Multiple worlds and strange objects: environmental education research as an additive practice

Abstract

Abstract The paper offers three examples of passionate immersion with strange objects and working with peculiar multispecies assemblages, such as the assemblage of a dove called Romeo and the technology to humidify a greenhouse called ‘Princess’, or the experiment of orienteering in forests for years, accounting for slips, scratches and tumbles as being taught by the forest — and prioritising these over the more commonplace educational narratives. The paper is structured in a nonconventional way in that most space is reserved for reports from these ongoing inquiries. The authors will each discuss how they situate themselves in relation to strangeness in research and how they proceed methodologically, locating their approaches as postqualitative. The questions each example addresses are: What is a strange object? How do we come across them? What do we begin to do/produce with them? The additive orientation described in the research stories is proposed to be an important constituent for new survival knowledge especially relevant for environmental education, addressing environmental problems as wicked, and demanding approaches that reach beyond methodological divides.