Preamble
Summer in islandic Southeast Mediterranean. June, to be more precise. For most, this allures to bright sun and crisp wind — Zέφυρoς (Zephyr), in ancient Greek mythology and in sailors’ etiquette — blue waters and hot sand. After a visit and an educational programme at a nearby museum, a primary school goes to the beach. This young child strolls up and down the coastal line, right where the waves collapse on land. She stands still in front of the sea, takes her shoes off and sits on the sand. Her hand goes up and down, stroking lightly the sand. Again and again, what seems to be an unconscious movement, in its iteration becomes a digging in the sand. A hole starts to form … she becomes aware, turns on her knees and indulges in the digging. As the hole gets bigger and bigger, one by one we start strolling right next to her. “What are you doing?” asked one teacher whilst sitting on his calves and tilting his head towards her. I believe he is still waiting for an answer. The child, immersed in the methexis of being with the sand, is living the rhythms of the sand, becomes-sand. Suddenly, she stops. She picks out of the hole The Treasure, a shell. She brings it close to her face, she looks at it closely, she turns it, she blows at it and takes the sand off it. “You know, they say that if you bring it close to your ear, you can hear the sea,” says another teacher, also sitting on her calves by her. The child looks at her and, without a single word, just brings the shell close to her ear. After a while, she puts it down, carefully, and keeps on digging. A tiny creature comes out running for the sea. More of them would peep out from that hole. “What are these?” we ask one another. No one knew. We didn’t even have the chance to get a close look at them. We only noticed aerial shadows swirling toward the sea. As the hole would get bigger and bigger, it would lure more and more teachers and children. Some of the children would take the sand by the hole and start forming things. Others would join in the digging. Among sand and shells and children and seagulls, what could have been children in nature escaping the confines of the school, or children learning in nature, even children re-connecting with nature, allures to the onto-epistemological, as ways of living, thinking-feeling and knowing.
Re-enlivening such event of my teaching-pedagogical practice is a way of relating that activates the (re)invention of concepts and connections. It is a movement that refutes application and results, mastery and control. Such relation does not subsume itself with interpretation or illustration, turning itself to a model for practice or inquiry. That would turn such events and education into the exemplary practice, a reduction to repetitions of the same instead of stirring up forces of life, as stressed by Christopher Naughton and David R. Cole (Reference Naughton, Cole, Naughton, Biesta and Cole2018). Openness and improvisation shift away from individual accounts of the human teacher and child to consider the multi- of events and the inextricability of the ontological and epistemological as well as the ethical and political of environmental education. An inquiry is enacted rethinking philosophical relations and criticality, as Paul Hart and Peta J. White (Reference Hart and White2022) discuss and, I would add, honouring ontological difference and diverse ways of thinking-feeling and living, prompting a re-imagining of environmental education. In our predicament, ecological degradation and inequalities have been accelerated by the violences of the -isms (capitalism, colonialism, imperialism). By evoking relational education, a worlding process beyond the fixation on the individual and the environment as bounded entities, is an ‘otherwise’ worthy of its times.
