In the state of Queensland, volunteers perform much of the work needed to prevent the extinction of threatened species who are native and unique to this continent. Acting from an understanding of interspecies justice, caring people rescue and rehabilitate hundreds of thousands of wild animals every year. Many of these same people conduct informal environmental education to bring to community attention the problematics of extinction by seeking the material expression of an ethics of conviviality. Using a document case study approach, this paper narrates aspects of the kindship work of a network of carers and educators of flying foxes who undertake informal environmental education as part of their care practices. Volunteering to care and educate for Australian flying mammals is a form of activism in a nation with a mammalian extinction crisis that still fails to meet its obligations under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 15. This paper describes how volunteer run informal environmental education in far north Queensland is driven by a strong sense of multispecies care.

Colourised photographs have become a popular form of social media content, and this article examines how the digital sharing of colourised colonial photographs from the Sápmi region may develop into a kind of informal visual repatriation. This article presents a case study on the decolonial photographic practices of the Sámi colouriser Per Ivar Somby, who mines digitised photo archives, colourises selected photos, and subsequently shares them on his social media profiles. The article draws on a qualitative, netnographic study of Somby's Colour Your Past profiles in Facebook and Instagram and demonstrates how Somby and his followers reclaim photos of Sámi people produced during historical encounters with non-Sámi photographers. Drawing on Hirsch's (2008, 2012) concept affiliative postmemory, the analysis examines how historical information and affective responses becomes interwoven in reparative readings of colonial photos.

This study critically examines the implications of integrating Indigenous relational worldviews into the water governance framework of the Saskatchewan River Delta. Using a relational theoretical framework and community-based participatory research methodology, both Indigenous community members and non-Indigenous researchers collectively examine the negative impacts of Western water governance policies and practices on the Métis community residing in Cumberland House, located in northeast Saskatchewan, Canada. Through Indigenous traditional water story-sharing methods with Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers, our focus centres on Indigenous interpretations and ways of knowing the Delta. The community highlighted the pervasive influence of power dynamics and political agendas in the governance of the Delta. As such, we emphasise the necessity of challenging settler colonial systems and structures and reinvigorating Indigenous worldviews for water governance. By doing so, we advocate for the advancement of Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination in their relationship with land and water, thereby promoting the meaningful implications of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action.

This paper reflects on the national referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament that took place in Australia in mid-October 2023. At the time of writing, the aftershocks from the failure of the referendum to gain the necessary majorities were still being felt keenly by many of the Voice advocates and supporters. The hurt and grief of many First Nations people were shared by millions of non-Indigenous “Yes” voters, while much reckoning continued in the subsequent weeks and months. The author here explores what might have been gained if more attention had been given to what an Indigenous Voice to Parliament might “sound like,” instead of the excessive focus on, and public discourse around what it might “look like.” Resources from the philosophies and physiology of voice, communication ethics, cultural studies, critical anthropology, Australian Indigenous writing and scholarship, and psychoanalytic politics are utilised to explore the connections between the human voice, vocal expression, hearing and listening, silence and song.

Our current ecological predicament requires a shift to a post-anthropocentric educational paradigm in which we educate for and about a world that is not “for us,” but comprised of a multitude of eco-systems of which we are simply a part. To facilitate this, education should be enacted differently; we need to experience learning not as furthering entrenched nature/culture binaries, but as “worlding” processes, whereby imaginary divides between individual and environment are troubled, as humans and the material world are revealed to be relational and entangled. Posthumanism offers an affective turn towards a social and ecological justice that accounts for such entanglements; enacted through necessary processes of de-familiarisation from the dominant vision of education. In this article we firstly explore the theoretical underpinnings of critical posthumanism to critique sustainability education-as-usual and propose new modes of teaching that lean into affective processes of noticing and surrender. We then discuss a research project in which participants came together to explore what happens when we cease to privilege humans as the ultimate instructors and holders of knowledge. In doing so we disrupt normative methodologies, drawing on affect, embodiment, relationality, transdisciplinarity and an ethics of care which extend learning to more-than-human kin.

The research field of online informal English learning has revealed associations of various informal digital English activities and second language vocabulary development. However, most of these studies have regarded digital resources as uniform entities when investigating their potential for vocabulary development and have failed to consider learners’ idiosyncratic interaction with the resources driven by self-defined purposes of use. Informed by the uses and gratifications theory, this study explored how three purposes of extramural digital experience (entertainment, socialization and information) relate to vocabulary knowledge, based on the survey responses from 322 undergraduate Chinese EFL learners and their receptive vocabulary knowledge. PLS-SEM analysis uncovered differential associations of the three media use purposes with receptive vocabulary knowledge. The study also revealed that the associations between the purposes of informal digital activities and vocabulary knowledge differed depending on whether the vocabulary was high frequency or low frequency. Additionally, it was found that the strategic use of digital resources, in terms of cognitive attention to and processing of lexical information that are facilitative of vocabulary learning during and/or after the interaction, played a significant moderating role in the relationship between digital activities for information purposes and receptive knowledge of high-frequency vocabulary. The findings highlight the importance of considering media use purposes in future research and pedagogical practices.

The invitation to speak at this conference on corpora and data-driven language learning (DDL) at COSEDI, the University of Grenoble, was received at the beginning of February 2023. ChatGPT had been released on 30 November 2022 and it was already becoming obvious that this technology would present revolutionary opportunities and challenges for corpus applications to language learning. Through a limited number of case studies – the Collins Cobuild Dictionary, a data-driven workshop for academic writing for research students, and the replication of the tasks used in the workshop, using ChatGPT – this presentation selectively highlights the trajectory of DDL from its beginnings to the present day and takes a look into a possible future with large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT.

Digital media have changed the ways people mobilise and act collectively in times of crisis. During the Russian aggression against Ukraine, they have been at the forefront of war coverage giving users the possibility to share experiences of wartime reality. To critically engage in the mediatisation of the current war in the context of war witnessing, this article aims at studying the war diaries shared on media during the Russo-Ukrainian war. More precisely, this study focuses on the analysis of Facebook and MyWar platform digital war diaries that were triggered by Russia's full-fledged invasion of Ukraine 2022. The article seeks to understand the main tools for experiencing and constructing wartime reality and war trauma. The experimental work presented here provides one of the first investigations into how wartime witnessing of Russian aggression is happening and how it is shared in the contemporary space of digital media and fosters intellectual discussion about the dynamics of digital participation while witnessing and narrating war experiences.