“We are symbionts on a symbiotic planet, and if we care to, we can find symbiosis everywhere.” — Lynn Margulis, 1999

abstract: The current sustainability crisis is born from a specious notion that humans are separate from and in a position of control over nature. In response, this dissertation reconceptualizes education beyond its current anthropocentric model to imagine education as learning through relationality with all that is ‘beyond’ the human. The study leaves behind hegemonic binary distinctions (human/nature, teacher/student, formal/non-formal education) to reimagine education as a multidirectional process of learning as worlding and becoming-with Earth (Haraway, 2016a). It explores what matters in education and how it comes to matter. This dissertation introduces the concept of storyworlding to describe what occurs when multispecies, multi-mattered assemblages (re)write Earth’s narratives through their relationships with one another. Taking its inspiration from the work of the Common Worlds Research Collective, Donna Haraway, and Isabelle Stengers, storyworlding acknowledges that the relationships between and among all biotic and abiotic forces on Earth make stories through their interactions, and these stories make a pluriverse of worlds. The study is structured as a natureculture (Haraway, 2003) ethnography. This innovation on ethnography, a traditionally human-centered method, focuses on agential, multispecies/ multi-mattered assemblages rather than the description of human culture. Data is not generated and then labeled as fixed in this study. It is emergent in its assemblages as a co-narrator in sympoietic storyworlding (Haraway, 2016b). Data generation took place over 6 months in a small, coffee-producing region of Southeastern Brazil. Data generation methods included walking conversations with children and the more-than-human world, participation in a multi-grade, one-room schoolhouse, and the collection of visual and audio data such as drawings, photographs, videos, and audio recordings. Using an intentionally slow, messy, and fluid diffractive analysis, I follow the data where it leads as I think with the concept of storyworlding (Barad, 2007; Mazzei, 2014). Drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Iveta Silova, the dissertation concludes with an Epilogue of speculative fabulation (SF) imaginings through which I invite the reader to engage in the thought experiment of reimagining not only what matters in education, but what education, itself, is. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2020

[pt] A pesquisa investiga o estatuto das fabulações na criação de transformações individuais e coletivas multiespécie no contexto da emergência climática (e suas interseccionalidades), com foco em histórias criadas por mulheres. Investiga-se um conjunto selecionado de criações artísticas que poderiam ser ditas simpoiéticas, nos termos de Donna Haraway, e que se mostram capazes de deslocar lógicas, disposições e sensibilidades arraigadamente em curso no contexto do Antropoceno. A investigação parte de um estudo do conto Estórias de Camille, do livro Ficar com o problema:fazer parentes no Chthuluceno, da própria Haraway, buscando em seguida ocasiões de cotejo e contágio entre essa história (em certo sentido inaugural) e duas outras fabulações: a obra de arte híbrida Proliferações, de Fabíola Fonseca, e o filme Teko Haxy: ser imperfeita, co-dirigido pela cineasta indígena Patrícia Ferreira Pará Yxapy e pela antropóloga não indígena Sophia Pinheiro. Feito à luz do conceito de simpoiese, o exame conjunto das criações analisadas busca somar-se aos esforços contemporâneos de contraposição às narrativas antropocêntricas (falocêntricas, etnocêntricas, especistas), tanto em suas versões utópicas e salvacionistas, quanto em reações distópicas e apocalípticas. / [en] The research investigates the status of fabulations in the creation of multispecies individual and collective transformations in the context of the climate emergency (and their intersectionalities), focusing on stories created by women. A selected set of artistic creations is investigated that could be said to be sympoietic, in Donna Haraway s terms, and that are capable of displacing logics, dispositions and sensibilities that are deeply rooted in the context of the Anthropocene. The investigation starts from a study of the short story The Camille Stories, from the book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, by Haraway herself, then looks for occasions of comparison and contagion between this story (in a certain sense, inaugural) and two others fabulations: the hybrid artwork Proliferações, by Fabíola Fonseca, and the film Teko Haxy: ser imperfeita, co-directed by indigenous filmmaker Patrícia Ferreira Pará Yxapy and non-indigenous anthropologist Sophia Pinheiro. Made in light of the concept of sympoiesis, the joint examination of the analyzed creations seeks to add to contemporary efforts to oppose anthropocentric narratives (phallocentric, ethnocentric, speciesist), both in their utopian and salvationist versions, as well as in dystopian and apocalyptic reactions.

