Conference Agenda

My doctoral dissertation develops utopian research in early childhood education (ECE) as a pathway for planetary citizenship. It addresses how utopia, understood as the imaginary reconstitution of society (Levitas, 2013), can make children’s complex environmental relations visible while opening space for unlearning harmful societal logics that reproduce ecological degradation and climate change. I define capitalist realism (Fisher, 2009) and intertwined coloniality (of power/knowledge/being/nature, de la Hoz et al., 2024) as sustaining forces behind the polycrisis and place these as explicit objects of pedagogical unlearning (McLeod et al., 2020; Azoulay, 2019; Zembylas, 2024).

A planetary perspective on citizenship examines humans’ multifaceted entanglements with societal life and the biosphere, as well as the lifelong formation of global agency and environmental stewardship. Conceptually, the study advances a planetary ethics of co‑responsibility (da Silva, 2011); a shift from individualized responsibility toward relational entanglements between human and non‑human worlds. A decolonizing approach to planetary ethics foregrounds not only this shared responsibility, but also understanding of historical justice, ecological interconnectedness and the imagination of decolonial futurities. Within this frame, utopia functions as a critical counter‑image of the present (Lakkala, 2020), oriented by a “desire for a better being” (Levitas, 2010, 9), thereby combining social critique and political imagination. In the context of ECE, utopian methodology becomes a child‑centered, playful means for imagining the world as we know it otherwise, and building capacities for environmental stewardship.

The project examines (1) the way small children (aged 5–6) articulate environmental relations and ideals of environmental agency in their lived societies; and (2) utopia’s pedagogical potential for unsettling unsustainable environmental relations and opening space for the re-imagination of these relations. The overall aim is to cultivate children’s political imagination and planetary understanding in critical environmental and sustainability education (ESE) by unsettling dominant narratives and unlearning colonial‑capitalist onto-epistemologies.

Research questions.

1. Theoretical: What does political imagination with 5–6‑year‑olds contribute to research on unlearning – specifically, unlearning capitalist realism and coloniality?
2. Methodological: How can children’s environmental relations and ideals of environmental agency be studied in an ethical and child‑centered manner amid the complex and politicized reality of the polycrisis?
3. Practical: Which research‑informed pedagogical practices are translatable to everyday ECE to both support planetary understanding and agency (learning) and dismantle unsustainable environmental relations (unlearning)?

Framing the ECE setting as a legitimate site of political subjectivity and utopian research, the project reconceives children not only as knowers of their immediate surroundings but also as political actors capable of utopian thinking. Although research on children’s political views has been conducted before, this tradition has largely focused on children’s understanding and views of societal phenomena in their existing forms – not on what society could be (Jost et al., 2022).

This proposal foregrounds atmosphere as a key analytic for understanding how climate knowledge is produced, constrained, and potentially transformed within workshop-based practices. From a relational ontological perspective, atmosphere can be understood as an assemblage in which humans, non-humans, time, and things are co-produced through entanglement, rather than as discrete or pre-existing entities (Barad, 2007). Drawing on Hohti’s work, atmosphere is understood not as a mood, feeling, or background context, but as an affective–material–discursive condition that emerges in pedagogical situations and actively shapes what becomes possible to think, feel, say, and do (Hohti, 2016; Hohti & Juelskjær, 2019). Stewart (2011) describes that an atmosphere is a force field: not an inert context and not an effect of other forces but a lived capacity to affect and to be affected that pushes a present into a composition. As method, following Stewart, atmospheres offers us an approach to the intensities in more-than-human encounters and events, which ‘accumulate and pool up in worldings’ (Stewart 2011, 452)

In eco-emotion workshop practices, atmosphere becomes particularly salient. Such workshops can be understood as temporary collectives and experimental spaces where affective–material arrangements may unsettle dominant climate narratives and open alternative forms of relationality, care, and accountability. Rather than focusing on what workshops teach about climate justice, an atmospheric lens attends to how climate knowledge is produced through bodily presence, spatial configuration, rhythm, silence, and sensory engagement. Atmospheres are perpetually forming and deforming, remaining unfinished and indeterminate as bodies enter into relation with one another and with more-than-human forces (Stewart, 2011).

