Wading into the mess

Today, the word ‘mess’ conjures negative responses, but the term originates from Late Latin as missus, meaning a course at a meal. In French, mess means a portion of food, a course at dinner. By the 1300s, mess was commonly understood as a supply, quantity, provision of food and later evolved into military terminology to describe many eating at the same table together; a shared eating experience usually in a mess hall. Messmates is a military term used to describe how certain groups eat together on a ship or at camp. The words mess hall and messmates conjure up a cacophony of senses (noises, smells, textures, cutlery, table, chatter), a pulsating aliveness of bodies and matter, all intermingling through food and eating. Such imaginaries are probably why the word ‘mess’ has been appropriated for notions of confusion, dirtiness, disorder, untidiness, deviance (Cook, Reference Cook2009, p.278). To mess with suggests interference and involvement. Mess around could mean careless handling. Mess up has connotations of error, trouble and mistake (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Messy poem.

Educational systems are situated within and amongst a messed up planet of climate change, loss of biodiversity, species extinction, and more. This ‘mess’ has been named the Anthropocene (Crutzen & Stormer, Reference Crutzen and Stormer2000), a geological epoch that describes how human-induced activities are threatening life on the planet. Haraway (Reference Haraway2016) suggests that a more appropriate term is the ‘Capitalocene’ to acknowledge the precarity of relationships that continue to arise from economic and developmental narratives. Our research seeks to address our concerns about the environmental crises ‘we’ (some more than others) are facing. For humans living in poverty, Indigenous peoples, children, people living in areas threatened by climate change and ecological degradation, the Anthropocene is experienced differently (Barratt Hacking et al. Reference Barratt Hacking, Bastos, Hogarth, Sands, Dunkley, Wenham, Saputra, McCabe, Fletcher, Nashid, Anjani and Davies2024). Simultaneously, our more-than-human kin face the destruction of ecosystems and extinction with an estimated 69% drop globally in wildlife populations from 1970 to 2022 (WWF, 2022). The damage and devastation of the Anthropocene demands a transformation in how we are relating with other humans, more than humans and the world to better care for our entangled lives.

We follow mess rhizomatically (Deleuze & Guattari, Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987) to explore these relations and to resist the human-centric order, control, safety, and domination of neoliberal, capitalist narratives of production in the Global Minority World. These attitudes and behaviours are echoed in neoliberal educational systems where learning in schools is disciplined, standardised and assessed (Moss & Roberts-Holmes, Reference Moss and Roberts-Holmes2021), and developmentalism and linearity prioritise preparing students for the next stage. Assessing individual children against normative standards risks perpetuating a deficit and reductive model that assumes children can be separated from the complex web of relations that make up childhoods. There is, as van Dooren et al., suggest, ‘no form of human life that has not arisen in dialogue with a wider world’ (Reference Dooren, Kirksey and Münster2016, p. 14). Educational research and practice needs to make space for multiple narrators of stories that attend to these intricate entanglements.

Responding to the troubles of and within the Anthropocene demands a ‘serious rethinking of the business-as-usual of environmental education’ (Taylor, Reference Taylor2017, p. 1448). Environmental education can be described as providing education that has ‘a working knowledge of environmental systems; concerns about environmental problems; and has the capabilities to solve and actively participate in implementing solutions’ (Fang et al., Reference Fang, Hassan, LePage, Fang, Hassan and LePage2023, p. 3). However, in recent years, the field of environmental education has been ‘dominated by policy-driven discourses that emphasise linear realisations about/of the world in prioritising technicist, mechanistic and instrumentalist teaching and learning practices’ (Riley & White, Reference Riley and White2019, p. 262). This is problematic since our relationships with the world have become operationalised (tidied-up, boxed-in, measured, reduced), perpetuating damaging attitudes and behaviours that reinforce asymmetrical power relations (see Figure 2). Inspired by this Special Issue’s call, we suggest that environmental education approaches need to focus on reconfiguring relations rather than delivering knowledge and solutions. In addition, environmental education is not separate from but part of all forms of education, because relationships are always forming.

Figure 2.

Verse 1 of our messy poem. Straight lines, boxed-in, tidy thinking for human-centric attitudes and behaviours.

