedding in kinship and community. Chappell's (Chap. 2) own writing sets the tone for this at the outset, when considering embodiment and materiality through touch and time. She demonstrates how working with multi-epistemic literacy (and, in so doing, honouring Indigenous and arts-based epistemologies, too), and attending to what might be understood as simple everyday practices such as walking and touching can open us up to entanglements with other ways of being and becoming. She argues that this fne-tuned attention to relations can equip us with the ability to quickly morph our responses to fast-changing wicked problems. Witt and Clarke (Chap. 6) similarly cultivate relations through what they call kin-centric pedagogies which emphasise collective cocreation with spaces and places. Importantly they stress that these relational pedagogies do not end when we leave a place; they continue in dialoguing, making, new thinking and transformations. Here they show the continuous and collective nature of how pedagogies might be. Katingima-Day (Chap. 9) explores the intricate links between aesthetics and our experiences of life through the African concept of Utu, to articulate how we experience an aesthetics of life. Tis ofers insight into how, by prioritising relationality and connectivity, Western hegemonic approaches can be decolonised. She leads us away from mechanistic frameworks to a more dispersed aesthetics which acknowledges the belongingness of varied entities. Katingima explains Utu as describing the essence of being and becoming human by participating in life, and in so doing demonstrates humans' entanglements with other entities and the value of thinking about education as a creative and dynamic process, woven into the living fabric of the people and generated within communities. Furthermore, Natanel (Chap. 12) articulates how walking in local landscapes can help to refect on the lives of settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel, leading to imaginations of 'who we might be, what we might do and where we will have gone'. By doing this, Natanel shows how understanding lives as entangled with the environment across continents can lead to decolonial thinking.

Fourthly, we see authors working with transdisciplinarity as a means to handle creative ruptions. Teir work is transcending the boundaries of a range of disciplines to use a variety of perspectives to address complex issues (Benatar, 2000) and in so doing pushes back against normative education. Wren's consideration of empathy (Chap. 5) and Witt and Clarke's (Chap. 6) exploration of sympoiesis through feld visiting are actively working across boundaries of the arts, poetry, psychology, social welfare, creative writing, philosophy and education. Henriksen et al. (2015) and Kligyte et al. (2019) argue that when embodied thinking is seen as part of the transdisciplinary process, it becomes a creative liminal space where the tensions within unknown possibilities can be held in an exploratory place. Hence, when Witt and Clarke are collage making to explore new possibilities for transdisciplinary learning, they are afectively exploring the liminal spaces through creative embodiment from which ruptions arise through participation. Campbell, Dyer and Nash's work (Chap. 11) is transdisciplinary in nature as it seeks to invite refective conversations between HE leaders and educators from various disciplines alongside others from outside the university. In this way, by refecting on the process of transdisciplinary practice and the conversations that arise from it, refexivity can lead to an understanding of diferent social phenomena which can alter prior assumptions (Von Seggern et al., 2023), providing broader perspectives on challenges and issues. Ben-Horin (Chap. 8) discusses a case study that explores the role of leadership in higher education to ensure that ethical educational futures emerge responsively through creativity to facilitate integration of research, development and innovation in educational programmes. To this end, the chapters in this book are an attempt to kickstart careful communication through the emergence of provocative and ethical methodologies that create conversations which can involve pluralistic possibilities for educational futures. With embodied processes also being a key part of crossing boundaries, this book ofers a way for educators to understand how to approach transdisciplinary learning through creativities that can lead to (ruptive) democratic educational futures (Burnard et al., 2022).