In approaching this contribution as a postqualitative assemblage, inquiry refutes normalisation and categorisation. Such an assemblage probes the conditions of life, countering stability and universality that separate knowing from being and doing and stresses the process of how various elements shape and are shaped one through the other. This kind of inquiry is formed in working the relationality of theory, storying and artmaking and in performing cartographies and imaginaries of Southeast Mediterranean. Cartographies, as Rosi Braidotti (Reference Braidotti2013, p. 163) notes, is a reading of the present, theoretically and politically informed, accounting for one’s locations and unveiling power-relations. In this contribution, cartographies are approached in terms of nonlinear timespace in thinking-with the work of Karen Barad, that is, the past and the future being enfolded in the present. As time and practice, the importance of place, complexity and challenging ideas of control enact an “otherwise” of wild pedagogies and education (Jickling & Sterling, Reference Jickling and Sterling2017; Jickling, Blenkinsop, Timmerman & De Danann Sitka-Sage Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Timmerman and De Danann Sitka-Sage2018; Blenkinsop & Henderson, Reference Blenkinsop, Henderson, Henderson and Blenkinsop2022; Paulsen et al., Reference Paulsen, Jagodzinski and Hawke2022), this contribution nuances such approaches through wilding urban sketching and more-than-human pedagogical and curricular wildings in Southeast Mediterranean. These wildings are performing imaginaries of Southeast Mediterranean; emerging in-practice rather than being prepared and modelled and responsive to conditions and events without abolishing the ghosts of the violences of the -isms (capitalism, colonialism, imperialism) in a region that suffered them throughout the centuries. The postqualitative assemblage of this contribution probes how such relationalities work, experimenting with concept-ing in-practice and evoking various connections.
Wildings: An otherwise in and beyond the Anthropocene
In the edginess of and beyond the Anthropocene — Plantationocene, where land has been transformed into an extractive and enclosed autarkic plantation through clearing and slavery as well as other forms of transported, exploited and alienated labour; Capitalocene, underlining the destructive role of extractive capitalism; Chthulucene, where humans realise they are not the chosen ones and need live and make-with other kin in non-catastrophic ways, as Édouard Glissant (Reference Glissant and Wing2010) and Donna Haraway (Reference Haraway2016; Reference Haraway2015) discuss — the reverberations of centuries of violences and ecological degradation trigger the lust for “otherwise.” The globalised mindset of domestication, measurement and standardisation permeating life and dominating education emphasises the need to counteract “the madness of life under our present dictatorship of the callous and the unimaginative,” as Jack Halberstam (Reference Halberstam2019, p. n.p.) argues. Such a stance refutes claims to health and purity as responses to disease-approaches and rather suggests antic forms of life and pleasure — “random physical contact, anonymous conversations in public, wordless ballets of association carried out in gyms, on subways, on campuses and in the streets” (Halberstam, Reference Halberstam2019, p. n.p.). In this sense, the child’s random engagement with the sand and the shell along children and teachers and peeping creatures and seagulls and the sun, sea, and wind of the preamble, unfolded as “open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, as these coalesce in coordination across many kinds of temporal rhythms” as well as “spatial arcs,” as Anna Tsing (Reference Tsing2015, pp. 9, 22) discusses. In seeking renewed intimacies that counteract extraction-based -isms (such as capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, militarism, scientism), “otherwise” imaginaries emerge, ways of thinking-feeling and living that rework the relationality of the spatial and temporal, the pedagogical and curricular, the poetic and philosophical.
In times where necropolitics and extractive capitalism deem life as “surplus” to the requirements of power-formations (Brennan, Reference Brennan2024) and as “bare” commodity that may be disposed with impunity, beyond the legal and the ritual (Agamben, Reference Agamben1998), the posthuman convergence underlines how Man and Anthropos come to matter. The convergence of post-humanism, focusing on the critique of Man as the representational human universal archetype, and post-anthropocentrism, focusing on the critique of Anthropos’s exceptionalism in species’ hierarchy (Braidotti, Reference Braidotti2013), has challenged prepotent conceptualisations of life. The conversion of earth, peoples and biomes into marketable resources balancing on the cost-benefit financial scale engenders a sense of hopelessness and the need for relational ethics encompassing all life. Such urgency is suggested by Evelien Geerts and Delphi Carstens (Reference Geerts and Carstens2021, p. V) as a project calling us to engage with and seek resonances between new materialist and Deleuzoguattarian strategies of wildness that recognise the human as “entangled with the collective and the planetary environment” and counter discrete individuality. In problematising such an ontological individualism, Félix Guattari’s (Reference Guattari, Pindar and Sutton2000) work, The Three Ecologies, highlights the way unrivalled scientific and technological progress has beget impoverishment: increased pollution and loss of biodiversity, global warming and industrialisation, deforestation and desertification, alienation and exploitation, slavery and depopulation and, I would add, submergence of worlds, of ways of thinking-feeling and living and relevant practices, artistries, languages. This work underlines not only Earth’s being at the edge of ecocide but also extractive capitalism dulling encounters with the human and more-than-human world, infiltrating and saturating, neuroticizing and necrotising the social, mental and environmental ecology. Félix Guattari (Reference Guattari, Pindar and Sutton2000, p. 28) accentuates an “ethico-political articulation” refuting technocraticism and heritages of extractive development narratives. “Wild” practices respond to such numbing by probing new constellations and ways of subjectivation beyond the human.