Acknowledging that environmental education research and pedagogies need to be capable of attending to disorderly, muddled, shambolic, complex relations, posthumanist and feminist materialist philosophies and Indigenous onto-epistemologies offer alternative ways to respond with the crises. They offer a new ethics of engagement that challenge who matters and what counts (Barad, Reference Barad2007) in the human-centric methodologies and methods that normalise dominant attitudes and behaviours. Replicable, planned and predictable humanist research reinforces linear relationships of cause and effect between objects and subjects, which consequently, ‘over-determine thought and practice, closing off what might be thought’ (St Pierre, Reference St. Pierre2019, p.163). This assumes that the researcher is put ‘in the world (as the world were a container and we needed merely to acknowledge our situatedness with in it)’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p.91). Instead, post-qualitative inquiry offers new ways of researching with posthuman and feminist materialist theories with/in the worlds we inhabit ‘to re-orient thought to experiment and create new forms of thought and life’ (St. Pierre, Reference St. Pierre2021, p. 163). As such, these approaches to research are generative, as they take us ‘beyond the viewpoint and political interests of human individuals’ (Rautio, Reference Rautio2021, p. 229) providing alternative stories to co-create our world/s.

This ontological turn challenges us to reconceptualise our understanding of knowledge, how it is produced and by whom. In this article, we explore four alternative ways of knowing, as articulated by Law (Reference Law2004): knowing as embodiment, knowing as emotionality and apprehension, knowing through deliberate imprecision, and knowing as situated enquiry. As Deleuze and Guattari (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987) suggest, alternative knowledge production requires research from the middle, a middle that we are always already in, affording new ways to relate, experiment, connect, intra-act and become with our research and the more-than-human world we research with. Our post-qualitative inquiries draw inspiration from this research approach, navigating unpredictability and uncertainty with/by/for more than humans as co-researchers. This makes knowledge-production a relational experience with the world, which means we are all always ‘response-able’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007; Haraway, Reference Haraway2016) for how we respond. As educational researchers, this expansive approach to inquiry requires us to embrace messy methodologies and resist humanist forces that have conditioned us to expect neat and tidy research and relationships.

Concepting with mess

We employ the notion of ‘concepting’ as a practice that assists us with our messy inquiries. Concepting is a ‘situated, relational, performative and emergent endeavour of ‘knowledging’ to consider ways we might ‘do knowledge differently’ (Taylor et al., Reference Taylor, Hogarth, Cranham, Hewlett, Bastos, Barratt Hacking and Barr2023, p. 23). Deleuze and Guattari’s (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987) term ‘rhizome’ which in botany describes a subterranean mass of roots that do not have a start, middle, or end, describes nonlinear networks and multiplicities. Rhizomatic thought has been taken up enthusiastically by many researchers and educators working with the ‘posts’ (posthuman, post-qualitative, poststructural, postdevelopmental, postcolonial) who ‘experiment and create something new and different that might not be recognizable in existing structures of intelligibility’ (St. Pierre, Reference St. Pierre2019, p. 5). As rhizomatic researchers (Clarke & Parsons, Reference Clarke and Parsons2013), we resist following a linear process that works through several stages, such as literature review, methodological planning, fieldwork, analysis and findings. Instead, we employ an iterative process that engages with multiple relata or ‘messmates’ throughout every stage. Rhizomatics can offer new pathways to undiscipline and help embrace the mess. In this article, concepting with mess is a rhizomatic ‘process of adding to, shifting and branching off, thinking and sifting…helping us to recognise interconnectedness and complexities involved’ (Cook, Reference Cook2009, p. 278). We offer several ways to concept with mess as signalled in our rhizomatic diagram in Figure 3 where you are invited to add your own response/s, as we wade together through the mess that configures our relational, felt, beautiful, damaged world/s.

Figure 3.

Employing rhizomatic thought for concepting with mess.

Firstly, we consider the generative and hope-full mess of multiple ‘messmates’ (Haraway, Reference Haraway2008) and inquiring with more-than-human co-researchers/ participants. Secondly, via messy research practices and ‘messy methodologies’ (Rautio, Reference Rautio2013) that turn to curious practices and ways of noticing. Thirdly, through messy ethics and ‘ethico-onto-epistemologies’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007). Finally, through arts-based, imaginative and creative messy storying. Concepting with ‘mess’ offers new ways of knowing, thinking, doing and feeling that encourages us to sit with, slow down and attend to the tangled worlds we find ourselves in. This means going deeper, backwards, sideways, slow rather than only going forwards. This mess-making, we suggest, resists fast paced outcomes-focused approaches in environmental education research and practice and instead makes room for empirical investigations with/in multispecies worlds.