Fifthly, we see how attending diferently can re-order power and bring through what has previously been denied or hidden. Turner (Chap. 3) opens us up to this way of working initially through his discussion of aesthoecology as a specifc way of identifying thinking about education. He argues that the melding of aesthetics and ecology, which both inherently attend diferently to afect, ofers a pivotal (political) balance between forms of perception, thought, production and action. He takes this political imperative as a driver for dissensus (Ranciere, 2010), or confict, identifying the opportunity to disrupt the status quo and to creatively re-order power relationships. Chave (Chap. 4) attends to the intense notion of love, grounded in afection and seeing it as a source for social change, with the potential for solidarity which can generate ethicopolitical pedagogies that have the potential to address injustices and suffering. Later in the book, authors draw these threads of re-balancing power by asking us again to attend diferently. For example, Wren's (Chap. 5) work on afective, embodied empathy forefronts a thoroughly sensorial engagement with environment which brings through messages and understandings which had previously been hidden because of a dominant focus on the intellect. Ghemmour (Chap. 10) identifes refexive decolonising practices as a means to include into HE the valuable yet neglected knowledge of Global Majority students' experiences, identities and cultural heritages, and thus re-order power. Similar approaches are advocated by Campbell, Dyer and Nash (Chap. 11) in their work with care as radical resistance and indeed as an act of political educational warfare (Lorde, 1998).

Sixthly and fnally, we note our authors going beyond the word when working with creative ruptions. Chappell (Chap. 2) shines a direct spotlight on the importance of going beyond the word through flm, technologies such as AR and VR, choreographic scores, martial arts, and indigenous and posthuman walking practices. She highlights the mind body split as a particularly Western problem that we in the West need to overcome (Fullagar & Zhao, 2018). She encourages a practice of cumulative ongoing rupturing as educational responses to both the climate crisis and the neoliberalisation of education. If, as a reader/engager, you have read the book sequentially you might well then experience a powerful accumulation of these ideas and practices throughout the chapters. For example, Turner (Chap. 3) picks up the fow and continues to go beyond the word through exploration of the sensory and afective, symbiotically entwined with the aesthetic and environmental within aesthoecology. Wren (Chap. 5) joins the fow, ofering a detailed journey through her embodied musings to understand afective environmental empathy through photographs, Padlets, swimmings, poems, videos and sound recordings whilst also encouraging us as readers/engagers to try all of these practices ourselves. Crickmay and Welsh also draw us beyond the word sometimes asking us to listen—and I repeat their request here. As you read this fnal paragraph in this section, I ask you, to listen to Chap. 7's Crickmay and Welsh's Audio: Poised on the Edge.

QR Code 16 Audio X: Poised on the edge—Bass note D

In this fnal chapter, we are indeed poised on the edge. So far, we have considered how we can work with creative ruptions. Understanding these six ways of working, we are at the precipice, ready to consider the book's creative ruptions and their productivity. Carrying us over that edge, Crickmay and Welsh (Chap. 7) and Katingima-Day (Chap. 9) go beyond the word through the inclusion and discussion of voices, images, sounds and instruments. In Chap. 7, they encourage us to think of music making as a fundamentally embodied experience, entangled with the instruments and the world; so that those living with dementia can teach us to focus on learning as a response-able encounter that is emerging towards unforeseeable futures. Katingima-Day eloquently supports us to positively step from the edge into the unknown of the 'not yet' through the experience of Utu, a Kiswahili concept regarding the essence of being and becoming human by participating in life. Here she argues that afect is an active, non-material and metaphysical *participant* in music and music making, life and therefore learning. She is clear that this awareness of afect opens new creative possibilities and, we would argue, the potential for ruptions both in music making encounters and wider educational systems. If you have listened to Crickmay and Welsh's *Poised on the Edge*, depending on your reading speed, this should have come to an end in your ears right about now, as we leap of that edge to dive into the book's ruptions.

## **What Do Creative Ruptions Do?**

So, our readings show us, the editorial team, that to work with creative ruptions, often from a place of marginalisation, we need to fnd ways to live with unpredictability and discomfort; practice in ethical spaces; allow entanglement but not over-complication; work with transdisciplinarity; attend diferently to re-order power; and move beyond the word. Handled in this way, then, what work do ruptions do?

