Conference Agenda

The laboratory is not only a site for learning experimental skills and scientific production, but also a crucial space where scientific cognition and subjectivity are shaped. This study aims to explore how novice researchers in the laboratory form their scientific cognition and self-constitution through continuous interaction with frequently occurring non-positive results (experimental outcomes that are unexpected, inexplicable, or poorly reproducible).Challenging traditional views that treat the things and failures in experiments as passive objects or background, this study draws on Actor-Network Theory to re-conceptualize the lab as a dynamic assemblage woven together through the continuous associations and negotiations of human (i.e.,supervisors, peers) and non-human (i.e.,cells, instruments, non-positive results) actors.

We conducted in-depth interviews with 12 students from the School of Life Sciences in a leading Chinese university , combining with participant observation and analysis of material documents like lab records. By following the actors, we mapped the mutual trajectories of translation within this network.

The study finds that students initially experience non-positive results as a sign of personal inadequacy, leading to prolonged internal struggle.Through ongoing negotiation with a multiplicity of actors, both human and non-human, they gradually learn to reinterpret failure as a form of communication from material world that can provoke new questions. The re-shaping of cognition not only helps them develop practical strategies of trial-and-adjustment but also enables identity shift: translating from a controller who attempts to unilaterally master objects, into a coordinator who mediates between human and non-human actors. This process ultimately leads to demoralize failure and helps students redefine the boundaries of their agency by establishing a new world-relation: with the support of peers and through dialogue, to build a responsive and affective connection with a world they acknowledge as fundamentally uncontrollable. This study offers a new ontological perspective for understanding uncertainty, failure in science education.

What if empathy were fundamentally part of the world in its ongoing performativity? Understanding empathy as a complex multifaceted aesthetic phenomena, through which sense-making happens, opens it up to including non-human animals and material objects as well. Through affective flows and interfaces, not only are we capable of empathizing with non-human animals but also material objects. Drawing on Barad’s (2007) feminist posthumanism theory agential realism and multispecies ethics (Rose, 2012) this paper argues that empathy is a biologically innate, material-discursive practice through which all living creatures work toward biological order.

Empathy, foundational to all forms of life and interactions, has become a highly misconstrued, anthropocentric concept. But how, might you ask, could inanimate or non-human animals be connected to empathy? Through shared experience or energy embedded in their creation and form, empathy work in eliciting responses in helping us form meaningful relations with Others. In this case, empathy is done performatively, as something we do, not something we have.

This presentation features a series of short video artworks called antinarratives, designed to elicit more-than-human empathy through surprising encounters. These videos illustrate Batson’s (2019) eight types of empathetic behavior as they unfold in real-time, emphasizing how non-human agents contribute to empathy within entangled material and meaningful relations. Each piece immerses the viewer in empathetic behaviors, encouraging discussion as to how empathy arises beyond human-centered frameworks. The videos highlight how empathy is generated through dynamic interactions between humans and non-humans, presenting empathy as a relational and emergent process shaped by both material-discursive intra-actions and inter-species connections. Rather than excluding humans, the posthuman approach reframes our role as co-creators through empathy.

Positioned within the field of research-creation, this presentation explores multispecies climate fiction (cli-fi) as a speculative mode of inquiry that speculates-with other-than-humans. As a process-oriented and experimental praxis that integrates thinking, making, and doing, research-creation unsettles normative discourses and practices that restrict the possibilities of research and knowledge. Here, the use of artistic approaches is particularly directed at expanding understandings of knowledge-making. In this context, speculative fiction offers possibilities for building more affective and relational understandings, for example, regarding climate change.

The work presented here centers on the multispecies cli-fi story Canopy of the Hidden Alley, which emerged as part of a participatory workshop where city residents, artists, and scholars collectively imagined multispecies life in urban areas affected by climate change. Engaging creatively with participants' imaginaries, I developed the story as both a response to and an extension of their propositions. As such, the story is not a direct representation of the workshop findings, but a creative continuation, presenting a speculative exploration that embraces the multiplicity and complexity of the imaginative thinking and making processes. During the presentation, I will share parts of the the story alongside methodological reflections on research-creation and theoretical considerations of what it means to speculate-with other-than-humans in climate fiction.

The practice of speculating-with other-than-humans revealed the deep entanglements between human and other-than-human worlds, creating dialogue across species boundaries. Moreover, creative writing process uncovered new tensions and propositions that challenged and reshaped understandings of multispecies life in climate change, highlighting the emergent, situated, and responsive potential of speculative fiction as a mode of inquiry.

The increasing emphasis on speech and language in early childhood education (ECE) overlooks some of the complexities entangled within not-speaking such as environmental, microbial and affective relations which might be expressed in languages other than words. Drawing on multispecies encounters with nonlingual children, this presentation explores the potential of moving education beyond individual accountability and deficit models of human progress. By attuning to subtle registers of movement, atmospheres and sense-based ecologies, we become curious for onto-epistemologies that seem more relevant to the pedagogies and research of arts education in the post-Anthropocene.

We explore the tensions and fruitful connections arising at the intersections of arts and ECE through two cases: ‘artful sensing practices’ which are mobilised as nonlingual children experiment with multispecies movements (Churchill Dower, 2025), and multispecies research encounters with microbes in a forest (Hohti, 2024, unpublished). We attune to entanglements through inexpert experiments that help us to dismantle mastery, fostering multimodal, multisensory, and multispecies ways of knowing and challenging assumptions about differently capable bodies.

In this presentation, we pay attention to the heterogenous porosities, cracks, common worlds and alternative landscapes in multispecies inquiry that disrupt and enrich expectations of childhoods. We ask whether speculative methods and sensing practices might open more-than-human ecological spaces for creating new languages.

We propose that sensing languages enrich the more-than-human collaborations arising outside of the plan, after the event, in unsuspecting spaces and atmospheres, and can be seen as a necessary ‘ferality’ (Tsing et al., 2024, p.10), a modality vital for ‘ecologising’ ECE. In doing so, we shift the educational bullseye from knowledge acquisition to ways of knowing, and reconfigure arts education and childhood studies methodologies to foreground nested child ecosystems (Millei et al., 2025) in place of individuals as separate from environments.

In this paper, I explore and discuss relationships between human and more-than-human. I claim this concerns education in two ways. One is regarding the educational possibility of being addressed by the more-than-human, and the other is regarding care for future generations. To make this claim, I express and concretise such relationships through arts-based research in the form of creative writing, including a poem and two pieces of fiction. Starting from the idea that education is imbued with anthropocentric imaginaries and highlighting the more-than-human through the work of Haraway (2008), Curry (2008) and van Dooren (2007, 2009), I bring this further by connecting it to Biesta’s (2015b) work on the question of whether what we desire is actually desirable in education. Building on the work of Nisbet (1994) and Dewey (1916), this leads to a discussion of how progress, being central to education, needs to be renegotiated in order to become educational. In conclusion, I posit that, with a miseducated grasp and mastery of the world, human life is led to be continuously unfazed by the more-than-human face. But there is hope.