Twisting with resistance

Resistance and mess have much in common. We consider resistance with a posthumanist, feminist materialist approach and apply resistance with/in a Deleuzo & Guattarian (Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987) conceptual framework. Firstly, bodies and things do not pre-exist; instead, they come into being as an assemblage through their relationships with all matter. Together, assemblages produce temporary, ongoing phenomena such as resistance and power that are always in relation. We recognise mess-making as resistance that coexists with/in the asynchronous power relations of environmental education, academic research and more, not as a separated, isolated or external entity. Secondly, all matter has agency and has the capacity to create affect; no body or thing is inert, which challenges the notion that only human agency produces the world. Instead, paintbrushes/insects/cats/trees/children/money/fox poo/weather are all presented in this paper as intra-relating, mess-making agents that combine to cultivate the conditions for resistance. Thirdly, the mess created conjures up affect, which acts on bodies and things to create new and alternative capacities that can be considered as moments, instances, events of micropolitics. The micropolitical moments of affect create new feelings, desires, ideas. These may produce ‘lines of flight’ (Deleuze & Guattari, Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987), which enact resistance to open space/s for empirical investigations with/in multispecies worlds. This enables us to reimagine how environmental educational research and practice might offer new ways of conceptualising learning, doing and becoming for ‘multispecies flourishing’ (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016; Osgood, Reference Osgood, Blyth and Aslanian2022).

The mess of multiple messmates: Who are ‘we’?

Haraway (Reference Haraway2008) writes that 10% of the human body is human genomes; the other 90% consists of harmless bacteria, fungi, protists that play a necessary role in keeping our bodies healthy and alive. We concept with messmates to envision the interconnectedness of life, that even our individual bodies are an ecosystem of thriving life forms, constantly living, learning and dying together. We are never boundaried bodies that function and flourish in silo. When we eat, we are always in communion with others, consuming our food with the elements of the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere; a mess hall of life. Our abilities to survive and thrive are situated within diverse ecosystems that balance one another for multispecies flourishing. It is when we mess with the balance and mess around with the elements that we mess up the healthfulness of our ecosystems; something we bear witness to today.

When we consider who ‘we’ (Hannah and Charlotte in relation) are, we acknowledge how we bring to the table our unique forms of expression that are informed by a multitude of lived experiences, sensory responses, and bodily ecosystems. As educators who have worked across all phases from Early Years to Higher Education, and as former teachers in both Primary and Secondary schools, we are interested in how educational institutions and systems seem to be capable of ignoring the mess. Haraway (Reference Haraway2016) calls this an ‘unprecedented looking away’ and we are motivated to find alternative approaches that ’stay with the trouble’. Part of this ‘trouble’ is acknowledging our multispecies relationality (see Figure 4). We are drawn to ask: What kinds of multispecies relations are our educational institutions and systems nurturing? How might we attend to and account for these messy relations in our environmental education research and practice?

Figure 4.

Verse 2 of our messy poem for multispecies flourishing. The term ‘radically open’ is inspired by bell hooks’ term ‘radical openness’ (Reference hooks2015).

We are both at different but equally messy stages of doctoral research that focus on ‘nature relations’ (Barratt Hacking et al., Reference Barratt Hacking, Bastos, Hogarth, Sands, Dunkley, Wenham, Saputra, McCabe, Fletcher, Nashid, Anjani and Davies2024, Reference Barratt Hacking, Davies, Bastos, Dunkley, Hogarth, Quinn, Sands and Wenham2022) within educational settings: Hannah’s in an urban forest school in London, UK and Charlotte’s in an International School in Bali. We both research with more-than-human co-inquirers and together engage in a messy mix of arts-based activities. Hannah’s inquiry explores the possibilities of/for childhoodnature play and the ways in which nature relations emerge in between child/animal/plant/weather encounters. Together the co-researchers spent a year playing together on weekly visits to an urban park and co-curated an exhibition in the park sharing multispecies stories of play through painting, drawings, re-enactments, collages and poetry. Charlotte is in the messy middle of an inquiry employing a range of arts-based techniques (e.g. poetry, painting, photonarratives, sound expression) to produce knowledge about how animals and children relate. Charlotte is interested in re-thinking animal-child relations to consider how these experiences might help international schools shift human exceptionalism from educational experiences and move towards more regenerative practices. We meet regularly (online and in different time zones) to read, concept and theorise, sharing stories from our research to enliven our reading-thinkings. Throughout the paper, we share our ‘tangles’ (Osgood, Reference Osgood, Blyth and Aslanian2022): tangly tales that thread moments from our data with our theorising and conversations.