Learning from the snowballing messages of the chapters, as editors we are clear that creative ruptions are radical, that is they afect the fundamental nature of things, and that they are irreversible. In conversation we have compared our experiences of feeling that whilst the past remains with us, there is 'no going back' once we have engaged with posthumanism, new materialism, decolonialism and feminism. Tey are all powerful tools which allow us to think, make and do the educational world diferently. We understand that these creative ruptions will not in themselves solve the wicked and Anthropocentric problems that the authors have in their sights. By defnition these problems are complex and weblike, requiring approaches from multiple vantage points. Te strength of the creative ruptions, and their underpinning theories and practices, though lies in their own complexity and weblike dispersal. If, for example, we take the Baradian notion of intra-action as articulated by Chappell (Chap. 2), Barad (2007) conceives of agency as a relational performance enacted within an entangled assemblage of material and embodied humans and other-than-humans where ideas and phenomenon emerge through the intra-action. Tis immediately constitutes us all as mutually dependent. With agency complexly dispersed in this way, creative ruptions have reach into the weblike roots of wicked problems; and if such ruptions accumulate they have the potential to intensify their power for change through the layering of their fssures and cracks.

Tis articulation of creative ruptions also requires of us a diferent understanding of change and progress. In Chap. 1 we have already pushed back against a linear, logical view of progress towards an envisioned future, by applying Osberg's (2017) ideas of symbiotic anticipation (proactively exploring in an open-ended way beyond the human) and Amsler and Facer's (2017) call to have the courage to critically anticipate futures which are currently unknowable. Tis push back is also reinforced in disciplines such as psychology where, for example, Ross (2023) challenges a traditional cognitive view of progress as a linear trajectory from ignorance to knowledge, arguing that creative cognition involves an extended and dynamic system of non-linear possibility generation. Tese stances are important as, whilst a creative ruption may be generated by our interventions with multiple others, equally we may fnd ourselves more in the role of recipients, when ruptions such as the Covid-19 pandemic or the rollout of artifcial intelligence overtake us, and we need to respond via symbiotic and critical anticipation.

Tus, change via creative ruptions is radical and irreversible and can be unexpected. We cannot tell therefore when smaller ruptions such as the ones detailed in these book chapters will either individually or collectively reach—what we are choosing to call—an 'accumulation threshold' (Zhang et al., 2021), and spill into irreversible change with signifcant momentum and benefcial spread. We fnd this notion gives us courage when the enormity of the problems we face can feel overwhelming. Tis book is already an example of positive spread, operating perhaps like a rhizome (Deleuze & Guattarri, 2013), rehabilitating thought as a creative and dynamic enterprise, across the lifetime of the Creativity and Emergent Educational Futures Network at the University of Exeter. Set up in 2018, ideas instigated and spread by Anna Craft, Deborah Osberg, Fran Martin and Kerry Chappell have been taken up, chewed on, adapted and reinvigorated in new contexts by the authors in this book and beyond. And we aim that through your reading and engaging with the book, this benefcial spread of ideas and practices will spread further in a rollout of creative ruptions. We know that these sometimes seemingly small instances of spread can have big efects. Each author or authorial team already has broad impact with their ideas whether at professorial or PhD level, or in between. For example, Natanel's (Chap. 12) focus on decolonialist feminist ecologies has developed from her interest in doing things diferently in education to think about women, sexuality and violence in new ways. Tis has led to her enacting radical feminist pedagogies with teachers and students in her HE classrooms, where she explores and develops decolonial and anticolonial orientations. Turner's educational ideas (for which he received an OBE) were played out in a large community college in England where he worked collaboratively with colleagues and others to centre a gallery at the heart of a new college building. Tese actions were informed by early-stage thinking about aesthoecology, and continue to have ramifcations for the education of thousands of young people and their families.

As a collective, contextualised within the wider group of researchers, practitioners and scholars who have taken up posthuman, new materialist, decolonial and feminist ideas, we have not yet experienced our 'accumulation threshold', but we are ready for it. In the section that follows next, from the point of view of this book, the editorial team considers how the chapter ruptions are contributing to wicked problems, thus potentially building to an accumulation threshold that will see these practices spill over in an irreversible way.

