Despite the growing influence of the “material” turn within childhood studies and education, scholarship related to teaching and learning within the early childhood classroom remains a largely humanistic endeavour. By applying relational and multispecies onto-epistomologies to both children’s classroom relations and our own teacher subjectivities, this work aims to highlight what other possibilities emerge when the dominant hierarchies of teacher-researcher-child-non-human are destabilised. Taking the idea of destabilisation literally, we diffractively map our own experiences as teacher-researchers within early years educational contexts, utilising diffractive methods to narrow-in on the mutually constituted conditions of movement. These more-than-human movements emerged during improvised classroom encounters between young children, animals and plants and varied in intensity and duration, as these constructed cuts and data (re)presentations continue to “move” us years later. Building upon research that explores the relationalities of children and non-human others, as well as “how movement does relationships’’ in early childhood educational contexts (Riley & Proctor, 2023, p. 663), we argue that a complex meta/physics of more-than-human movement affords literal and conceptual turning, enmeshing, decentering, connecting and rupturing, producing a less certain but more attuned early years teacher.

Our current ecological predicament requires a shift to a post-anthropocentric educational paradigm in which we educate for and about a world that is not “for us,” but comprised of a multitude of eco-systems of which we are simply a part. To facilitate this, education should be enacted differently; we need to experience learning not as furthering entrenched nature/culture binaries, but as “worlding” processes, whereby imaginary divides between individual and environment are troubled, as humans and the material world are revealed to be relational and entangled. Posthumanism offers an affective turn towards a social and ecological justice that accounts for such entanglements; enacted through necessary processes of de-familiarisation from the dominant vision of education. In this article we firstly explore the theoretical underpinnings of critical posthumanism to critique sustainability education-as-usual and propose new modes of teaching that lean into affective processes of noticing and surrender. We then discuss a research project in which participants came together to explore what happens when we cease to privilege humans as the ultimate instructors and holders of knowledge. In doing so we disrupt normative methodologies, drawing on affect, embodiment, relationality, transdisciplinarity and an ethics of care which extend learning to more-than-human kin.

Introduced in 2020, the notion of living artefacts encompasses biodesign outcomes that maintain the vitality of organisms such as fungi, algae, bacteria, and plants in the use of everyday artefacts, enabling new functions, interactions, and expressions within our daily lives. This paper situates living artefacts at the intersection of the sustainability discourse and more-than-human ontologies, illuminating the unprecedented opportunities that living artefacts present for regenerative ecologies. These ecologies are characterized by a fundamental inclination toward mutualism, creativity, and coevolution. In regenerative ecologies, the human-nature relationship transcends the binary distinction and it manifests as a single autopoietic system in which the constituent members collaboratively engage in the creation, transformation, and evolution of shared habitats. The paper outlines five pillars, supplemented by guiding questions and two illustrative cases, to aid designers in unlocking, articulating, and critically evaluating the potential of living artefacts for regenerative ecologies.

Forest ecosystems are crucial to survival on Earth. This article argues that trees and forests are both vital components of a healthy Earth system and productive examples for expanding International Relations’ disciplinary boundaries. The article discusses the forest in three contexts: the global, the (post)colonial, and from the tree itself. From tree planting as a practice of social and environmental justice, to postcolonial and Indigenous science and knowledge, to the mycorrhizal ‘wood wide web’, a focus on trees, forests, and biosphere opens the possibility for a multispecies IR. Through a consideration of trees and forests in law, treaty, culture, and science at the local and global level, this article adds to a growing literature in IR that strives to bring the non-human, more-than-human, or other-than-human creatively and productively into the discipline. Foregrounding the forest's materiality and trees’ symbolic power for human cultures opens important pathways to understanding how the non-human is, and should, alter and affect global politics.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonial governments used human-lion interactions to further their efforts to reproduce white supremacy in northwest Namibia. Drawing on archival, oral, and published sources, Heydinger presents this “animal-sensitive history,” which examines the central role of livestock in antagonistic human-lion interactions. The government has historically played a major role in securing European dominance over lions, while African pastoralists have suffered from human-lion conflict. Government interventions had lasting effects on human livelihoods and the geography of lion survival. Lions were eradicated on white farms, but they thrived in Etosha—where livestock were prohibited—and yet maintain a tenuous presence in Kaokoveld. Heydinger examines the ways in which human livelihoods and lion survival remain linked to one another to this day.

Situated within a series of river journeys, this inquiry considers the role of material landscape in shaping learning possibilities and explores practices of reading landscapes diffractively. We consider ways we might pay attention to the ever-changing flux of places while experimenting with posthuman pedagogical praxis. Methodologically, we embrace the post-qualitative provocation to do research differently by enacting a new empiricism that does not ground the inquiry in a paradigmatic structure. In doing so, we rethink conventional notions of method and data as we create a series of short videos from footage recorded during canoeing journeys with tertiary outdoor environmental education students. These videos, along with a student poem, form the empirical materials in this project. Video allows us to closely analyse more-than-human entanglements, contemplating the diverse ways we can participate with and read landscapes in these contexts. We aim to provoke diffractive thought and elicit affective dimensions of material encounters, rather than offer representational findings. This project intends to open possibilities for post-qualitative research, inspired by posthuman and new materialist orientations.

The sustainability concept seeks to balance how present and future generations of humans meet their needs. But because nature is viewed only as a resource, sustainability fails to recognize that humans and other living beings depend on each other for their well-being. We therefore argue that true sustainability can only be achieved if the interdependent needs of all species of current and future generations are met, and propose calling this ‘multispecies sustainability’. We explore the concept through visualizations and scenarios, then consider how it might be applied through case studies involving bees and healthy green spaces.