Throughout our storying, we often get frustrated at the ways in which we return to anthropocentric notions of ‘human/nature’ and of adult-centred notions of ‘child’. Our research is inspired by reconceptualisations of ‘child’ (indeed of human, too) such as Murris’ (Reference Murris2016) ‘posthuman child’ that draws on Barad’s agential realism to illuminate children as part of the world, not separate from it. Taylor’s (Reference Taylor2013) queering of ‘nature’s child’ challenges figurations of ‘child’ and ‘nature’ as innocent and natural and instead situated and implicated. The Common World Collective (2020) explores worlding practices that are ‘generative, agentic, and interspecies’ building on Haraway’s (Reference Haraway2008) notion of worlding as a practice of co-creating worlds. The collective has explored child/animal relations (Nxumalo & Pacini-Ketchabaw, Reference Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw2017) and child/place relations (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw2013) that offer insights into ways we might research with ‘child in relations’ (Fairchild et al., fc Reference Fairchild, Hogarth, Hankin, Luna, Wright and Tesar2024). We draw on the integrating posthuman concept of ‘childhoodnature’ (Cutter-Mackenzie et al., Reference Cutter-Mackenzie, Malone and Barratt Hacking2020) that sees children as part of nature. These relational ontologies acknowledge that relata are made by relations, rather than pre-existing them. They are all preceded by Indigenous onto-epistemologies that have always been relational and it is crucial that as European posthuman and feminist materialist scholars, we do not tokenise nor appropriate these ontologies of land and culture. Indigenous research has always considered ‘nature’ not as something ‘out there’ but as part of our worlds and work with flattened ontologies (Rosiek et al., Reference Rosiek, Snyder and Pratt2020). Our research therefore aligns with these relational cultures, geographies, histories by co-creating messy stories with more than humans. Mess-making reminds us that we still have so much to learn.

Tangle 1: Painting with ink and rain

One week, the children were experimenting with food dyes and natural inks and were creating paintings by splatting the coloured liquids on the paper. As ink reached paper it started to drip and swirl and move. Whilst they were left out to dry, the rain started to pour. Princess Jasmine, Snawi, Tinkerbell and Donut (self-chosen pseudonyms) all screamed as the rain started to mingle with the ink. Then we watched, fascinated, as the rain started to take the artwork in new directions. The children, rain, artwork messmates started to work together to co-create. We started to notice the size of the drops of water, the speed at which they dropped. We turned our heads to the sky to look at the colour of the light grey clouds above. We smelled, touched and felt the rain with our faces.

Throughout the inquiry, play was not defined or seen as something the human child ‘does’ but as phenomena that emerges through childhoodnature encounters and posthuman ‘bodies, things and concepts in motion’ (Taylor, Reference Taylor2016, p. 20). In this event, the rain became an artist, a playmate, a participant (Figure 5). By being outside to do painting, rather than in a classroom, and encountering the rain whilst making art, new ways of becoming with weather and water were experienced and felt. These arts-based approaches offer us ways to think with, become with and research with more than humans in collaborative ways.

Figure 5.

Art-making by rain, children, ink and paper.

Messy ‘methodologies’

In our search for approaches and tools that allow us to research within and with messy relations, we have been inspired by the work of many theories, researchers and scholars. Rautio (Reference Rautio2013, p.403) calls on researchers to ‘engage in messy methodologies’ and suggests that ‘methods that celebrate the open, seek to problematise and to produce more questions than answers, are needed not to replace but to diversify the variety of methods with which researchers approach and conceptualize children’s everyday lives’. In this section, we focus on four ‘inquiry approaches’, a term that we prefer to use for research, as opposed to the inert, static and replicable implications of ‘methodology’ (St Pierre, Reference St. Pierre2019). These inquiry approaches are not tools to research with but are ways of being and becoming research apparatus (researcher/pedagogue/educator/person). They offer ways to ‘attune with’ the world, to respond to and become with and are messy because they are ongoing, immanent, iterative and part of who we are and might be.

The first inquiry approach is a ‘curious practice’ (Despret, Reference Despret2015; Haraway, Reference Haraway2016). When Despret works with animals, she intentionally does so in unpredictable, unknown ways; she doesn’t overly plan because she leaves open the space for animals to respond with her. This challenges more typical humanist research where questions would be planned in advance and the researcher is viewed as separate to the data that is being collected. A curious practice helps us to consider how we co-create worldmaking together, in a simultaneous, yet perhaps, uneven, becoming with.