The schizoid processes of extractive -isms — such as capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, industrialism, scientism — and their whirling effects highlight how environment, ideas, images, bodies and ways of thinking-feeling both shape and are shaped through one another. The way that environment, ideas, bodies are dynamically shaped through various processes whilst, at the same time, affecting such processes, is discussed by Stacy Alaimo (Reference Alaimo and Hekman2008; Reference Alaimo2016) as trans-corporeality. For Alaimo, the trans-corporeal advocates an ethical engagement that dwells in the dissolve and emanates from feminist and environmental practices of thinking-feeling that are often improvisational and “rooted in the ordinary practices of everyday life” (Reference Alaimo2016, p. 2). As bodies, ideas and environment are shaped through one-another, ways of living and doing that counter the disembodied and detached WesternFootnote 1 subject’s utilitarian mastery and objectivity through an ethic of responsibility, care and relationality — for instance, indigenous — are also entangled in processes generating the trans-corporeal. In being cautious of posthuman approaches in their re-colonising tendencies and extractivist relationships with indigenous cosmologies, And Pasley, Alejandra Jaramillo-Aristizabal and Noah Romero (Reference Pasley, Jaramillo-Aristizabal, Romero, Morales and Zarabadi2024) trouble Modern/ colonial tendencies of knowledge production by embracing Māori, Abya Yala, and Filipinx onto-epistemologies, querying the possibilities of upholding plural worlds and un/settling colonial humanism in education. Such problematisation is accentuated by Georgina Stewart (Reference Stewart2018) in highlighting how uncritical work that crosses multiple knowledge systems usually omits the marginalisation of indigenous people as well as the obliteration, appropriation, even denial of indigenous knowledge by the West. Whereas declarations of interest and respect can be felt as further colonisation, Stewart notes that collaborations of Western and indigenous knowledge could generate creative tensions. Such potential, though, is generated by honouring not just the worlds that Man and Anthropos sought to position and re-position — hierarchising, silencing and erasing, or elevating and including — but also the memory of practices of subjugation and eradication, resurrection and regeneration, and how these worlds tremble. Tending to these frictions and processes performs the indispensability, rather than the re-positioning, of “othered” worldings.
In probing further such tensions, this contribution attends to Southeast Mediterranean worldings. By Southeast Mediterranean, I not only refer to geographical coordinates, but also to ways of thinking-feeling and living that do not conform to Western philosophical approaches. I approach Southeast Mediterranean in its plurality — Mediterranean(s) —refuting fixity as a universal and homogeneous entity and honouring Relation and trembling encountersFootnote 2 in Édouard Glissant’s (Reference Glissant and Wing2010; Reference Glissant, Obaist and Ramadan2021) philosophy. Such Relation honours the suffering of -isms permeating life and the re-enlivening of submerged, subjugated ways of thinking-feeling and living. Southeast Mediterranean(s) worldings perform artistic, pedagogical and curricular wildings entangling the ethical and onto-epistemological with the political and the poetic, re-imagining environmental education and nuancing wild pedagogies.
