Conference Agenda

We present a qualitative educational study situated within environmental education. The study, which involved Greek senior high school students, explored oral history both as a research approach and a pedagogical method in the context of a place-based school program. The aim was to empower students as citizens and young researchers of their environments in the direction of a critical pedagogy of place (Greenwood, 2013).

The study was organized along three relational axes: (a) the researcher/educator and the learning process, (b) the students and their research, and (c) the researcher/educator and the students' research. Our focus was on the spiral development of the students' sense of place as a key dimension of environmental action competence (Jensen & Schnack, 1997).

This study contributes to qualitative research theory and practice by combining environmental education with oral history while reflecting on the integration of historical and personal/collective memory perspectives into environmental education research. It also advances research on environmental oral history by developing qualitative approaches that explore the dynamic relationships between humans and their environments.

What happens when ecomuseums meet postqualitative inquiry? This paper explores that encounter as both methodological and ethical disruption. Given museum’s deeply colonial history and its grounding in Western epistemologies of control, permanence, and expertise, a postqualitative approach offers ways to reimagine heritage practices as relational, situated, and plural. Emerging organically from early fieldwork experiences in Brazil and Scotland, this inquiry rejects predetermined methods and comparative frameworks, responding instead to Elizabeth St. Pierre’s (2019) provocation: “Why do we think we should know what to do before we begin to inquire?”

Through engagement with ecomuseums as spaces of community practice, the study treats heritage not as a stable category but as an unfolding assemblage of relations—an active process of negotiation with change. Heritage practices here are understood not as the act of preserving objects, but as an ongoing practice of care, reciprocity, and becoming, entangled with material vitality, and local desires. Postqualitative inquiry fits into this context as “Not a repetition of what is known, but rupture and provocation - a thinking at the limit” (Mazzei, 2021).

By bringing heritage practices into conversation with postqualitative thought, this research challenges the binaries of subject/object, expert/community, and nature/culture. It embraces uncertainty and emergence as generative forces in both research and ecomuseums. Agency is conceived as distributed across humans and nonhumans, places and materials, rather than centralized within institutions. When heritage encounters postqualitative inquiry, it becomes a living, plural, and unfinished field - an ethics of relation and transformation that opens possibilities for more sustainable practices of care. This inquiry offers an opportunity for both myself and the communities entangled within it to “not obtain knowledge by standing outside of the world, [but to be] part of the world in its differential becoming” (Barad, 2007).

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork at a Finnish composting facility and interviews with people who compost biowaste at home, this paper examines the dynamics of care and scale in composting practices. As many studies in the field of social scientific waste studies have illustrated, composting biowaste requires a lot of care – monitoring the temperature and moisture of the compost soil, and taking care of microbes, worms, soil and even the whole planet. However, like all care practices, composting involves situational exclusions of certain problematic entities and relations. Composting practices often entail awkward waste that needs to be excluded, such as avocado seeds or bones that do not break down in home composts, or plastics and other contaminants at composting facilities. Here, understanding the possibilities of care from the viewpoint of scale becomes crucial: waste is always taken care of in situated practices, and the scale of waste affects our ability to care for it. Simply put, the practices of composting kitchen waste at home differ significantly from those involved in treating retail food waste packaged in plastic at industrial-scale composting facilities. Thus, the exclusions inherent in these care practices are always connected to the scales of waste. I examine how these exclusions are enabled through what I term technologies of un/forgetting – practices and technologies that enable the management of awkward, problematic waste. These technologies include, for example, placing poorly decomposable biowaste in mixed waste bins, incinerating plastic waste received at composting facilities, or sampling the level of contaminants in compost soil. I argue that the exclusions enabled by technologies of un/forgetting are always temporary and situational. Even if we care for waste, awkward waste, such as microplastics or incineration ash, continues to haunt us if the problems related to the scales of waste remain unaddressed.

This presentation focuses on our own thinking and co-affective encounters with the Great African Seaforest in Cape Town, South Africa. Our presentation is a contribution to the emerging field of Critical Forest Studies which is "dedicated to critical, creative, and relationally embedded practices with forests”. While Critical Forest Studies has paid attention to land forests, less is known about the seaforest, and the entanglement between territorial and marine forests. We believe that we have a great deal to learn from the Great African Seaforest, in particular, as it has been under-researched from marine biology, oceanography, environmental and blue humanities perspectives. In keeping with the interconnected hydrological cycle of which we are all a part, we consider the Great African Seaforest, as a Global South “sentient interspecies learning community” for broader global politico-ethico-onto-epistemological practices and relations. In our presentation, we explore how our collaborative practice of reading-writing-photographing-swimming with the Great African Seaforest brings to the fore insights regarding kelp forest sentience, kelp forest imaginaries, kelp forest regeneration and kelp forest pedagogies. For the purposes of this presentation, we scheduled four swims throughout the month of August 2025. During these encounters we documented our swims with photos and videos, followed by freewriting sessions in nearby coffee shops. Interspersed with the swims we read marine biology and social science texts about kelp forests and the vegetal turn. In sharing excerpts of writings and visual images we give expression to how hopes and possibilities can grow in the light of our interconnectedness and shared vulnerability, as well as our interdependency with human and more-than-human worlds.

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. This presentation examines the relationships between plants and children in the context of Finnish early childhood education. The research framework includes theoretical, historical, and material aspects related to plant-child relations. In the research, I utilize Haraway's (2004) storytelling strategy in studying landscape assemblages (Tsing, 2017) in which children share their lives with plants.

The presentation is based on ongoing doctoral research. The first phase of the research examined growth, children and plants in the contexts of early childhood education, learning gardens and garden pedagogy. In this presentation, I will mainly focus on the next 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. What happens when the priority in encounters is not the child but the plant and how to consider plants in diverse encounters? What questions does conducting multispecies ethnography with plants raise? I will present preliminary observations from ethnographic material produced by walking-with (Springgay & Truman, 2018) a kindergarten group on excursions to the surrounding semi-urban areas, reflecting the experiences on selected theoretical frameworks.

The presentation challenges to think about environmental education from a multispecies relational perspective, and it offers insights of how to conduct multispecies inquiry with plants.