With our curious practice inquiries, as researcher(s) we remain present in the moment and allow insights to emerge. We both employ photography, drawing and writing with natural world experiences on and with educational sites. These apparatuses (Barad, Reference Barad2007) enable us to respond with our curiosities, to be ‘alert to off-the-beaten-path practices’ (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016, p.6) in unexpected, emergent ways. This suggests that we should consider the less travelled path, the journey of the few, looking beyond the bigger, more obvious story to instead, consider what smaller details might reveal.

Tangle 2: Becoming with fox who is never there

Hot Dog (self-chosen pseudonym) is playing with leaves when he treads in a hidden pile of poo. He comes to me (Hannah) to help him wipe it off his shoe. I gag at the smell. Hu-uuurgh. I smear along his trainer with a tissue. From the colour and musty smell I think fox poo, itself a multispecies assemblage of local food waste, fruit pips, feathers.

When later we start playing ‘What’s the Time Mr Wolf’?, a game that ultimately involves being chased by a ‘wolf’ hungry for dinner, we run carefully, looking down to check that we avoid any more hidden surprises. As we dance and dodge and move across the park, we become with the fox and the marks they have left on the park. A fox who is, as Princess Jasmine exclaims, ‘never there’.

These encounters are rare; most of the fox and dog poo is cleared before the start of the session by forest school volunteers. Figure 6 was taken during a clear up of the park before a forest school session. The urban park, a space for humans and their companion species, for urban foxes, for flora and fauna and urban children from a local primary school is an animated space, a mingling and making of lives. In this story, it is the smell that calls us to notice who we share the park with. Thousands of urban foxes live in London, as humans live in increasingly urbanised environments, so, too, do our other-than-human animal (and plant) populations. For years, periods of ‘fox culling’ have been practiced in London following (unfounded) concerns about faeces and attacks. Are we so uncomfortable with fox poo that we are willing to name urban foxes pests and find ways to kill them?

Figure 6.

Preparing the park for poo-free play.

This tangle highlights the asymmetrical power relations regarding which species matter and which do not (Nelson & Drew, Reference Nelson and Drew2024) and confronts us with discomforting questions. These child-animal relations challenge any romanticised views of ‘children in nature’ and instead illuminate ways more than humans can live together by acknowledging the need for messy practices and complex relations.

In our conversations about the tangly tale of fox poo, Hannah and Charlotte in relation discuss the notion of being called to look down at the earth by the bodies and materiality that are situated there. Oftentimes, as researchers, we look at the world with our human eye level, discounting the abundance of life beneath our feet. Inspired by the fox poo encounter, we have both since practiced walking without intention, considering how we are intra-acting with the landscape in alternative ways, waiting for insights to emerge. Consequently, footpaths have become a source of inspiration in Charlotte’s inquiry and a curious practice approach helps to explore this further. In most schools, the construction, direction, materials, maintenance of most school footpaths are flat, insured, maintained; designed for hundreds and possibly thousands of children to travel along safely, quickly and without distraction throughout the day. These spaces enact beliefs about how children exist and evolve in efficient, clinical, isolated, linear ways. What might a more rugged footpath in an international school in Bali teach us about how we relate to the world around?

Tangle 3: Walking is never a solo endeavour

Walking is a practice that is embodied, entangled, relational and always a multi-material, multispecies experience. In this place, walking is a process that converges dirt, mud, dust, rocks, branches, insects, shadows, glints of sunlight, foot, footwear. Hot and humid weather demands that the human in relation wears sandals, flip flops or bare feet to traverse the campus. Footpaths challenge human responses: rocks force us to be attentive, wet puddles slow us down, insects dotted all around question our response abilities (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016) to them. Footpaths teach us that we can learn to be affected (Despret, Reference Despret2015) by our geological companions, walking with and as creaturely life (Lasczik et al., Reference Lasczik, Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2021). This vibrant materiality (Bennett, Reference Bennett2010) awakens us to the radical aliveness of the world (Barad, Reference Barad2007) and takes us into the unknown: How long will the journey take? How are we expected to walk? What is our direction? Who will we walk with?

As messy researchers, ‘venturing off the beaten track’ with a curious practice inquiry is a pedagogy (Figure 7). We are encouraged to meet unexpected, non-natal kin, and ‘to strike up conversations, to pose and respond to interesting questions, to propose together something unanticipated, to take up the unasked-for obligations of having met’ (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016, p.7). We have found that it is easy for us to slip back into our efficient, human-centred research practices and we must actively try to reattune ourselves to resist potentially anthropocentric attitudes and behaviours. Embracing such messy research with a curious practice helps us to stay with this trouble and to learn with and as the more-than-human world.