Turning to non-Newtonian physics, Karen Barad’s (Reference Barad2010; Reference Barad2017; Reference Barad2019) work highlights how -isms and their effects are lived and felt in the everywhens and everywheres. In discussing Quantum Field Theory and its role in the catastrophe of nuclear bombing, Barad’s work highlights moments as “infinite multiplicity where other moments are here-now in particular constellations” (Reference Barad2019, p. 525). Each moment is made of various moments, “differently weighted and combined in their specific material entanglement” (Reference Barad2019, p. 528). The imperialist universalising sequentiality of time as the present preceded by the past and antecedent by the future and happenings as uniquely existing in time and place, thence, once ended, are no longer vibrant and felt, are blown to smithereens. Matter neither exists independently from space and time nor pre-exists its relations. As such, it does not unfold at the backdrop of a determinately empty void, a nothingness, against which it could be mapped in space and time as predictable and fixed, universal and homogeneous. Instead, Quantum Field Theory suggests the void as “innumerable imaginings of what might yet be/ have been […] as a scene of wild activities” (Reference Barad2019, pp. 528-9), refuting void as signifying emptiness, lack of, absence — a backdrop upon which that which matters is grasped in time and space. Rather, questions of emptiness — plentifulness, lack — excellence and absence — presence are ethicopolitical as questions of ontological difference and of what comes to matter and for whom. The void, in its connection with the violences of the -isms, is
a much-valued apparatus of colonialism, a crafty insidious imaginary, a way of offering justification for claims of ownership in the “discovery” of “virgin” territory — the particular notion that “untended,” “uncultivated, “uncivilized” spaces are empty rather than plentiful, has been a well-worn tool used in the service of colonialism, racism, capitalism, militarism, imperialism, nationalism, and scientism (Barad, Reference Barad2019, p. 529).
Effects of the -isms are lived and felt in the human and more-than-human world. Such material hauntology, “ghostly matters” (Barad, Reference Barad2010, p. 246), suggests not only an everlasting dynamism but also the entanglement of the ontological, ethical and epistemological as well as the political and poetic. Whether the structures of violence will be maintained or troubled, dismantled even, is inextricably linked with ways of thinking-feeling and doing, in this contribution probed through artistic (urban sketching) and pedagogical-curricular practice.
Wilding urban sketching
Urban sketching has been routinely approached as sketching-on-location rather than drawing from memory and reference-material inside a studio setting. It tends to zoom on the convergence of location and life, focusing on the intersections of architecture, scenery and people going about their daily lives as a form of visual storytelling. In this contribution, however, I approach urban sketching differently, a wilding urban sketching. Such practising is performed with (and is of) shells and cyclamens in Southeast Mediterranean — on the beach with the child and the seagulls and other creatures of the preamble (Figure 1), in the Museum of Natural History (Figure 2), between rocks and cobblestone roads and pavements of the next section (Figure 3). In wilding urban sketching, I respond to wild pedagogies’ call for enacting new ways of thinking-feeling, being and doing by querying artistically and intimately relationships with places, practices and the more-than-human world.
Wilding urban sketching — Preamble’s Shell (Beach). Artwork and image by the author.
Wilding urban sketching — Shell (Museum of National History). Artwork and image by the author.
Wilding urban sketching — Cyclamen. Artwork and image by the author.
