Abstract
This chapter explores collaborative Arts practices as critical and creative vehicles for assembling a figure of the socioecological learner. We focus on developing the sensorial and affective dimensions of learning through aesthetic engagements with place, drawing on Deleuzian concepts of the “larval subject”, “carte”, and “rhizome”. In doing so, we also forge connections with contemporary life sciences that reveal the permeability and plasticity of learning processes through dynamic interactions within developmental eco-systems. These conceptual and empirical resources inform our posthumanist methodological approach to collaborative Arts practices, which we describe in terms of a c/a/r/tography. Through the collaborative production of “site/sight-specific” images and poetic texts, we seek to produce a generative and visually critical exposé, which locates the emergence of the socioecological learner within a “biosocial ecology of sensation”. This opens up a field of potentials for sensing, thinking, feeling, and learning through collective aesthetic engagements with more-than-human worlds.
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- 1.
The use of the capital signifier in ‘Art’, rather than the lower case ‘art’ is an act of political resistance against the marginalizing of the discipline in contemporary education contexts, and is used consistently in this chapter.
- 2.
This is to explicitly distinguish cartography from arborescent methodologies that are predicated on the image of thought, language and life in terms of a tree that germinates deterministically from a seed, and grows roots that descend into an obscure and yet entirely rational depth. In phenomenological and structuralist terms, this means that the seed always contains the underlying ‘essence’ or ‘presence’ of the individual tree it will eventually grow to become. Rather, for the rhizome-map there is no pre-existing individual essence for each thought, language or life, only the machinic production of difference (as individuation of a larval subject) through networks of dynamic interaction across scales and temporalities.
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Rousell, D., Lasczik, A., Irwin, R.L., Peisker, J., Ellis, D., Hotko, K. (2020). Site/Sight/Insight: Becoming a Socioecological Learner Through Collaborative Artmaking Practices. In: Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, A., Lasczik , A., Wilks, J., Logan, M., Turner, A., Boyd, W. (eds) Touchstones for Deterritorializing Socioecological Learning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12212-6_7
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