Call for proposals for a special issue: New materialisms and environmental education

The purpose of this special issue is to: acknowledge the emergence of new materialisms in environmental education research and articulate the potential significance of new materialisms for debates in environmental education research, policy, and practice; to encourage engagement with debates concerning materiality and ontology occurring in the broader theoretical and research landscape; to consider what might arise in the coming together of new materialist theories and the hopes, intentions and purposes of the field of environmental education and environmental education practitioners and scholars. Overview of the special issue: In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency & Politics, Coole and Frost (2010) argue that contemporary environmental, economic, geopolitical, and technological developments require novel articulations of nature, agency, and social and political relationships, and that means of inquiry that privilege consciousness and subjectivity are not sufficient for the task. New materialisms, a term that covers diverse theories, generally posit that the social sciences in the last several decades have paid particular attention to subjectivity at the expense of considering matter due to a perceived inaccessibility of the material world. New materialist theories attempt to take up the ostensibly neglected philosophy of matter by finding new means to express the ways in which the world relates to itself. New materialisms, for example, ask questions about what agency is and where it is located; the relationship between matter and discourse; the axiomatic distinctions between what is ‘natural’ and what is human or human derived; as well as the possibilities of expanding the concept of ‘life’ beyond the solely organic, as in Jane Bennett’s (2009) vibrant materialism and materially informed contemporary animism (Harvey, 2013).