Abstract
“How to Keep the Story going for Those Who Come After,” is an experimental act of crafting an assemblage, cobbling together stories of otherworldly conversations/encounters, envisioning the production of knowledge as a process of arranging, organizing, and temporarily fitting together ideas and theories. Playfully unpacking the figuration of the salmon through its complex multiple contradictory identities, the author brings forth a deeper understanding of the entangled nature of the material and the discursive. The chapter is written diffractively in order to disrupt conventional historical forms of research narratives, instead holding together dispirit findings and presenting stories threaded through one another. Questioning the practices and processes of who, what and, why we teach, the author imagines the development of feral nomadic subjects able to hold together heteronymous ideas, beliefs, and theories in a generative society.
We inherit the future not just the pastKaren Barad Nomadic ethics does not prescribe a path to follow but it does insist on wandering with others and forming nourishing alliances.
Leesa Fawcett
Quote from a presentation given by Karen Barad (2014) “Re-Membering the Future, Re(con)figuring the Past: Temporality, Materiality, and Justice-to-Come,” presented on May 19, 2014. Reprinted with permission of author, Karen Barad.
Epigraph from Leesa Fawcett’s (2009) essay “Feral Sociality and (un)Natural Histories: On Nomadic Ethics and Embodied Learning” in Marcia McKenzie, Paut Hart, Heesoon Bai and Bob Jickling (Eds.) Fields of green: Restorying culture, environment, and education. Reprinted with permission by Hampton Press.
Epigraph from Leesa Fawcett’s (2009) essay “Feral Sociality and (un)Natural Histories: On Nomadic Ethics and Embodied Learning” in Marcia McKenzie, Paut Hart, Heesoon Bai and Bob Jickling (Eds.) Fields of green: Restorying culture, environment, and education. Reprinted with permission by Hampton Press.
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Notes
- 1.
Robert Brucker, a Rowland Junior Fellow at Harvard University who co-authored an article entitled The Hologenomic Basis of Speciation: Gut Bacteria Cause Hybrid Lethality in the Genus Nasonia (2013), created a pop-art image of the holobiont in order to push/challenge the boundaries of science into the everyday, just as the pop artist attempted to challenge the notion of “fine” art by including aspects of pop culture and everyday objects (such as the soup can) into their artwork. The hologenome theory is pushing the boundaries of what is considered a “species” and at which level evolution functions at (the “individual” or the collective). As Brucker (2013, para.5) writes, “Bacteria are often considered part of the environment, and any influence they have on a species is no different than any other organism-organism interaction, like say a predator and prey. But because it is impossible to have a naturally occurring organism without any microbiome, bacteria are essential to the existence of that species. Pop art parallels this, ordinary objects and pop culture references where not considered high art because they were part of everyday society, but yet art is a reflection of our society—neither exists without each other. Our microbes are as much part of our identity as a species as Marilyn Monroe. The art and beauty of living surrounds us, though in mass produced quantities it represents what we are and where we are going.” The image is ironically similar to the image on a T-Shirt Donna Haraway wears on a short video called “Donna Haraway Reads the National Geographic on Primates” (1987) in which she explores the intersections of naturecultures illustrated on various covers of National Geographic issues. The T-Shirt, also drawing on Andy Warhol’s screen prints of Marilyn Monroe, illustrates instead a series of colorful portraits of a gorilla, shifting the cultural gaze toward more complex natureculture relations.
- 2.
Trudy is the chatty Times Square bag-lady character in the one-woman Broadway play, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, written by Jane Wagner in 1986. Trudy is a bag-lady situated at “Walk, Don’t Walk,” who is a “creative consultant” for a group of alien fact finders (her space chums) doing research on earth and who undergoes time-space continuum shifts.
- 3.
Similar to Haraway (2004, 333): “I like layered meanings, and I like to write a sentence in such a way that, by the time you get to the end of it, it has at some level questioned itself.” Definitions of terms are palimpsestic, multimodal, multidisciplinary, historically situated, and often (mis)translated. My hope in this book is to search for polysemes, and hold together the multiple definitions of terms to create a deeper, richer, and more complex understanding(s). My goal is to create thick meanings, messy meanings, that drawing on multiple fields/planes/modes of thought; to create generative (re)interpretations and translations. The definitions scattered throughout the book are not intended to be conclusive static definitions; they are simply the current gathering of descriptions that shape my understanding.
- 4.
Throughout this book the character of Trudy generatively interrupts the text, posing questions, providing insights, and sharing research stories. Trudy’s interruptions were originally posed in Jane Wager’s (1986) play The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, that was turned into a film in 1991 directed by John Bailey (although the film title was intentionally misspelled, The Search for Signs of Inteligent Life in the Universe). The play was also published as a book in 2012.
- 5.
The acronym WCHP was created by Haraway (2008b) and used to describe “white capitalist heterosexist patriarchy” narratives and practices.
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Adsit-Morris, C. (2017). How to Keep the Story Going for Those Who Come After. In: Restorying Environmental Education. Curriculum Studies Worldwide. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48796-0_6
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