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Clarke2019.Pdf (4.235Mb) This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for a postgraduate degree (e.g. PhD, MPhil, DClinPsychol) at the University of Edinburgh. Please note the following terms and conditions of use: This work is protected by copyright and other intellectual property rights, which are retained by the thesis author, unless otherwise stated. A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Practising immanence: (still) becoming an environmental education academic David A.G. Clarke Doctor of Philosophy University of Edinburgh 2018 Own Work Declaration I declare that the thesis has been composed by myself and that the work has not been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. I confirm that the work submitted is my own, except where work which has formed part of jointly-authored publications has been included. My contribution and that of the other author to this work has been explicitly indicated below. I confirm that appropriate credit has been given within this thesis where reference has been made to the work of others. Some of the work presented in Haecceity 2 has been published as a Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Environmental Education Research titled New Materialisms and Environmental Education by myself and Jamie Mcphie. I am the sole author of the elements of that Call for Papers that are presented in this thesis. Some of the work presented in Haecceity 3 has been submitted for inclusion in the book Outdoor Studies and Research Methods (Routledge, 2019) as Post-qualitative inquiry in Outdoor Studies: A radical (non-)methodology by myself and Jamie Mcphie. I am the sole author of the elements of that submission that are presented in this thesis. Some of the work presented in Haecceity 3 was published during my studies in Environmental Education Research as a book review of Eve Tuck and Marcia McKenzie’s Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods, and was authored solely by myself. Most of the work presented in Haecceity 4 was published during my PhD studies in the book Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times (Malone, Truong and Grey, 2017) as the chapter Educating Beyond the Cultural and the Natural: (Re)Framing the Limits of the Possible in Environmental Education , and was authored solely by myself. Some of the work presented in Haecceity 5 has been accepted for publication as a paper in Environmental Education Research as Nature Matters: Diffracting a Keystone Concept of Environmental Education Research – Just for Kicks by myself and Jamie Mcphie. I am the sole author of the elements of that submission that are presented in this thesis. Some other parts of the work presented in Haecceity 5, and some parts of the work presented in Haecceity 8, have been submitted as a paper to a/b: Auto/Biography Studies as Ecobiography, posthuman-postnature? Immanent life writing in the Anthropocene , authored solely by myself. Most of the work presented in Haecceity 6 has been submitted as a paper to Environmental Education Research as The diffractive practitioners: collaborative writing-thinking-doing with students, concepts, and Walney Island (and aliens) by myself and Jamie Mcphie. Each authors’ contribution is clearly identified in Haecceity 6. Signature: ……………………………..… (David A. G. Clarke) Date: 10.09.2018 Abstract This thesis is located between. It is not quite about outdoor environmental education. It is not quite about research methodology. And it is not quite about the author’s learning. These delineated categories exist on a different plane to the thesis, at least, to what the thesis becomes - is becoming. The thesis is thus a haecceity, a certain thisness that is no other. This is not meant to be a grand claim to the contribution or originality of the thesis. It is a statement about the nature of being that ‘I’ have been moved towards in exploring what practice might be in a world that is ‘post’ environment and ‘post’ methodology, and where the separation of theory and practice dissolves. The thesis is constituted of eight haecceities. The starting place is my concern, as (becoming) an outdoor education academic, for finding a pedagogy that might help mitigate environmental degradation. The search for this pedagogy takes up new materialist inclinations and particularly the concept of immanence as described by Deleuze and Guattari (2004). This in turn changes the thesis, and leads it to an exploration of various post-qualitative informed ‘fuzzinesses’ of research methodology; where methodology becomes a pedagogy and the notion of an educational practice that is separate from my life, a life, is troubled. From here, the thesis takes up an increasingly ‘post’ autoethnographic lilt to explore becoming a post environmental education academic. This exploration is carried by writing, and collaborative writing, as forms of inquiry by which various stories are told; stories in which the boundaries between environments, theory, practice, learning, and research become unclear. Throughout the thesis various concepts are created to help explore these tensions. These include the concept of the haecceitical self as the occurring process of , rather than a self being connected or in relation to something; the concept of becoming alien , as an attempt at unhumaning ourselves. i.e. to raise awareness of our belonging to something else, rather than the stable and quiddital ( whatness ) of the concept of the human; and lastly the concept of environing education . Environing education is difficult to define, but it is at the least the process of learning to live more ethically in response to the contradiction of caring about environmental degradation, whilst at the same time questioning the category of the environmental. The concepts are not monolithic and not necessarily transposable to other situations. Rather they live in their use within the thesis. Whilst the thesis originates from a place of trying to advocate for the environment, through the process of writing the ‘environment’ becomes troubled as a conceptual category, thus troubling the environmental as a category of moral value. Instead, towards the close of the thesis, I explore the competing lines of desire that function to produce the thesis, in the search for an immanent ethics. This ethics of affect is co-constitutive in the writing of the haecceities, to aesthetically explore post human/environment tensions of becoming an academic, and acknowledging the personal struggles that this entails. The contribution of the thesis lies in its exploration of writing an immanent ethics, given the destabilising effects of an immanent ontology on prevailing ethical orientation towards transcendent notions of the ‘environment’. In this way, the writing is a form of post-ecobiography, whereby the contribution of the thesis is also its affective process, for me and (possibly) for the reader. Lay Summary This thesis makes a philosophical contribution to theory and inquiry in environmental education by attempting a form of inquiry that at once troubles the idea of ‘nature’ and the human ‘self’. The reason for this attempt is to respond to recent philosophical turns towards ‘new’ materialisms and the practical philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in educational research, as well as what I see as the impact of these theories for prevailing ethical orientations in environmental education and my own practice as an educator and researcher. The thesis unfolds through eight haecceities rather than chapters. A haecceity is a philosophical concept forwarded by Deleuze and Guattari which prioritises the thisness of a thing or event, rather than considering a thing as assignable to pregiven delineated sets depending on its whatness (quiddity), or identifying characteristics. This move allows a novel methodological approach whereby the haecceities act as sites of variation on the themes of the thesis. These themes include: the self as unstable and posthuman; the environment as everything (immanent) rather than as other, romantic or a green version of nature; and the tensions that these moves create for ethical orientations in my practice as an outdoor environmental educator and a becoming academic. Throughout the thesis various concepts are created to help explore these tensions. These include the concept of the haecceitical self as the occurring process of , rather than a self being connected or in relation to something; the concept of becoming alien , as an attempt at unhumaning ourselves - i.e. to raise awareness of our belonging to something else, rather than the sovereign and quiddital ( whatness ) concept of the human; and lastly the concept of environing education . Environing education is difficult to define, but it is at the least the process of learning to live more ethically in response to the contradiction of caring about environmental degradation whilst at the same time questioning the category of the environmental. The concepts are not monolithic and not necessarily transposable to other situations. Rather they live in their use within the thesis. Towards the close of the thesis I reflect on the nature of an immanent ethics for my practice, as well as the teaching that this form of inquiry has enacted. Acknowledgements Thank you… Gemma, for your infinite patience. Fen, for bringing what only you bring. Mum, Dad, and Chris, for helping me in so many ways, and for bearing with me when I asked for strange books for Christmas. Jamie, you know what for. My supervisors, Robbie Nicol, John Telford, and Ramsey Affifi, for new friendship, for being constant and solid throughout this process, for being generous with your help, and for pushing me to think harder.
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