Circle 5: Ecology of Transformative Learning Practices With/In A More-than-human World

In this study circle, we nurture a diversity of practices for mutual learning and knowledge creation through play with the “more than human”. We build a community of practice, where we create ‘playgrounds’ or spaces of not knowing, which are focused around prompts and themes for especially young scholars to experience and test methods, and examine afterwards through their own frameworks/theories. These spaces aim to instil opportunities to grow epistemological humility and inner pathways toward responsibility.

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Next events:

Learn more about the next symposia and find the calls for papers, poems and practices for each symposium.

Winter Session “Re-rooting and restor(y)ing academic spaces”

22-25 February, 2025. Denmark: Trente Mølle Naturskole, Isle of Fyn

From mud to meal, we practise novel ways of tasting food. We explore dampness of old cellars, cook root vegetables, taste bitterness, and sweetness, make food like 500 year-old ancestors.

Activities: One outdoor activity of 2-4 hours, e.g. a sensing walk from indigenous to modern (academia); sharing and giving feedback on texts and stories; one writing(with) plant session of 2 hours.

About the location: The location is Trente Mølle Naturskole, 40 min by car from Odense, Denmark. https://maps.app.goo.gl/SpeXQVzopRqSGkHeA. Please contact Heide Maria to learn more (heidenjoy@gmail.com).

Call for participation: Send us proposals for practices, papers, poetry … about:

Re-rooting and restor(y)ing academic spaces;
Re-rooting with the more-than-human-world through mud, mold, food…;
Reviving traditional farming techniques and wisdom;
Bioregional educational futures;
Post- and ecohumanist education;
Ecofeminist perspectives on academic spaces;
Queer ecology and academic spaces;
Educating(with)plants.

(This list is non-exhaustive. We are open for proposals of papers, poems, storytelling sessions, an outdoor practice… as long engagement with the more-than-human-world is in the core of the proposal.)

Deadline Call for Papers, Poems and Practices: 15 November 2024, midnight, to vitalija.ppetri@gmail.com and wendywwuyts@gmail.com.
Expected announcement of the programme: 15 December 2024
Registration payment deadline: 31 January 2025

Payment: All participants need to pay an annual membership fee (25 euros) in the webshop of NSU. In addition, we will ask a participant fee, which will be in the range between 25-100 euros and depends on your access to financing (to be confirmed by October 15th). This includes accommodation, self-cooked meals and pick-up from the most nearby train station. Unfortunately, we will not be able to cover travel funds.

Summer Session “Inclusive finance for rewilded academic and organisational spaces”

20 July– 28 July 2025, Finland

We explore flows of finance for projects, bench fees, administration. We explore landscapes of funding in a trans-gen(d)erational workshop with the aim of syncopating (Bayo Akomolafe) of the existing rhythms of funding in academia and impact investing towards possibilities of blended, slow finance, slowed-down inquiry that make space for “unusual business”.

Theme call: What story does finance tell? What are ways of resourcing each other? Where is potential for trans-gen(d)erational, trans-cultural, trans-species value creation?

About Study Circle 5: Ecology of Transformative Learning Practices With/In A More-than-human World

“What if, instead of thinking of a theory of change being produced from an identified preferred goal or outcome, the focus instead was placed on the way in which a system becomes ready for undetermined change? Can unforeseen ready-ness be nourished? While linear managing or controlling of the direction of change may appear desirable, tending to how the system becomes ready allows for pathways of possibility previously unimagined.” – Nora Bateson (An essay on ready-ing: Tending the prelude to change)

“We have dreamed together about unpredictable directions, about midwifing new perceptions, about autistic cartographies that stray from the tried and tested. Taking seriously the insurgent premise that thought isn’t exclusively human, that the world is alive, and that the way we approach the crisis is speculatively part of the crisis, we have wondered what it might look like to truly ‘stay with the trouble’. “ – Báyò Akómoláfé

Aims and goals of the project:

This project addresses the crisis of separation and alienation between humans and the more than human world. This led to other crises, such as climate crisis, polarisation etc. Especially in posthumanist sustainability science, socio technological (ST) studies and gender studies, this crisis of separation has been studied for decades. To counter this, scholars have raised questions on practices of knowledge creation and learning, and experimented with various radical landscape engagement methods to foster transformative learning and care. Presencing our felt sense in relation to the more-than-human expands our window of perception, affecting knowledge management. This can open the academic fields to new ways of communication when engaging with the dominant discourse and changes who we can be in organisations (Wilmott 1993). This project proposes attention to process and a new ecology of communication in academic spaces.

However, academic spaces are part of a patriarchal system that reinforce the barriers that hinder these radical practices and curtail the potential of transformation. Knowledge is rooted in contexts, micro-particularities and specificities. Science constitutes but a layer of “expertise” yet it has acquired a monopoly of truth and power in the decision making processes of society. Replicating colonial patriarchal dogmatism and slow violence, science needs an update.

To address these patriarchal structures, this project weaves theories of different fields and knowledge systems, inspired by various scholars:

eco-feminists (Plumwood, Shiva, Haraway, Braidotti, Barad, Federici, Irigaray)
biosemioticians (Hendlin, Affifi)
plant thinkers (Gagliano, Marder, Aloi, Mancuso, Manning)
indigenous scholarship (Goodchild, Wall Kimmerer, Yunkaporta, Akomolafe).

They have paved the way for academia to become a place of encounter to explore identities of scholars as porous unfinished beings that are in continuous transformation.

We see these academic spaces as “ephemeral ponds” of inquiry: how do we reshape learning organisations into a place that leaves space for life to evolve beyond the industrial techno-solutionary and media-marketable sci-craze gaze? What is sanctuary in academia? To whose needs are schools and institutions academia responding and how? What are the edges of organizations, where do they get stuck? Is academia a place for learning and expanding collective knowledge? What would it look like if academia were a place of composting scientific hubris and a place of mental health care? Can academia model eldership? What is the future of learning?

What if academia can be a place that expands – by bringing together the siloed fragments of scientific expertise into a space that is gesturing toward humility in light of the Not Knowing?

This study circle project invites academics and practitioners to meet on land and online. Each symposium will introduce current (re)search practices, such as forest bathing (Wuyts 2024), warm data labs, writing with plants. These practices are embedded in rigorous academic theories (Bateson, 2023; Akomolafe, 2023; Morton, 2024; Manning, 2022; Roy, 2018; Sehgal, 2024). Through connecting transdisciplinary academic approaches with the deeply personal, ancestral/historic, place- and context-based embodied experiences, we deliberately invite other species to our own human cultural contexts.

Shared vision for 2027

By the end of the circle, we, as a diverse team of learners, have united in our conspiring so that we begin to see the more-than-human and bio-neuro-cultural diversity in general as our greatest allies, both in nourishing all forms of life, cooling the planet, regulating our nervous systems, and bridging between cosmologies.

Vitalija Povilaityte-Petri

Coordinator Study Circle 5

Wendy Wuyts