Listening for futures along Birrarung Marr: speculative immersive experience in environmental education

Abstract This paper considers experiences of speculative immersion as artists and children map the multilayered sonic ecology of Birrarung Marr, a traditional meeting place for Aboriginal language groups of the Eastern Kulin Nation. We explore how speculative practices of immersion shaped the mapping of precolonial, contemporary, and future soundscapes of Birrarung Marr, and the ceremonial burial of these sonic cartographies for future listeners. Bringing together Indigenous and non-Indigenous concepts of immersion in mutually respectful and purposeful conversation, we work to re-theorise immersive experience as a process of ecological multiplicity and affective resonance, rather than one of phenomenological containment. By approaching immersion as both a concept and a sensation that ruptures the boundary between body and environment, we follow how immersion ‘drifts’ across porous thresholds of sensing, thinking, dreaming, making, and knowing in situated environmental education contexts. In doing so, the paper stresses the importance of speculative immersive experience in cultivating liveable urban futures under conditions of climate change, and responds to the need for new understandings of immersion that take more-than-human ecologies of experience into account.