Shells and cyclamens embody the intimacy of peoples and Land in islandic Southeast Mediterranean and enfold the violences of the -isms in the everwhens and everywheres. Wilding urban sketching de-appropriates shells as inanimate elements of cabinets of curiosities and museum collections that demonstrate “the restless desire and power of the modern West to collect the world” (Clifford, Reference Clifford1988, p. 196). The legitimisation of collection, classification and exhibition of the world and the justification of the subjugation and appropriation of Other worldings, what Édouard Glissant discusses as “the Western project of knowledge” (Reference Glissant and Wing2010, p. 57), I posit, is a force of the violences of the -isms that raises questions on the ethics and politics of othering nature and enclosing it in collections. Such wilding also problematises cyclamens, indigenous to the Mediterranean, as a specimen of scientism; of collecting, studying, species-ing and cataloguing as well as developing plant-conservation strategies to protect its diversity from the prevailing extinction enabled by climate change. Wilding urban sketching honours material hauntings (Barad, Reference Barad2019, p. 539) refuting the erasure of the ghosts of the -isms and probing a thinking-feeling and doing otherwise. Such wilding urban sketching is an embodied artistic practice of re-membering (Barad, Reference Barad2017), of the enfoldment of the violences of the -isms, colonial practices of othering, in the everywhens and everywheres. These materially haunted encounters suggest,
The past is never closed, never finished once and for all, but there is no taking it back, setting time aright, putting the world back on its axis. There is no erasure [of past violences] finally […] Time can’t be fixed. To address the past (and future), to speak with ghosts, is not to entertain or reconstruct some narrative of the way it was, but to respond, to be responsible, to take responsibility for that which we inherit (from the past and the future), for the entangled relationalities of inheritance that “we” are, to acknowledge and be responsive to the noncontemporaneity of the present, to put oneself at risk, to risk oneself (which is never one or self), to open oneself up to indeterminacy in moving towards what is to come. Responsibility is by necessity an asymmetrical relation/doing, an enactment, a matter of différance, of intra-action, in which no one/ no thing is given in advance or ever remains the same (Barad, Reference Barad2010, p. 264).
As an asymmetrical relation, wilding urban sketching probes a non-representational practice. The images are not skilful sketches of shells and cyclamens as forms that elucidate and inform. Rather, such wilding urban sketching resonates with what Jack Halberstam (Reference Halberstam2020, p. 53) discusses as “a bewildering relation” to temporalities, spaces and terrains; the entanglement of colonial notions of the wild and a wilding that is not confined in one moment in time and in apparatuses of enclosure. Wilding, a philosophical concept emerging in-practice, reaches for new arrangements of bodies, temporalities, spatialities, forces that escape human grasp and order. Wilding urban sketching, then, plays with an aesthetic and ethics of bewilderment as forces refuting to be inanimated and stilled by colonial notions of capturing truthfully the state of things and burying the violences of the -isms. Playing with shadows and materials in sketching (as in the images of this contribution) not only honours ghostly matters (Barad, Reference Barad2010, p. 246) but also reconfigures the Glissantian notion of opacity as an aesthetico-ethico-political concept of Relation. For Glissant, opacity counters reductive transparency as “the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought” (Reference Glissant and Wing2010, pp. 189–190), a tool of control and domination. Glissant, in his penchant for “the right to opacity” (Reference Glissant and Wing2010, p. 194), underlines the invaluable Diverse, the refusal of reduction and assimilation according to universalised values and norms. Opacity then, when thought through the aesthetic of bewilderment, defamiliarises conventional urban sketching honouring the im/possibility of reducing the Other to a representation and performing imaginings of what might yet have been/be(come). Such wilding is a form of worlding, beyond classification and application, that strings a never-ending story of the violences of the -isms.