## **How Are We Responding to Wicked Problems?**

So, how do these creative ruptions respond to wicked problems? Wicked problems are not just difcult, they possess a complexity that involves multiple possible causes and outcomes and internal dynamics that are far from linear (Peters, 2017). For a problem to be wicked, in addition to being complex it is also multicausal, multiscalar and interconnected.

Consequently, wicked problems can never be completely solved, they are interdisciplinary and multiple stakeholders may have conficting agendas (Rittel & Webber, 1973). Tey are very similar to hyperobjects (Morton, 2013) which are problems that, as opposed to being linear and rational, implicate all actants as being part of a web or net and, therefore, difcult to disentangle. As Morton puts it, 'Te more I struggle to understand hyperobjects, the more I discover I am stuck to them.' (p. 28). Witt and Clarke (Chap. 6) refer to this as multiple engagements in a mesh of intra-action. Wicked problems challenge society, policy makers and institutions and include issues such as climate change, refugees, terrorism, digital warfare and loss of biodiversity (Termeer et al., 2019).  To take the climate crisis as an example, it is far greater than that induced by anthropogenic activity, important and worrying as that is—it is the immense and ramifying complexity of the issues that defne it as a wicked problem.

Te climate crisis will be the harbinger of many other wicked problems which will beset the planet and its inhabitants, human and other-thanhuman alike. For example, changes in climate are likely to lead to catastrophic weather events which will displace very large numbers of people from their homelands. Te United Nations (Human Rights) claimed that of 59.1 million people internally displaced in 2021 across the world, most were displaced by climate-related disasters, much higher than displacement due to armed confict (United Nations, 2022). Te overall efect on more-than-human populations is, of course, incalculable but hugely signifcant. Te depletion of the rainforests and the damage to coral reefs are but two examples. McKinnon (2022), for example, points to the climate crisis as being not just due to greenhouse gas emissions but also to 'a product of historical injustices, current inequalities, institutional inadequacies and the abuse of power' (McKinnon, 2022, p. 2). She goes on to say that these issues challenge our most fundamental convictions of what makes for fourishing societies and meaningful individual lives—surely also our aim as educators. Climate change and its emergent consequences, therefore, is something that must be at the core of education and futures thinking. Tis book illustrates how radical, ruptive and creative approaches contribute to that alternative educational mode of thinking and being, not to *solve* wicked problems, but to perceive them in a new light—prisms which difract the light and, through ruptions, break the status quo and allow a diferent way of being, knowing and valuing.

For example, Chappell (Chap. 2) refers to this as a multi-epistemic literacy and Chave (Chap. 4) suggests that this requires a letting go of certainty and an acceptance of ambiguity. Many of the authors in this book approach these problems through a posthumanist and new materialist lens. Wren (Chap. 5), invites the reader to creatively think-with-theenvironment, and Witt and Clarke (Chap. 6) expand notions of dialoguing with the world in a collaborative and collective ma(kin)g. Wren refers to the increasing stresses put onto the planet due to climate change (Chap. 5), and Chave (Chap. 4) refers to the climate and ecological emergency as a space for bewildering questions, where no-one yet knows the answer. Turner (Chap. 3) refers to catastrophic events which will become more frequent and unpredictable, in which climate change plays a major role, but, more generally, points to the idea that this spills over dramatically into massive geopolitical uncertainty. How does society and, more particularly, education deal with these unknowns? Leadership in higher education can play a signifcant part in this and Ben-Horin (Chap. 8) draws attention to how this might be achieved in risky and improvisational ways through seeing students and teachers as co-creators of emergent content drawing on the disciplines of both art and science. Overall, this book cannot give defnitive answers to all the questions posed by wicked problems but it can promote diferent understandings and eco-philosophies of our inter-connected relations with the world, seeking the ethical spaces and opportunities for creative ruptions and emergent solutions.

