Conference Agenda

In modernity, human-nature relations have been characterized by separation, hierarchy, and the exceptionalism of human agency. Accordingly, the position of other than human animals has been shaped by subordination and otherness in relation to human species. Currently, the human-induced environmental crisis is introducing profound changes in the ways these positions and divisions are perceived. The porosity, transcorporeality and entanglement of humans with the rest of the nature, as implicated in the debates around the concept of the Anthropocene (Lorimer, 2017), requires an ontology capable of grasping the blending of the natural with the human-constructed, the biological with the cultural, genes with their environments, and the material with the semiotic (Massumi, 2009). This “interactionist ontology” (Tuana 2008) becomes visible especially in environmental catastrophes. Furthermore, threatening and looming environmental catastrophes illustrate how affects are indistinguishable from the generalised crisis environment (Massumi, 2009).

We invited groups of children and young people to collectively examine the changing human-nature relations in two informal educational settings, a natural history museum and a zoo. We engaged in multispecies ethnography, expert-led excursions and art-based workshops to enhance attentiveness to various aspects of human-animal relations. Across all these activities, we employed the concept of atmosphere (xx) to focus on the ways in which affect and ontology come together in these contexts, their representations, narratives and stagings. The questions we examined were: How is the human/animal distinction made in the natural history museum and in the zoo? What kinds of atmospheres are emerging and how are atmospheres used around this ontological distinction?

Atmosphere, or affective atmosphere (Anderson & Ash, 2015) is a concept that builds on the dynamic notion of collective and prepersonal affects (Massumi, 2009). As phenomena, atmospheres can be seen as affective assemblages (see Tsing, 2015), in which openness, heterogeneity, movement and change foreground. However, atmospheres also help us approach the other-than-human and nonhuman worlds, as myriad crucially significant atmospheres exist outside the human sensory and semiotic capacities (Lorimer et al., 2019). Importantly, in our research, the atmospheric ethnographic approach (Schroer & Schmitt, 2018) fuelled ontological sensitivity to exploration of educational assemblages involving humans, legacies of science, nonhuman animals, and various materials and architectures.

The ethnographic, atmospheric, and arts-based approaches and materials allowed us to analyse the material and affective making of the human/animal distinction: the making of scientific subjects and objects; the atmospheres of conservation and their ruptures; the co-existence of different, frictional atmospheres around the animal closures and dioramas. In the end of the empirical phase in the natural history museum, we conducted discussions with the young people to revisit their experiences during the research. In particular, the atmospheres around extinction led us to reflect on human exceptionalism and the related existential loneliness (Rose, 2011), and the possibilities of change related to these.

The study highlighted the interrelated affective and ontological dimensions of the environmental crisis, focusing on the ways these shape and are shaped by young humans and other than human animals. In the course of the research, being human in a human-induced environmental crisis became seen as an issue related in various ways to the modernist human/animal distinction maintained in educational practices. However, this same distinction appeared as one that can be ruptured and unlearned. The discussions also highlighted a space of agency, in which the young people pondered various, even conflicting modes of action within the environmental crisis. However, in particular in the zoo context, other than human animals’ worlds, agencies, and atmospheres were made visible, ones that easily are hidden behind normative educational accounts and human exceptionalist storylines.

Our contribution takes ethnographic observations from a school trip as its point of departure in order to explore relational becoming-with (Rautio et al. 2020; Timeto 2021) from an educational anthropological perspective. A central concern in social and cultural anthropology has long been to understand local ideas and worldviews beyond Western models of thought, in order to account for forms of social organisation, relations to environment(s), and modes of existence in the world. In this context, established dichotomies such as subject/object, nature/culture, and human/non-human have been critically questioned (Latour 1993; Kohn 2013; Descola 2014; Viveiros de Castro 2015; 2016), and relational ontologies have been developed and debated (cf. Ingold 2011; Strathern 2020; 2024; Spyrou 2022).

Discussions of different forms of knowing, learning, acting, and being in the world that challenge Cartesian modes of thinking are constitutive of these debates and offer productive points of departure for the further development of relationally oriented educational anthropological research on childhood and schooling. Within this context, the motif of animism has been framed as a possible response to what has been described as a crisis of civilisation associated with the Anthropocene (Stürmer 2022, 41). Contemporary discussions of the so-called new animism are thus taken up as onto-epistemological considerations. Rather than conceiving animism as a coherent and unified ontology, current approaches emphasise animistic sensibilities (Swancutt 2019, 2), which emerge in specific moments, situations, and relations to particular beings, things, forces, or experiences (Stürmer 2021, 42).

Of particular relevance in debates on new animism is the question of what constitutes a person. Our approach draws on Nurit Bird-David’s seminal text Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology (1999). Following Marilyn Strathern, Bird-David conceptualises the person not as an “individual” but as a “dividual”: a subject that is not understood as a bounded, self-contained entity, but as relational, divisible, processual, and constituted through relationships. This understanding encompasses relations among all entities, including humans, non-humans, and inanimate objects, as well as affects, desires, thoughts, and concepts. As Bird-David argues, “against materialistic framing of the environment as discrete things stands relationally framing the environment as nested relatedness” (1999, 78).

One of the most pressing questions facing educational anthropology in the early twenty-first century concerns the conditions under which formal education can function as a driving force for social change towards more egalitarian, inclusive, and sustainable societies. In this contribution, this concern is further developed by situating it within relational epistemologies. This makes it possible to reconceptualise learning as learning to relate, thereby connecting children and humans more broadly to relations among people, places, and more-than-human entities. Subjects are not assumed to pre-exist these relations but emerge through ongoing interconnections with human and non-human others, becoming continuously constituted through processes of becoming-with.

Against this theoretical backdrop, the paper draws on ethnographic observations from a school trip to a forest to explore becoming-with from an educational anthropological perspective. Engaging with current debates on the Anthropocene, relational theory and new animism, the contribution asks how processes of subjectification and education beyond an anthropocentric framework can be empirically described, and how such a perspective can be made productive for ethnographic educational research.

This paper introduces the method ‘episodic participant observation’ (Svendby, 2025). This is a flexible and pragmatic alternative to the traditional and idealized long-term fieldwork far from home (Geertz, 1973; Glesne, 2006; Goffman, 1989; Mead, 1928). In the paper, I present unfortunate effects of this idealization. I argue that the idealization promotes a fully functioning researcher with few responsibilities i.e., in most cases a young, white, non-disabled male that moves free of obligations or restrictions, gendered or otherwise. Producing knowledge from this perspective – and only this perspective – is both a loss for ‘Other’ researchers (e.g., some disabled researchers) and for academia – which will systematically miss out on certain types of knowledge and continue producing the truths and worldviews of the privileged (Weiner, 1988). To increase accessibility, ‘episodic participant observation’ is introduced to open for an alternative where participant observation may be conducted ‘episodically’, meaning for shorter or longer timespans, planned or spontaneously, and at any location.