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The nomadic wanderings of a bag-lady and her space chums : re-storying environmental education with feral figurations

University of British Columbia

This thesis is a semi-autobiographical narrative, a serious fiction, in which I hold together the contradictions I have inherited and gathered (specifically in relation to the Western educational system) and learn to encounter the “Other” (real and imaginary others), including the other that is my constantly shifting/growing “self,” and attempt to find/foster nourishing alliances for transforming Environmental Education. I situated myself with new materialist theorists, specifically Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Karen Barad, who attempt to think “through the co-constitutive materiality of human corporeality and nonhuman natures” (Alaimo & Hekman, 2008, p. 9) and provide useful tools (figurations, metaphors, and/or stories) for finding creative theoretical alternatives to the reductionist, representationalist and dualistic practices of the Western (Euro-American) metaphysics. Instead, shifting towards ecological, rhizomatic thinking and a nomadic subjectivity, I take up bag-lady storytelling, a performative new materialist methodology, a creative (re)twist of Ursula Le Guin’s (1989) “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” a nomadic practice of wandering and gathering. Such wandering and gathering requires a different logic, an attunement and attentiveness to processes and practices of ongoingness (not simply endings). Sharing the stories and figures I gathered doing and thinking a performative Environmental Educational inquiry during a yearlong place-based eco-art project collaboratively undertaken with a Grade 4/5/6 class around the lost streams of Vancouver, I focus on the patterns created and the traces left by the multiple complex figurative entities encountered who wander throughout spacetime. I focus on the types of stories created and told from these traces, searching for stories of our shared vital vulnerability, stories that just might draw us together, gathering and holding all of our heteronymous ideas, beliefs, and theories. My goal was to draw attention to ways of being, ways of knowing, and ways of living (getting on) together, that disrupt, alter, revitalize, and might just lead to the practices of collective recuperation needed to sustain a vibrant lively future.

Text

2015-08-26

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/54655

Curriculum Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/