What might seem as dark and untransparent or even irritating and confusing in the wilding urban sketching images, possibly estranging at a first glance, is a deliberate choice when reconfiguring the notions of ghostly matters (Barad, Reference Barad2010) and opacity (Glissant, Reference Glissant and Wing2010) in artmaking and wilding pedagogy. This choice works as ethico-political articulation countering the impoverishment brought by the schizoid technocratic mentality (Guattari, Reference Guattari, Pindar and Sutton2000) and highlights the trans-corporeality (Alaimo, Reference Alaimo and Hekman2008) of bodies, ideas, and environment defamiliarizing urban sketching and nuancing wild pedagogies and environmental education. It requests a shifting away from mentalities of fast and easy backgrounding of living pedagogical-teaching encounters in favour of measurable cognitive tasks and of consuming nature and backdropping environment or education (whether outside, at the beach/ mountain, or inside, in the museum). In the specific project, it requests slowing-down in living and teaching-pedagogical moments, in the artistic process and in engaging with museum collections and creative-scholarly works, triggering non-linear conceptions of timespace and activating new connections. It problematises “locating the wild” as well as “teachers’ making time” suggested by wild pedagogies (Jickling et al., Reference Jickling, Blenkinsop, Timmerman and De Danann Sitka-Sage2018) and probes the manifold of time, space, place and practices that un-“us” us from anthropo- and human- centric subjectivations. It suggests teachers encountering the wild in its connections with -isms, probing such connections and opening spaces to problematise such moves and enact “otherwise” worldings. The wilding urban sketching also nuances wild pedagogies probing artmaking in environmental education and opening spaces for teachers, students and communities. Such artmaking and wild pedagogy go beyond expression, even skill of the master-artist, to an inquiry of encounters with the wild, the world and the trans-corporeal relational self.
In revisiting the Museum of Natural History and encountering the plethora of shells in its exhibitions, time was imploded on itself, with each moment of being in the museum diffracted with various other moments. I re-enlivened (Barad, Reference Barad2017) the encounter with the child, the shell and the beach of the preamble. I re-encountered -isms heritages in Southeast Mediterranean: imperial ruling (Roman and Byzantine, House of Lusignan, Venetian, Ottoman and British, to name a few), crusades and massacres, wars and displacements, and colonising Western philosophical approaches including othering nature and environment, Ford-ian conceptualisations of education standardising pedagogies and inanimating education. -isms heritages permeate thinking-feeling-practising reconfiguring wilding urban sketching by entangling art and philosophy, pedagogy and environmental education, querying how -isms are felt and lived in the everywhens and everywheres and honouring such ghosts.
Pedagogical and curricular more-than-human wildings
The broad spectrum of Wild Pedagogies renegotiates the intersections of education and environment in the Anthropocene. Anthropocene suggests new understandings of time and space, matter and void as well as agency and responsivity. Humankind is considered not only a geomorphic force (Crutzen, Reference Crutzen2002) in acknowledging extractive -isms, but also an “intemperate force” (Yusoff, Reference Yusoff2013, p. 781) alongside other forces, Earthian and extraterrestrial, enacting planetary agency. At the same time, humankind cannot be held together in homogeneity unproblematically, as the violences of the -isms enable and are enabled by privileged exploitation of peoples and the Earth. As Kristen Simmons (Reference Simmons2017, p. n.p.) accentuates, “the conditions we breathe in are collective and unequally distributed, with particular qualities and intensities that are felt differently through and across time.” Anthropocene, thence, is conceived not only as an epoch but also as a mode of thinking (Colebrook, Reference Colebrook2020) and living as well as an ingrained concept of the violences of the -isms.
Wildings problematise, unfurl and even undo violences inherent in power-formations, apparatuses of “we”-ness and enclosure, through performing cartographies and imaginaries. In re-turning (Barad, Reference Barad2017) to projects with children, communities and the more-than-human world in Southeast Mediterranean, wildings is queried as pedagogical and curricular more-than-human troublings that rework ethical relations by problematising dominant values of colonial legacy and imperial systems of thinking.
Walking with (primary-school) children in the semi-mountainous area their community lives is an honouring, perhaps through the re-enlivening and un-submerging, of ways of thinking-feeling and living. Accompanied with (grand-&)parents, we walked the rural paths connecting cultivated land right next to the school and residential area, hills and forest. Such endeavour opened-up to attuning and noticing; smells, sounds, swirling tiny creatures and many other feltings. From low bushes whose leaves are turned into herbs, to rocky hills where wild cyclamens thrive, such walking is a pedagogical and curricular wilding. It gave rise to -isms atmospherics of islandic Southeast Mediterranean; affective atmospheres of the violences of the -isms (capitalism, colonialism, imperialism), ineffable and intense, vibrating so lively that can be felt, actively created through assemblages of humans, more-than-humans and environment. Walking enacted a thinking-feeling where the past and future are enfolded in the present and evoked multiple intensities.