Accordingly, we are now talking about climate justice, as well as climate change, incorporating the web of wicked problems, which will arise. Tis is captured well in Sect. 3 of the book (Resistings) in which, for example, Natanel (Chap. 12) draws attention to the wider ramifcations of connecting racial justice with food, land and climate justice. Flexible awareness of the impact of these problems, alongside potential educational pedagogies and emergent solutions, sews the golden threads of creative ruptions throughout the book and seeks, if not demands, radical change to our education systems accordingly.

However, we also argue that to change the core of education to tackle the climate crisis, a challenge to neoliberalism is also needed. Neoliberalism is a political approach that favours free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending. What arises from this viewpoint in education is an accumulation of wicked problems to overcome which directly afect the identity, relationships and subjectivity of educators as they try to keep up with unreasonable requests of accountability to meet performative goals (Ball, 2016). Tis is because neoliberalism centres the human in the world and thus it is by that that all things are measured (Snaza & Weaver, 2015). Tis ultimately creates a hierarchical structure where any perspective beyond the human is dismissed as less valuable. When education is unwilling to accept that the world is more than human it ignores the possibilities that once humans cease to exist on this planet, other species will still go on to survive (Wallin, 2017). Tis book is an attempt to create ruptions in a neoliberalist-dominated agenda in education from posthuman and decolonial viewpoints. For example, by taking a new materialist approach, Wren has highlighted the interconnectedness and blurring of boundaries between entities through creating a space of co-creation between the human and more-than-human. Furthermore, Witt and Clarke alert us to a *posthuman fusion* by exploring sympoietic relations through making kin to celebrate collective cocreation of learning spaces for more-than-human fourishing. Both chapters advocate for collective, posthumanism which are necessary for destabilising individualism and the pursuit of self-interest in neoliberal education so that a more cooperative understanding of education emerges (Kretz, 2014). In addition, the growth of ecology was imbued with colonialism and all too often scientifc global discoveries confgured the world from a Western and anthropocentric perspective. Tese colonial stances were used to justify social and environmental control to the detriment of existing knowledge systems in order to develop global economic systems largely based on despoilation and extraction (Trisos et al., 2021). We argue that it is necessary to disrupt the neoliberalist machine through decolonial and posthuman approaches. Te wider culture that neoliberalism has created, in which progress is measured by universalised human knowledge rather than seeing humans as materially connected to their environment (Lerch et al., 2022), is one of the challenges that the ideas of creative ruption seek to address.

Terefore, to rethink individualised human knowledge production, Chappell's exploration of touch and time sees knowledge as emerging through multi-epistemic literacies and by slowing down. Tis, she argues, causes ruptions in neoliberalist education as it moves away from seeing learning as a commodity for market-driven outcomes which do not allow for hesitation, non-linear and multiple ways of thinking (Chappell et al., 2021). Furthermore, Campbell et al.'s chapter challenges the notion that neoliberalism focuses on professionalised knowledge which does not allow for alternative forms of thinking (Lerch et al., 2022). Tey use collective forms of refection to resist measurable, quantifable education models in favour of a non-linear, non-logic-based approach that allows for non-productive moments to be fore-fronted. Tese authors argue that non-productive moments are an essential part of the learning journey which allow for agency, an essential part of wellbeing and thriving (Patrick, 2013). Conversely, our push against neoliberalist education extends beyond the learner as we also see in Chappell's chapter when she explores transdisciplinary practice. In a number of projects, she shows how educators have been encouraged to foster adaptability and resilience to give them the capacity to navigate uncertainty in a rapidly changing world. Tis can also be seen as a crucial part of the educational experience as identifed in the 2018 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report (Schleicher, 2018).

Finally, by taking a decolonial viewpoint, Katingima-Day (Chap. 9) and Ghemmour (Chap. 10) challenge Western dominated hierarchies by problematising inclusivity, diversity and equity. Trough the resisting of these structures, they call for a critical examination of power dynamics within educational institutions and encourage the recognition of marginalised voices and perspectives from the edges of neoliberal education systems.

