Papers by Chessa Adsit-Morris
The American Journal of Bioethics
Proceedings of the 2019 AERA Annual Meeting
Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment, 2021
Drawing on H. G. Wells’ visionary texts, social critique, and revolutionary insights, this chapte... more Drawing on H. G. Wells’ visionary texts, social critique, and revolutionary insights, this chapter revisits and recontextualizes questions raised by Wells almost a century ago around the adequacy of science education curricula to grapple with the still unfolding Anthropocene. Exploring the technological advances in molecular biology that have occurred over the last twenty years, which have instigated an epistemological turn toward what many science studies scholars are calling the post-genomic era, this chapter situates current education research and policy debates within the post-genomic era through new research in the field of sociobiology. Conversely, drawing on the fundamental reconceptualization of inheritance that underlies genomic research in the post-genomic era, this chapter argues for a similar reconceptualization of intelligence, educational attainment, cognition, and learning. The chapter concludes by exploring the potential of a transnational and transknowledge extended...
Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies, 2019
This article takes Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene as a p... more This article takes Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene as a point of departure for troubling the largely uncontested acceptance of the Anthropocene as a matter of scientific “fact.” Our approach is informed by our methodological commitments to understanding writing as a mode of inquiry and our preference for diffraction (rather than reflection) in conceptualizing practices of reading and critique. The article is therefore organized around questions that Haraway’s text provokes, and our responses to them. We draw on various sources, including selected science fiction (SF) texts, to trouble practices of naming geological epochs and also to trouble some of the assumptions that Haraway makes in offering “Chthulucene” as an alternative name for our present epoch.
Environmental Education Research, 2019
We address the aims of this Special Issue by exploring, critiquing, and responding constructively... more We address the aims of this Special Issue by exploring, critiquing, and responding constructively to the emergence and potential significance of new materialist thought in environmental education research and the broader theoretical landscape in which such research is situated. We offer some productive possibilities for advancing postparadigmatic materialist theorising in environmental education research by deploying concepts selected from Deleuze and Guattari's 'box of tools' (namely, 'machinic assemblage' and 'lines of flight'), supplemented by concepts associated with SF (science/speculative fiction)-namely 'cognitive estrangement' and 'object-orientated thought experiments'-to generate new lines of flight in material-semiotic environmental education research assemblages.
The Journal of Environmental Education, 2017
Using the figuration of queer tango, we conceive this essay as a performance that responds to thr... more Using the figuration of queer tango, we conceive this essay as a performance that responds to three Canadian Journal of Environmental Education articles, each of which calls for the creation and circulation of more queer scholarship in environmental education. We explore Mark Vagle's (2015) suggestion of working along the edges and margins of phenomenology using poststructuralist concepts and ideas, with a view to engaging with Joshua Russell's (2013) phenomenological interpretation of queer theory, with particular reference to Sara Ahmed's (2006) phenomenological exploration of "(dis)orientation." Although Vagle (2015) uses the Deleuzean concepts of multiplicity and line of flight to explore the phenomenological notion of intentionality, we suggest that engaging other, somewhat lesser used, Deleuzean concepts might better pair with Russell's (2013) use of the phenomenological ideas of orientation and embodied experiences. Thus, we draw on the Deleuzean creative conceptions of the molar/molecular, body without organs, and assemblages to queer(y) phenomenological notions of subjects, objects, lived bodies, and (dis)orientations. Through our inquiry, we found that dancing around the edges of phenomenology requires a redrawing of the boundaries of subjectivity and objectivity that moves from the individual to the collective, from static objects to material-semiotic generative nodes. Our provocation is that such a queer dance-one that prods and probes the geometries and optics of relationality (Barad, 2003)-can not only reinvigorate environmental education scholarship but also help to reimagine curriculum as a collective inquiry into the practices of enacting and policing boundaries.
Journal of Childhood Studies, 2018
For many, the Anthropocene foreshadows the apocalypse: a fertile terrain to speculate about the f... more For many, the Anthropocene foreshadows the apocalypse: a fertile terrain to speculate about the future, which can displace the now. We aim to reconceptualize this era, drawing inspiration from those working to imagine possible eras for the post-Anthropocene—imaginaries that do not deny the material histories and urgencies of the present. In particular, we seek to transform the ways children are figured in this epoch. In this conceptual essay, we (re)consider the Anthropocene, explore how figurations of the child tap into environmental futurism, and call for a pedagogy of the post-Anthropocene which rejects future-orientations that negate children as bearers of their own experience and agents of their own purpose.
Using the figuration of queer tango, we conceive this essay as a performance that responds to thr... more Using the figuration of queer tango, we conceive this essay as a performance that responds to three Canadian Journal of Environmental Education articles, each of which calls for the creation and circulation of more queer scholarship in environmental education. We explore Mark Vagle’s (2015) suggestion of working along the edges and margins of phenomenology using poststructuralist concepts and ideas, with a view to engaging with Joshua Russell’s (2013) phenomenological interpretation of queer theory, with particular reference to Sara Ahmed’s (2006) phenomenological exploration of “(dis)orientation.” Although Vagle (2015) uses the Deleuzean concepts of multiplicity and line of flight to explore the phenomenological notion of intentionality, we suggest that engaging other, somewhat lesser used, Deleuzean concepts might better pair with Russell’s (2013) use of the phenomenological ideas of orientation and embodied experiences. Thus, we draw on the Deleuzean creative conceptions of the molar/molecular, body without organs, and assemblages to queer(y) phenomenological notions of subjects, objects, lived bodies, and (dis)orientations. Through our inquiry, we found that dancing around the edges of phenomenology requires a redrawing of the boundaries of subjectivity and objectivity that moves from the individual to the collective, from static objects to material-semiotic generative nodes. Our provocation is that such a queer dance—one that prods and probes the geometries and optics of relationality (Barad, 2003)—can not only reinvigorate environmental education scholarship but also help to reimagine curriculum as a collective inquiry into the practices of enacting and policing boundaries.
Books by Chessa Adsit-Morris
This book examines a performative environmental educational inquiry collaboratively undertaken wi... more This book examines a performative environmental educational inquiry collaboratively undertaken with a class of grade 4-6 students through a place-based eco-art project around the lost streams of Vancouver. The resulting work explores the contradictions inherent within the Western educational system and the myriad of “Others” (real and imaginary others) encountered, in an attempt to find and foster nourishing alliances for transforming environmental education. Drawing on the work of new materialist theorists Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, and Karen Barad, Adsit-Morris considers the co-constitutive materiality of human corporeality and nonhuman natures and provides useful tools for finding creative theoretical alternatives to the reductionist, representationalist, and dualistic practices of the Western metaphysics.
Digital Humanities and Web-Based Scholarship by Chessa Adsit-Morris
Center for Creative Ecologies Journal (online), 2017
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Papers by Chessa Adsit-Morris
Books by Chessa Adsit-Morris
Digital Humanities and Web-Based Scholarship by Chessa Adsit-Morris