In such practising, islandic life unfolds through residential areas, cultivated land and forest land. Old anthropological texts describe the region’s life: small houses made out of clay, stones and wood, dirt and cobblestone roads, tiny creatures (such as annoying mosquitoes) and domesticated animals, olive trees and low bushes, and the natives of the area as resilient (throughout various rules) yet primitive and underdeveloped in the Western eye. Sir Samuel White Baker — an English officer, explorer, naturalist, hunter, writer, among other titles — visited Southeast Mediterranean in the 19th century. Throughout his journeying, from Egypt to Mediterranean islands, like Cyprus, to Africa, from exploring the Nile to big-game hunting in Asia, Africa and North America, he wrote various books and articles of anthropological interest. One of such texts, Cyprus as I saw it in 1879 (Sir Baker, Reference Sir Baker1879), describes natives and their ways of living as well as the biomes and flora of the area we were walking. The following excerpt zooms on his approach towards cyclamens, a plant embodying the intimacy of nature in islandic life.
I could only find two varieties, the snow-white, with claret-coloured centre, and the rose-colour; but the blossoms were quite equal in size to those usually grown in our glass-houses in England (Sir Baker, Reference Sir Baker1879, p. 105) […] their variegated leaves ornamented the white stones as they emerged like bouquets from the crevices of fallen rock (p. 239).
His description of cyclamens is accurate, thorough, in accordance with a species-ing account, demonstrating his grasp and control over the matter and over nature, that is, over all casted at the fringes of Man and Anthropos (Braidotti, Reference Braidotti2013). As the title of his text denotes, as I saw it, Sir Baker’s study is focused on the optical, an examination from outside and above, much like a specimen trapped in a glass-jar. Islandic life is denoted based on his presuppositions, through the eye of the governor and ruler of the island, described as a discovery and an adventure, and compared with bounded, isolated, grasped and positioned “others” of the world and in a way that fits in the narratological formation of the “superior” imperial stance.
-isms atmospherics permeate our walking. Such atmospherics oscillate among the remnants of former rules of the island, the clearance and expansion of land for residence, the industrialisation of nearby areas, the semi-ruined and reconstructed old houses, the submergence of ways of living and the subjugation of knowledges, practices, artistries, languages. Noticing and halting to smell and touch, we “got lost” in the memory of submergence and the re-enlivening of subjugated knowledges inextricably linked with ways of living. The making of herbs and even cutlery from the leaves and branches of bushes glowed and underlined the more-than of the multisensory. The old houses made of πλίνθoς (clay and hey), stone, reed and wood also glowed. These are natural materials of the area, characteristic of local rural engineering that, along with the characteristic local rural architecture, not only resulted in houses that were cool during summer and warm during winter but also made the distinction of inside-outside and domestic-wild porous. Such wisdom evokes an ethics of inhabiting where “the domestic does not domesticate and the walls do not divide” (Alaimo, Reference Alaimo2016, p. 1). Furthermore, such wisdom is a way of living in reciprocal respect with the environment, an ethics of wilding. Both practices have been swamped by industrialisation. Packaged herbs and functional cutlery are sold in abundance. The materials used in buildings and the building-process itself are highly regulated at the image of globalised control-systems; an approach through which old wisdom has been either catapulted or inundated by the extractivist mindset of capitalism and development. Our unexpected bumping into a flock of sheep roaming around in the fields intensified wilding ethics triggering questions, some of which had to do with living with animals and traditional ways of dairy-production. Such encounters enabled the problematisation of taken-for-granted knowledges and ways of thinking and living.