Figure 7.

What can footpaths teach us?

The second inquiry approach that helps us to put concepting with mess to work is a ‘deep hanging out’ (Somerville & Powell, Reference Somerville and Powell2019).This is an approach that brings a deep immersion into contact with posthuman philosophy via a curious practice. This new orientation involves thinking with more than humans by spending time together in shared, embodied encounters where ‘everything, especially the very mundane and everyday, is regarded as fascinating and thought provoking’ (Somerville & Powell, Reference Somerville and Powell2019, p. 829). We are interested in what happens when we spend time—a lot of time—engaging in multispecies ‘deep hangings out’. The researcher is considered a participant with the encounters that unfold, responding dynamically ‘in the moment’ as well as giving space for data to emerge. The data continues to proliferate in messy and unforeseen ways long after the research encounters, challenging notions of ‘field work’ and ‘data collection’. Hogarth et al. (Reference Hogarth, Taylor, Hewlett, Cranham, Barr, Bastos and Barratt Hacking2023), describe the joyful sprawly mess created by data that erupts and irrupts throughout and beyond an inquiry, encouraging us create spaces to attend to our empirical materials and data in constant flux.

Tangle 4: Layers and layers of paint and memories

We are painting stories of forest school. Stickman dips her paintbrush into the paint and starts to create swirls on the paper. Slowly, she adds more and more colours and moves her brush round and round. She adds layers to the page. Other children have told stories of strawberries and fire and ladybirds and trees. I (Hannah) ask Stickman what her painting is about but she just smiles and shrugs. She continues to add more layers, covering over deep reds with greens so that they become swirling brown.

The painting in this tangle (Figure 8) was displayed along with several others at our exhibition entitled: ‘Stories of Play’. We engaged in painting, collaging and sculpture making to respond to our experiences of playing together. So often these added new ways of thinking about what possibilities childhoodnature play created. Play became research and research became play. Working without clear boundaries of ‘data collection’ and ‘data analysis’ complexifies the focus of our research and these artful enactments became generative playful iterations of our co-inquiry. The discomfort I felt with not knowing what this painting is of, with not understanding what, if indeed anything, Stickman was trying to represent, opens opportunities to question my own need to tidy, categorise, explain and justify. How might this painting tell its own account of a processual playful research-creation event?

Figure 8.

Passionate immersion and the refusal to represent.

The uneasy feeling of not knowing is something that we have returned to regularly in our online conversations. Accepting that we do not have ‘answers’ is an important part of getting comfortable with mess. Equally, if not more, important is to accept that we might not even be asking the right questions. Despret’s ‘What would animals say if we asked the right questions’ (2016) encourages us to try to ask questions beyond human interest, but this is often challenging in practice. Opening ourselves up to think with other species, materials and affects resists the human centred focus and requires asking different sorts of questions that might make new forms of knowledge and relations possible.

Tangle 5: Cat-pedagogue, Cat-messmate, Cat-researcher, Cat-teacher, Cat-embodied-inquirer

Chutney jumped up to the kitchen table to greet me whilst I was writing at my computer (Figure 9). She immediately became distracted by the money lying on the table, which then distracted me. She started to roll vigorously on the money, rubbing her back, head and spine along the notes, appearing to be in some sort of joyous ecstasy! This intrigued me so I followed her lead. I wondered what it was about this money that appealed to her? I picked up the notes to smell them: nothing. I felt the notes in my hands, tracing my fingers along their faces and edges: nothing. But still, she continued to frolic. I realised that as an embodied inquirer, Chutney was participating in a relational exchange with money, noticing in ways that are incomprehensible to me. Chutney’s sensory responses remind me that more than humans process the world differently to humans and we can only attempt to understand if time, energy and effort is dedicated to notice and follow behavioural cues.

Figure 9.

The aliveness of the world is all around if we are willing to notice it.

In this multispecies moment (Hankin, Reference Hankin2022), Chutney and I (Charlotte) render one another as capable (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016). Consequently, I learn from Chutney’s example and include her contributions in our messy inquiry. This researcher-research-apparatus-narration-time-space-photograph-money-table multispecies moment invokes a transformative process of becoming with (Haraway, Reference Haraway2008). Chutney is my teacher, co-researcher, cat-pedagogue, cat-embodied-inquirer and my messmate. I am always becoming with researcher even if I am not ‘in the field’, blurring the conventional stages of doctoral research. Our shared encounter provokes my further consideration: what other ways might we do more to acknowledge multispecies contributions in our worlding practices?