This book is about the participatory aesthetics of the fantastic. In it, the author argues that the definition of the fantastic presented by Tzvetan Todorov in 1970 can be used, provided it is first adapted to a media-ecological framework, to theorize the role of aesthetic participation in the creation of secondary worlds. Working within a hermeneutical tradition, Todorov understands reader participation as interpretation, in which the creative ambiguities of the literary object are primarily epistemological. However, it is here argued that the aesthetic object of the fantastic is also characterized by material ambiguity. The purpose of this dissertation is then to present a conceptual framework with which to theorize the relation between the material and the epistemological ambiguity of the fantastic. It is argued that such a framework can be found in an ecological understanding of aesthetic participation. This, in turn, entails understanding human subjectivity as a process always already embodied in a material environment. To this extent, the proposed theoretical framework questions the clear and oppositional distinction between form and matter, as well as that between mind and body, nature and culture, and human and non-human, on which a modern and humanist notion of subjectivity is based. And in this sense, the basic ecological assumptions of this dissertation are posthumanist, or non-humanist. From this position, it is argued that an ecological understanding of participation offers a means to reformulate the function of a number of concepts central to studying the aesthetics of the fantastic, most notably the concepts of media, genre and text. As the fantastic focuses on the creation of other worlds, it is an aesthetics of coming into being, of ontogenesis. Accordingly, it will be argued that the participatory aesthetics of the fantastic operationalizes the ontogenesis of media, genres and texts. By mapping the ontogenesis of three distinct media ecologies – the media ecology of fantasy and J. R. R. Tolkien’s secondary world Middle-earth; the media ecology of the American comic book superhero Miracleman; and the media ecology of William Blake – this book argues that the ecological imagination generates world. Per Israelson has been a doctoral candidate in the Research School of Studies in Cultural History at the department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University. Ecologies of the Imagination is his dissertation.

[pt] Esta pesquisa investiga de que modo saberes das artes, das humanidades e das ciências da Terra têm sido mobilizados por experimentos estéticos, sobretudo cênicos e performativos, empenhados em abordar os desafios existenciais trazidos à tona pelo Antropoceno — aqui interpretado como consequência direta de um projeto de modernidade antropocêntrico e capitalístico. A pesquisa investiga, portanto, propostas críticas e criativas que fazem da cena uma contra-cena, isto é: experiências que se apresentam como contraposições radicais às premissas ideológicas que fundamentam a modernidade e que engendram o Antropoceno. Trata-se de respostas estéticas que se empenham, sobretudo, em deslocar o humano das ilusórias posições de centralidade, soberania, onipotência, autossuficiência e de independência em relação à trama da vida. Na etapa final do trabalho, as noções de polifonia, de simpoiesis e de composições interespecíficas são investigadas enquanto dispositivos reflexivos e formais capazes de estruturar propostas performativas que, em forma-conteúdo, em dramaturgia e em encenação, se instauram enquanto contra-cenas ao Antropoceno e ao antropocentrismo. A partir de obras como Stifter s dinge, do encenador Heiner Goebbels, podemos vislumbrar formas de experiência cênica em que o humano deixa de estar representado enquanto protagonista único, soberano e indispensável da cena da vida — tanto da Terra como, também, do Teatro. / [en] This dissertation investigates how knowledges from arts, humanities and Earth sciences have been mobilized by aesthetic experiments, especially scenic and performative, engaged in approaching the existential challenges brought up by the Anthropocene — here interpreted as a direct consequence of an anthropocentric and capitalistic modernity project. The dissertation investigates, therefore, critical and creative proposals that make the scene a counter-scene, that is: experiences that present themselves as radical counterpositions to the ideological premises that underlie modernity and that engender the Anthropocene. These are aesthetic responses that strive, above all, to displace the human from the illusory positions of centrality, sovereignty, omnipotence, self-sufficiency, and independence in relation to the fabric of life. In the final stage of the work, the notions of polyphony, sympoiesis and interspecific compositions are investigated as reflective and formal devices capable of structuring performative proposals that, in form-content, dramaturgy, and staging, establish themselves as counter-scenes to the Anthropocene and anthropocentrism. From works like Stifter s dinge, by Heiner Goebbels, we can glimpse forms of scenic experience in which the human ceases to be represented as the only and indispensable protagonist of the scene of life — of the Earth as well as of Theater.