Visiting with children a contemporary industrial dairy-production unit unfolded and intensified the modernisation of buildings and of fermented foods and how such modernisation trembles with the wild. In accordance with the industrialised mode of doing, we maintained two straight lines, met with our guide and wandered the icy-cold establishments. Standing behind glass, we saw the production-line ending in small airtight packages moving along the spotless stainless-steel conveyor belt while listening to our guide explaining the entire process. The whole time, workers with their white robes, shiny wellies, hairnets and masks were keeping an eager eye on the machinery. The visit could be limited in the “learning about” the whats and hows of the production of industrial dairy-goods, products that, albeit trademarked as traditional, are nonetheless produced and packaged through certified practices in highly controlled laboratory premises. Such visit though highlighted the risk of losing not only microbial diversity but also the heritage and wisdom of ways of sustaining it, of fermentation practices and diverse ways of creating fermented foods and their rich textures, smells and flavours. This kind of modernisation, even though accredited, stresses the call for unsettling the violence of corporate and colonial food systems by re-centring “living ecologies and interconnected systems across foodways” (Fishel et al., Reference Fishel, Winter and Burke2021, p. 6). Our gathering in the unit’s café and the very kind gesture of being offered freshly made dairy products gave rise to discussions that problematised ethics and probed the trembling of the wild with the modernised world and how this is lived and felt in the everywheres. Departing from commentaries such as “this is not how my grandmother does it” to “my grandmother’s is tastier because she puts in mint and thyme but harder to chew and bigger” to the ethics of respecting the animals’ giving birth by ceasing milking during that time. Such questions are often approached as a clash between “traditional” and “contemporary.” When thought through wild pedagogies though, such questions probe linear time, locating the wild and complexity by problematising ethics and querying education beyond domesticated technocratic visions numbing the social, mental and environmental ecology (Guattari, Reference Guattari, Pindar and Sutton2000), that is, enacting the philosophical and poetic of education enhancing new imaginaries. In re-visiting such encounters, wild pedagogies are nuanced through the problematisation of how non-linear timespace is lived, felt and evoked and how the wild might tremble in-relation with the -isms. What could be limited to engaging with nature in the rural semi-mountainous and coastal (of the preamble) or to an educational visit to a museum and industrial unit, “learning about” or simply enjoying “the wild,” is intensified, problematising how the industrialised and domesticated tremble with the wild in ways of living and in teaching-pedagogical encounters.
Wildings: Reworking Relational (environmental) Education and Intensifying Wild Pedagogies
This contribution attends to the formation of wild as a philosophical concept emerging in-practice working the relationality of theory, artmaking and storying. In re-visiting and re-enlivening, in Karen Barad’s discussion, projects with children, communities and the more-than-human world in Southeast Mediterranean through artistic and teaching-pedagogical practice, wildings emerges as dynamic differentiating process that reworks ethical relations, intensifies relational education and nuances wild pedagogies. In probing power-relations, it refutes human- and anthropo- centric dominant visions of education and highlights the enmeshment of peoples and environment. The artistic and pedagogical-curricular troublings respond to wild pedagogies’ call for new imaginaries beyond the impasses of domesticated education. Wildings accentuates how the -isms (capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, scientism) are lived and felt in the everywheres and everywhens extending an invitation to probe how the wild trembles with the -isms and for lived, embodied artistic and teaching-pedagogical encounters that open up spaces for an inquiry with the world and the relational trans-corporeal self.
Acknowledgements
A warm “thank you” to everyone who welcomed and embraced, believed and trusted, supported and empowered in kind, polite and respectful ways.
Financial support
The publisher kindly waived article processing fees for this contribution.
Ethical standards
Nothing to note.
Author Biography
Andrie Savva is a qualified teacher and independent scholar working for more than two decades in the areas of education, environment and the arts with diverse communities. She is particularly interested in the intersections of posthuman feminist and critical new materialist with de-&post-colonial and indigenous philosophies as well as postdevelopmental and relational approaches to child- and adult- centrism and education.
Open access