Although, in this section, we have only taken two specifc wicked problems as examples it is quite clear that the link between the two renders them even more difcult to tackle because of the entangled, net like nature within which they exist. Te Roosevelt Institute (2019), for example, in its report *Transcending Neoliberalism: How the Free-Market Myth Has Prevented Climate Action*, points to the 'role of ideology in creating our climate crisis' (p. 4), and we contend that neoliberal ideology has also infected the UK education establishment in a negative way. Te authors in our book, therefore, look to create cracks and fssures in the system through creative ruptions, to challenge and subvert, the normative stance of anthropocentric educational practice. Only in this way might we provide the skills and opportunities for the next generation of practitioners and students to face the big challenges of the century.

Although authors in this book have not directly addressed artifcial intelligence (AI), we feel that it is worth at least a brief discussion as a currently emerging global challenge, the impacts of which are rapid, pervasive and unpredictable in terms of ethics and care. In particular, we note the fear of AI's growth in relation to education where there are anxieties about these technologies replacing teachers (Gocen & Aydemir, 2020); creating poverty, disrupting data security, changing human behaviours (Huang et al., 2021); and misplacing autonomy and agency (Khosravi et al., 2022). Tere is also a concern that AI is being used by 'big tech' as a neoliberal tool for the concentration of power (Verdegem, 2022) which replicates existing social injustices based around race, gender, sexuality, disability and more.

Despite these fears, there is also a feeling that AI will not be able to replicate certain human qualities such as intuition (Herman, 2021); emotion (Schif, 2021); creativity, empathy and critical thinking (Kissinger et al., 2021). So, there are calls for fnding ways for humans to live alongside and embrace AI, so as to take advantage of AI's positive capabilities (Herman, 2021). To put this into action, recent research has proposed that we understand the machine/human relationship as relationally produced (Perucica & Andjelkovic, 2022); as creative (Author Unknown, 2023); and as a spur to move away from dualistic thinking (Dahlin, 2023). We would argue that the ideas and practices within this book have the ability to create ruptions which can respond in this way to AI as a new, emergent wicked problem. Tis is because many of these approaches promote relational and pluralist thinking through creativity.

Also, as Luckin (2023) and Luckin et al. (2022) argue, we need to make sure that moving forward in relationship with AI, we understand that it has the capacity to fundamentally disrupt education, and that we positively work with this. Tey urge us to use AI for its data processing capacities, and to see humans as the creative and critical thinkers. Te approaches in this book suggest a more entangled, less centrally human controlled stance to this relationship, but we are certainly in agreement with Luckin and her team that we need to be alert to the ethical harm of the proft-driven imperatives of big tech AI. Drawing again on Osberg (2017), we argue that it is through symbiotically anticipatory AI-human relationships that this impending wicked problem can be responded to without knowing what is coming, but in a way which actively takes longterm ethical responsibility for the future. As Luckin emphasises, failure to change is not an option.

## **Thinking-Being-Doing to Push Matters Forward**

So far in this chapter, we have articulated strands and threads that have resonated for us as an editorial team. We were interested to see, in the spirit of post-qualitative research, what would emerge if we ofered another way to actively assemble these threads together. In this spirit, we asked two authors from the book, Sharon Witt and Helen Clarke, to predominantly work with the images in the book to create an assembled collage as an alternative leaping of point for you as readers/engagers.

In the spirit of post-qualitative research (Maclure, 2013), they have created a lively collage as a provocative call to action (Fig. 13.2).

Here, collaging is an expansive act, where imagery, words, phrases, diffraction, paper sculpture, theory, chapter snippets, fgures and materials are enmeshed and put to work with all the creators can 'muster' (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 622). Collage is generated and generative to produce 'new connections' (Maclure, 2013, p. 229) (Fig. 13.3).