Mémoire en recherche-création / Je te dégoûte comme un souvenir d’enfance est un recueil de poésie qui explore l’incarnation trouble de sa sujet dans le monde du capitalisme hégémonique. Ce monde, tantôt inhospitalier tantôt serein en apparence, l’atteint par les yeux. Puis, il s’inscrit dans la matérialité du reste de son corps à la fois réceptif et tendu. Son rapport physique et psychologique à la sexualité ouvre une fenêtre sur la possibilité de résonance avec autrui, une connexion partielle et momentanée. Pourtant, l’être-au-monde, aussi complexe et épanouissant puisse-t-il potentiellement être, est ankylosé par l’impératif de la mort qui impose une fin à son expérience. L’essai s’intéresse, conjointement à la création, à l’aliénation des sujets poétiques qui naviguent dans les espaces déliquescents de l’Amérique néo-libérale dans Comment nous sommes nés de Carole David. Il lit ces lieux par le prisme du paysage subjectif (Collot, 2005) et de l’américanité littéraire, expérience continentale intime et angoissante (Nepveu, 1998 ; Lapierre, 1995). Produits sociaux éminemment politiques, ces lieux du poème, espaces abstraits (Lefebvre, 1974), s’y révèlent comme des instruments à la pensée et au pouvoir dans la production d’un champ spatial aliénant. Surplombés par le spectre de l’apocalypse, les poèmes de Comment nous sommes nés enchevêtrent la vie et la mort. Ils dépeignent de manière lucide un univers composite dans lequel l’exceptionnalisme humain laisse place aux dialogues entre espèces. Les espaces sympoïétiques (Haraway, 2020) du recueil m’apparaissent enfin comme tentaculaires, entrelacés. / I repel you like a childhood memory is a collection of poetry that explores the troubled incarnation of its subject in the world of hegemonic capitalism. This world, sometimes inhospitable sometimes serene in appearance, passes through her eyes first. Then, it is inscribed in the materiality of his body both receptive and tense. Her physical and psychological relationship to sexuality opens a window on the possibility of resonance with others, a partial and momentary connection. Yet the being-in-the-world, however complex and fulfilling it may be, is stifled by the imperative of death that imposes an end to its experience. The essay is jointly concerned with the creation and alienation of poetic subjects navigating the deliquescent spaces of neo-liberal America in Comment nous sommes nés by Carole David. It reads these places through the prism of subjective landscape (Collot, 2005) and literary Americanity, an intimate and agonizing continental experience (Nepveu, 1998; Lapierre, 1995). These places of the poem, abstract spaces (Lefebvre, 1974), reveal themselves as instruments of thought and power in the production of an alienating space field. Overlooked by the spectrum of apocalypse, the poems of Comment nous sommes nés tangle life and death. They lucidly depict a composite universe in which human exceptionalism gives way to dialogues between species. The spaces of sympoiesis (Haraway, 2020) of the collection appear in the end as sprawling, interlaced.