Abstract
The Pluriversity for stuck humxns is an exploratory dialogue between early career researchers and established researchers. It responds to the concern that dominant forms of knowledge production are not assisting us to move towards life affirming ways of being and that alternatives are possible. The production of this chapter is one of many new acts towards realising other modes of being and becoming unstuck in scholar activist practice. The chapter begins with an invitation in the form of a poem by Lena Weber, and the resulting text is a response to the poem from multiple contributors from around the world, who imagine transgressive and progressive ‘departments’ of the Pluriversity. Situated amongst the impulses of queer ecopedagogy and drawing on imagination to understand and play with multiple (or diverse) knowledges, the authors explore what nurturing institutions for scholarly training and life may look like, and what might be possible and in fact are possible through our collaborative experience in the act of creating the Pluriversity for stuck humxns. Itself an intersectional being, this chapter is a queer inquiry dedicated to challenging and reframing norms and dogma and to shake up the boundaries of categories and narrowly and often dogmatically employed concepts. The authors break open pedagogy in ways that allowed them to question research practice and instead conceive of a ‘research worthy of their longing’.
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Notes
- 1.
The Transformations community brings together a growing network of researchers and practitioners who work towards social transformations in sustainability contexts. See https://transformationstosustainability.org/
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The range of work by contributing authors spans: political ecologies of climate change and environmental movements (Scheidel et al. 2018; Temper et al. 2018; Temper 2019), environmental policy alternatives and justice movements (Broome et al. n.d.; Bajpai 2019), higher education and public pedagogy (Lotz-Sisitka 2019), environmental education and critical pedagogy (James 2019), environmental education and arts-based research (Van Borek and James 1964), water access policies and resistance (Pereira and Wilson 2012), Transformative ocean governance from a social justice perspective : (Morgera et al. 2019), systems research and agriculture (Metelerkamp et al. 2019), researcher reflexivity and transgressive learning (Temper et al. 2019), Action research and transformations to sustainability (Macintyre 2019; Macintyre et al. 2019), transgressive learning epistemologies (Bengtsson 2019), bringing together environmental law and the anthropocene (Vermeylen 2017), climate change and (Moser 2020), socio-ecological transformation and stewardship (Cockburn et al. 2018; Eakin et al. 2019), possibilities for peace amidst extreme violence (Kuany 2017).
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Rebecca Martusewicz (2009: 254) refers to the concept of ‘collaborative intelligence’, which she borrows from Susan Griffin (1996): “…intelligence , even knowledge, is not born of the human capacity to think or make sense of the world alone, but rather it is the result of a collaborative endeavor among human and the more-than-human world. In this sense, as human communities are nested within a larger ecological system, we participate in and are affected by a complex exchange of information and sense-making that contributes to the well-being of that system.”
- 7.
Widely practiced in South African Primary Schools in the early 1990s
- 8.
(Among the Dinka) A clay made pebble game played under the Lang or Thau trees by the elders to pass time and philosophize.
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Huun Huur Tur, https://huunhuurtu.wordpress.com/
- 11.
Tamikrest, Kidal, http://www.tamikrest.net/
- 12.
Ali Farka Toures, Niafunke, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCoSiT57c0E
- 13.
Palestinian orchestra uses ‘music as resistance ’. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2017/09/palestinian-orchestra-music-resistance-170904120451727.html
- 14.
Rebel Music: The Tuareg Uprising in 12 Songs by Tinariwen. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/rebel-music-the-tuareg-uprising-in-12-songs-by-tinariwen
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McGarry, D. et al. (2021). The Pluriversity for Stuck Humxns: A Queer EcoPedagogy & Decolonial School. In: Russell, J. (eds) Queer Ecopedagogies. International Explorations in Outdoor and Environmental Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65368-2_10
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