During co-construction, themes, comments, and questions of thinking, making and doing education diferently emerge—repeating, spiralling, folding/unfolding, turning back, moving forward, tracing and retracing. Collage weaves a web of bold ideas in a mesh of strands and threads creating a 'way of relational knowing … which involves multisensory responses in a particular moment…. produced in collaborations' (Somerville, 2008, p. 212). Like Holbrook and Pourchier (2014, p.760) Sharon and Helen do not 'seek complete or fnal works or concrete answers … the collages are constituted as contemplative spaces' that are partial, constantly changing, dynamically (in)forming and deliberately inciting further encounters.

Together with Sharon and Helen, we invite readers to explore the collage (Fig. 13.4).

Please consider: Which ideas have resonance for you? What feelings are stirred up within you? What is activated within your practice? What can you do diferently? Where do you stand? How does this connect and enliven what you have engaged with in the book's chapters?

**Fig. 13.2** The collage hanging

If you have accessed the threads of the collage above, you will by now be on your own journey, possibly a difractive one (Barad, 2007). Your ideas and doings may be spreading out in multiple directions, cutting together apart with theories that you are interested in, practices with which you are familiar, bending and diverting trajectories to take you in your own new directions from the provocations to produce your own teachings, activisms and learnings. In parallel, and perhaps still intraacting with those trajectories, we also now ofer our editorial team's departure points. We entered this space with a quote from Facer (2019, p. 12):

**Fig. 13.3** An excerpt from the collage

**Fig. 13.4** Screenshot of collage flm and QR code

it is possible to begin to create educational spaces in which the surplus potential of the past, present and future are visible, in which new ideas are generated, in which the experience of living in complex material and planetary systems that decentre the human can be acknowledged.

Tis book has created intersecting educational spaces which tap that surplus potential, which generate new alternative educational futures, whilst honouring the need for emergence. Chapters have acknowledged complexity and have worked to de-signify and de-centre humans, and within human interrelations have worked to de-centre dominant Western narratives and practices. Surplus potential is frequently a phrase associated with economic growth but the interpretation in this book is far more complex and exciting than that. What has been written by the authors has exceeded the expectation that any of us might have envisaged. In extensive dialogue about the chapters, we have been engaged in the witnessing of emergent knowledge and understanding that has been transformational; we hope you have found this to be the case too.

As we move forward, we are alert to accumulation thresholds which may be reached and which could cause large-scale ruptions that we can contribute to and build upon. Given where we are at the time of writing, it is hard to predict if, for example, AI will trigger this kind of change. It is almost certain that there will be an accumulation of climate-related factors that coalesce to further negatively and irreversibly damage the planet. Other, as yet, unpredictable and emergent phenomena are likely to create future ruptions. Perversely, perhaps, we need not to be surprised by this. As the frst of the learnings regarding how to deal with creative ruptions suggests, we need to know how to live with unpredictability in education. Tere is the very real potential for some kind of current systems collapse or upheaval; acknowledging this removes a false sense of security that we as humans are in control, and being acquainted with these kinds of ideas will allow us to deal with them better.

Furthermore, futures anxiety, or perhaps more precisely eco-anxiety, is seen as an inevitable consequence of continuous change and sometimes rapid and unforeseen emergent events. Te balance is set between an acute awareness of the earth crisis whilst simultaneously maintaining hope and determination that positive action can and will make a diference to the future. Tis requires a radical change in thinking and doing. Eco-anxiety arises not only from 'a poverty of imagination' but also a 'poverty of hope' (Damhof & Gulmans, 2023, p. 51). Tey suggest that poverty and hope are intimately connected—imagining the impossible turns out to become a necessity—a radical act of hope (ibid.). However, to act on the hope also requires courage in the face of difculty and an ethical sense of making diferences to any possible future. Futures Literacy (Miller, 2018) is the skill to imagine the future in diferent ways and in diferent contexts which might elicit a new way of thinking and a sense of agency through perceiving and embracing emergence when it occurs. Miller (2018) suggests that when we imagine more, and when we explore multiple futures, we perceive more in the present, which is all we have to act upon. Seeking and seeing creative ruptions provides an attitude of hope and agency for the future, thus addressing perceived feelings of futures anxiety. Further, Freeman (2023, p. 73) suggests that to 'succumb to despair is not only fatalistic but "problematically" safe' and that, although difcult, it is imperative to hold on to hope in order to sustain a sense of the possible.