I am left wondering: Have we ‘humans’ lost our art of noticing? Could children and other-than-human species teach us how to be more attentive? How might schools provide time and space for children to enact the art of noticing in their curriculums? Would this help us to come to know the world in alternative ways?

The final inquiry approach that helps us concept with mess is ‘cultivating the art of attentiveness’ taking on a ‘passionate immersion’ with ‘distinctive experiential worlds, modes of being, and biocultural attachments of other species’ (Dooren, Kirksey & Münster Reference Dooren, Kirksey and Münster2016, p. 6). This passionate immersion involves paying careful attention to what matters to others and learning to be affected (Despret, Reference Despret2015, p.114) by them.

Tangle 6: The Robin who came visiting

At the end of our forest school sessions, the children lined up and walked back to class. I would stay behind to help the practitioner ‘tidy up’. The moment the children left the park, the robin would fly down and start picking at the soil with their beak, no doubt finding remnants of food. The following week, I mention this to the children. Snawi (a self-chosen pseudonym) says: ‘then he must be watching us, waiting to get the park back for himself!’

In this story from my (Hannah’s) inquiry, the Robin (Figure 10) has engaged in a curious practice and has noticed the movements of the children the robin shares the urban park with. Snawi notices, too, that the Robin must have been watching us play. Robin as researcher. Robin as knowledge-producer. Robin as playmate. We need to notice the knowledge-making practices of more than humans to resist the anthropocentrism that exists in Western ontologies and education. Like the robin, researchers interested in cultivating the art of attentiveness need to be ‘passionately immersed with those they are generating research with, involving first-hand experiences to become sensorially affected by the encounter. Attending to these senses helps move ‘beyond viewing other creatures as mere symbols, resources, or background for the lives of humans’ (van Dooren et al., Reference Dooren, Kirksey and Münster2016, p.6).

Figure 10.

Whose knowledge counts? The robin as researcher.

Since ‘making worlds is not limited to humans’ (Tsing, Reference Tsing2015, p. 22) but is a process co-constituted with others, multispecies scholars are increasingly turning to the potential of art making to help dream of life at the messy edges. Arts-based approaches provide opportunities to learn more in/for/with multi-contributions, multilayers, multispecies, illuminating how the human is not simply situated in, or located in, environments. Rather ‘environments’ and ‘bodies’ are intra-actively co-constituted’ (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p.170). Becoming human is therefore an emergent process of becoming-with (Haraway, Reference Haraway2008; 2016) a multitude of other bodies and materials.

In our inquiries, we have experimented with some of these arts-based practices to search for ways to work with living and non-living knowledge creators and this has involved mess-making together, metaphorically and materially. Mess-making has taken many forms, including playing together, squelching in mud, running, walking, twirling, mark making in a collaborative research journals, drawing, rubbing chalk together, squishing rotten apples, collaging, photographing, videoing. These are processes that are both forms of research and pedagogical practice, purposeful and purposeless, serious and silly, and we sit with the ways they give force to nature relations.

Tangle 7: Muddy art

Much like playing and/or art making, messy research requires us talking about process rather than outcome. Here mud, water, sheet, children comes together as messmates evoking playful, spontaneous, joyful marks that tell tales of their own. Hands flick, stir, mix, spray, paint, smooth, splatter, touch, rub.

Mud oozes, drips, drops, sticks, dissolves, soaks into.

The children often created beautiful muddy messes on the white sheet (see Figure 11). The white sheet was washed and brought back each week. This art creation as play became a process that we enjoyed engaging in again and again, a mess-making process that was never concerned with a finished product. Taking this photo somehow creates an ‘output’ or a ‘captured piece’ but moments after the photo was taken, more water and mud was thrown at the sheet changing it again. It is easy to want to analyse these art-making practices, to try to define what they are, what is learned (by the human child) and how they might be replicated. However, this process is always in a state of becoming other and the children are becoming with the muddy flickers on the sheet. These processes are a way of more-than-human knowledge-making.

Figure 11.

Muddy art resisting analyses.

