From action to intra-action? Agency, identity and 'goals' in a relational approach to climate change education. Issue 9 (2nd October 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Verlie, Blanche
• Is Part Of: Environmental education research. Volume 26:Issue 9-10(2020)
• Page Start: 1266
• Page End: 1280
• Publication Date: 2020-10-02
• Subjects: Diffraction -- intersectionality -- acting-with -- posthuman -- new materialism; Environmental education -- Research -- Periodicals; 333.7207
• DOI: 10.1080/13504622.2018.1497147
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1350-4622

Abstract

Abstract: Engaging with new materialist/posthuman approaches to agency, in this paper I explore what might happen to the goal of cultivating climate action if we decentre the human from our climate pedagogies. Specifically, I engage with Karen Barad's concept of intra-action which argues that agency is not possessed by individual things or beings, but emerges through relationships. I work with experiences and occurrences from Climate Change Responses, an undergraduate social science course that I tutored in 2015 (CCR15). I explore how in CCR15, while trying to learn to better mitigate climate change, we became climate killjoys, resisting, challenging and disrupting pleasurable carbon intensive practices. Through these empirical examples, I show that 'climate intra-action' can enable us to attend to how human and more-than-human identities change through engagement with climate change; how our human capacities to affect climate emerge through acting-with more-than-human entanglements; and thus how unanticipated, different actions can emerge in climate change education. I therefore suggest that an intra-active approach to climate change education research and practice might enable less anthropocentric and more relationally attuned climate change 'response-abilities', for both teachers and students.