A workshop creates a kind of atmospheric attunement—a tuning into the relational field of the world. It’s not about excavating emotions that were already there, but about generating the conditions that allow what doesn’t easily surface to come into emergence. Therefore, rather than advancing fixed research questions, this project is guided by the following lines of inquiry:

• How are eco-emotional atmospheres collaboratively generated through bodily, spatial, and more-than-human relations in workshop settings?
• In what ways do eco-emotion workshops reconfigure participants’ capacities to sense and be affected by ecological loss and more-than-human presence?
• How do moments of silence, proximity, and material engagement contribute to the emergence of affective intensities within eco-emotional pedagogical spaces?
• Rather than treating emotions as internal states, how might eco-emotions be understood as relational events that unfold across bodies, spaces, and environmental elements?

Critical examination of human-centered ways of thinking has become topical as complex crises challenge sustainable development. In education research, attention has begun to be paid to relationships and living with multispecies companions. However, recent initiatives to include relational ontology and multispecies insights in educational discourses have mostly focused on animal relations, while plant companions have hardly been taken as an explicit focus (e.g. Tammi et al., 2023). In this presentation I examine the relationships between plants and children in the context of Finnish early childhood education and care (henceforth ECEC). The presentation is based on ongoing doctoral research, which is situated in the intersections of early childhood education, multispecies studies, and critical plant studies. My objective is to critically examine how plants and children relate to each other in educational practices by asking 1) In what ways cultural, historical, and material aspects are present in plant-child encounters? and 2) What kind of histories bring plants and children together in urban multispecies landscapes?

I ground the theoretical background of the research in posthumanist and feminist new materialist literature. I take the standpoint of relational ontologies to see how the relationship between plants and children can be seen through disorienting focus from the child and moving it to plant-child relations. Multispecies approach allows me to emphasize the entanglements of human and other-than-human in various assemblages (van Dooren et al., 2016; Tammi et al., 2023) and critical plant studies to address plants as relational agentic beings (Lawrence, 2022). I view children and plants as participants in landscape assemblages (Tsing, 2017, 2020), that is, gatherings of human and nonhuman becomings in their mutual world-making or worlding (Haraway, 2007). The concept of worlding is used in decentering the ideas of individual identity and self-forming autopoiesis, and in moving towards the idea of becoming-with in sympoiesis: life is interdependent and collaborative co-making, shared becoming with (Haraway, 2007, 2016). Conducting postqualitative inquiry, I orientate my thinking and practices with theory and concepts and read the data through multiple theoretical insights diffractively (see Jackson & Mazzei, 2023; Lenz Taguchi & St. Pierre, 2017; Mazzei, 2014; St. Pierre, 2021).

In this presentation, I will focus on the empirical phase of the research, in which plant-child relations are mapped using multispecies ethnography. I will highlight perspectives on how history, culture, and materiality are present in plant-child encounters and how they bring plants and children together in the diverse landscapes of cities. I will explore what happens when the priority in encounters is not the child but the plant, how to consider plants in diverse encounters, and what questions does conducting multispecies ethnography with plants raise. I will present observations from ethnographic data, reflecting them on selected theoretical frameworks. Inspired by the bag-lady storytelling practice described by Haraway (2004), I present the expected outcomes of this study as narrative vignettes.

The presentation offers insights of how to conduct multispecies inquiry with plants. It also challenges us to think about ECEC environmental and sustainability education from more-than-human point of view. This research has implications beyond the Finnish context. Relational more-than-human perspectives are not prevalent in European educational contexts, which are mostly built on humanities and natural sciences. However, there is a need to review our place in nature as part of a more-than-human world. This presentation may open space for dialogue among researchers and practitioners on how plant-child relations can be (re)considered in education.