Messy ethics

We consider messy ethico-onto-epistemologies because of the way in which ethics is intertwined with knowing and being. Concerned with the ethical entanglements within our inquiries, we have explored the different ways in which agential cuts are enacted within and through our research (Hankin & Hogarth, Reference Hankin and Hogarth2023), recognising that it is impossible to include the contributions of all life that co-constitute the radical aliveness of our world. Kuriloff et al. (Reference Kuriloff, Andrus and Ravitch2011) explore the ‘messy ethics’ that emerge during collaborative and participatory research but go on to suggest a framework that might help prevent ethics from becoming too messy. We suggest that ethics must be messy if we are to respond to multispecies entanglements. Probyn (Reference Probyn, Lewis and Potter2010) explores the messy ethics of eating and argues that ‘nowhere is the conundrum of individual action versus global catastrophe more acute than in the arena of food’ (p.104). She engages with ‘mess’ to explore the multiple scales, times, locations and actors when considering the ethics of eating and challenges our thinkings about multispecies flourishing with the idea of multispecies survival. Environmental education research needs to be capable of responding to multispecies messmates by facing up to difficult and exploratory questions about who decides what lives, what dies, how, why, and when (Haraway, Reference Haraway2008). We acknowledge that despite going through ethical processes from our institutions, these are not sufficient for accounting for the emergent and dynamic unfoldings within our research more broadly. For example, we could not fully acknowledge our ethical obligations towards all multispecies participants including plants, animals, environments. However, recognising the messiness of this ethical process is an opening for us all to enter complex conversations about how to stay with the trouble of multispecies flourishing in the shadowy Anthropocene.

Tangle 8: Centipede and Wonderboy

The poem is a response to a story from Hannah’s research inquiry that has been told and retold several times about an encounter between Wonderboy (a self-chosen pseudonym), Centipede and a plastic pot. Hannah shared it at a conference, and Wonderboy helped choose the pictures for the slides. Hannah and Charlotte then retold this tangly tale in a conference and again in conference proceedings (Hankin & Hogarth, Reference Hankin and Hogarth2023). The stories emanate from a moment when the children picked up minibeasts in plastic pots as part of a ‘minibeast hunt’. Wonderboy noticed Centipede writhing around in the pot and insisted we return him to the grass. Wonderboy fabulated ‘play tales’ (Hogarth et al., fc) where Centipede returned to find his family and came back the following week to thank him (see Figure 12). We fabulated tales where Centipede was lost, searching for a family he would never find. Moving beyond human-centred storying left a messy mix of relations, ethical tangles and emotions. Could I share with practitioners our feelings that these collecting practices could be bad experiences for the mini-beasts? Would I upset the practitioners if I talked about perpetuating anthropocentrism? How does Wonderboy feel about the re-telling of this tangly tale?

Figure 12.

A messy ethics poem entitled: The mess of and, and, and…

Many environmental education practices that seek to connect children to nature, focus on what nature can do for the child, often consolidating the concept of human exceptionalism. In exploring the ‘non-innocence of matter’ in the forest school, a ‘complex and altogether disturbing and unsettling counternarrative to the conflation of childhood with nature’ emerges (Osgood et al., Reference Osgood, Axelsson, Cavaliero, Hanniffy and Mc Donnell2023). Our actions are always ethical in the sense that they are relational but these ethics are messy, and present wicked problems due to their complexity and entanglement with multiple relata. This opens important questions that need to be asked if we are to really create meaningful, exciting and lively approaches to learning about/within/for/by the environment and its multispecies inhabitants. These questions are a powerful form of resistance to current practices by quietly challenging the often taken for granted approaches that assume human superiority.

Mess-making as a force for resistance

As we come to a close in this middle, we consider the generative mess that this paper leaves in its wake and how this might serve as resistance to the destructive mess that contributed to the Anthropocene. As with most post-qualitative inquiries, we are left with more questions: How might we employ the mess? How is this mess applicable to education? How might mess be presented as a positive and generative form of inquiry? How can we generate more mess? Thus, mess-making generates questions (and questions about questions) which are a form of resistance; these questions are agentic and potentially create lines of flight towards new directions for environmental education research and practice.

Our mess-making produced new forms of knowing with more-than-human co-researchers, illuminating and deepening relations with those whose world/s we co-constitute. As such, our knowledge-making practices generated new relations of awareness and care, rendering more than humans capable of enlivening and enhancing the living experiences of all life. We urge environmental educators and researchers to create spaces to notice with, attend to, deeply hang out with, slow down and create possibilities for more than humans to contribute their unique expressions to our shared world/s. We advocate for methodologies and pedagogies that allow for mess creation, for feeling comfortable with messiness and to resist the need for order, control, comparison, categorisation. Learning, researching and educating with children and more than humans will always create a generative mess that needs to be sat with and appreciated rather than tidied up, settled or sorted out. Mess-making as a force for resistance opens spaces for more-than-human communion and transformation for flourishing post-Anthropocene worlds.