As part of quelling futures anxiety and turning to hope, courage and determination, despite a dominant neoliberal narrative that aims to hoodwink us into believing that we must continue with the Western rationalised status quo, as a collective of *Creative Ruptions* authors, we are not alone. And neither are you as readers/engagers. Decolonial colleagues are taking the courageous and necessary steps to call for a deconstruction of the Western project that is modernity, but to do this with care and humility. In *Hospicing Modernity*, De Oliveira (2021) has drawn together a powerful call to arms to face our crises with maturity and integrity. She is clear, as we are, that there is no quick fx and that in her words we need to 'interrupt' the patterns that are destroying our communities and our planet. She ofers thought experiments to reimagine how we can respond to crises, to expand our capacity to hold space for pain and grief, to interrupt our satisfaction with neoliberal and colonial habits and create space for change. Tere are others tackling similar issues at diferent levels. For example, Pirbhai-Illich et al. (2024) ofer practical approaches to decolonising educational relationships in higher education. With a core focus on relationships they ofer caring, accessible and critically honed insights into process, grounded in extensive experience and practical exercises. Tey show how to decentre from dominant Euro-centric models through an actionable de/colonial imaginary, to contribute to the wider project of working for a more just world. Te work of our *Resistings* authors especially can be entangled with these approaches and provide an opening to begin thinking about how these approaches can be actioned in any given situation especially through the process of critical refection, so that ruptions begin to spread across a wide range of diferent educational contexts. Colleagues in Possibility Studies are coalescing around similarly activist thinking and practice too. Drawing on Osberg (2017) and Amsler and Facer (2017), we are putting forward an argument here for critical, symbiotic anticipatory approaches to educational futures which gel with those in Possibility Studies. Together all our work can contribute to the spread of ideas that is necessary for accumulation thresholds to be reached. Resonating with Chappell's chapter in this book, Facer (2023) calls for the cultivation of the temporal imagination to use as a critical resource for futures thinking. Grounded in theorists such as Greene (2011), she proposes that using our temporal imaginations can allow us to see our own understanding and practice of time as just one possible timeframe. Facilitated to see this from the outside we can then become aware of other timescapes and to engage in dialogue with others through and within these. As Chappell argues, a focus on understanding time diferently and as Facer argues, imaginatively, is a strong tool for creating space for new futures which challenge dominant narratives and look to respond to the wicked problems we face.

We also take heart from Escobar (2023), who pushes beyond questioning our conceptions of time, to challenge our understanding of reality per se. Our work in this book completely resonates with this call. Escobar encourages us all to explore the complex cultural political work of imagining the future and begins by highlighting how deeply shaped this process is by current Western centric notions of modernity. As we have done in this book, he asks us to disrupt the onto-epistemic foundations. We clearly respond to his call here by employing posthuman, new materialist, decolonial and feminist theories and practices; we are, however, not in the business of imagining new futures and telling readers/engagers how to achieve them, but in providing the theories, tools, provocations and examples that allow readers/engagers to create space for the kinds of ruptions that can contribute to responding to wicked, Anthropocentric problems in a fexible and responsive way. And we need to respond bravely. As Bayo Akomolafe (2023) states:

When a crack appears in the mighty wall, the only thing scarier than letting it grow unbridled, the only thing more worrisome than allowing it breath, is sealing it up—for the thesis of the crack is to call into question the form we've assumed, the nobilities we cherish, the stories we assume to be true. Te crack is the monster's gift—a reminder that the fxity of the postures we take on often prove more dangerous than the threats we presume to withstand….

…we must now inhabit the cracks…

## **Note**

1. Please note you will fnd a range of terms including other-than-human, more-than-human and non-human across the book, and use is dependent on author preference.

## **References**

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