Conflicting worlds in a time of environmental emergency: Worlding as an educational response

Abstract

What kind of worlds do people live in and how do these worlds impact on education’s capacity for responding to the climate emergency? As Bruno Latour (2017, 2018) puts it in his work, this is not an effect of simply seeing ‘the world’ from different, conflicting vantage points, rather it is that we indeed inhabit different worlds: for some the world is where land, resources, and animals are for human use and subject to human value; for others the world is a place of profound interconnection and spirit with other living beings and non-living entities. Beginning with a critique of how ‘the’ world has been utilised in education research, I then discuss ‘worlding’ as an educational practice which recognises that we just do not live in the world, or even with the world, but that we are of worlds, simultaneously constituting and being constituted by them.

Beginning with two worlds colliding

I begin with a story reported in The Guardian (11 February, 2022) on the Swedish government’s agreement to develop one of the largest mines in the midst of Sápmi territory near Jokkmokk, unceded lands of the indigenous Sámi peoples. The mine will disrupt traditional reindeer breeding tracks, thus threatening not only the livelihood of those Sámi who herd them, but the future of the reindeer themselves. The British-owned mining company, Beowulf, offered statistics in a supposed gesture of consolation: the mine would represent just 0.5% of the 1019 sq miles of available pasture lands. In response, Jonas Vannar, a herder, stated: “You can show anything with statistics. If you compare it to someone shooting an arrow to your heart, it’s a pretty small hole when you calculate the area of the wound compared to the entire body. Then it’s surely not possible to die from an arrow in your heart?”

Two questions crystallise for me in this example: what kind of worlds do people live in and how do these worlds impact on one’s capacity for responding to the environment in these times of breakdown and emergency? Clearly a hole in the earth not only ‘means’ something different to the mining company than it does to Vannar, but the hole itself is conceived as ‘real’ in different ways. One sees the hole as a means to an end, measuring damage according to numbers and percentages; the other sees it as an insertion into an existing set of relations involving more than human others. As Latour (2017, 2018) puts it in his work, these two positions are not an effect of simply seeing ‘the world’ from different, conflicting vantage points, as if there is one world we all inhabit; rather it is that these positions indeed inhabit different worlds: for some what counts as the world is where land, resources, and animals are for human use and subject to human value; for others the world is a place of profound interconnection and spirit with other living beings and non-living entities. In other words, ‘worlds’ in the plural are made in relation between subject and material reality. However, even while both are constructed, each has different implications for the environment. As Latour sees it western/northern notions of modernity have made it difficult to ‘land on Earth’ – to root oneself within the relational flux that makes up earthly life – since they have been based on severing us as humans from our own sense of our selves as being part of the worlds we live in. Being part of rubs against conventional language that uses phrases such as being in relation to a world that is already there, outside of us. To fully land on Earth, according to Latour, requires practices that acknowledge interdependency, and as I have explored elsewhere (Todd, 2023), the importance of recognising that we just do not live in a world, or even with a world, but that we are of a world, simultaneously constituting and being constituted by it. This act of mutual implication is what a number of scholars, both indigenous and western, have referred to as practices of ‘worlding’ (e.g., Haraway, 2017; Mika, 2017).

The challenge for education is how do we begin such a landing (through worlding practices), in these times of ecological crisis, since it asks us to de-invest in ways of thinking that come as second nature to us (us in the global north at least) and to invest in new forms of educational life. How do we undermine our sense of ‘subjecthood’ as it is felt and experienced by all of us who find ourselves in these cultural contexts while moving toward another kind of ‘landing’ that demands another kind of living-subjectivity altogether? These are not simply conceptual or intellectual questions, but ones involving bodies and practices and how these matter to our educational pursuits. As I explore toward the end of this paper, one of way of conceiving of the embodiment of education involves (at least) two bodies, to use Hildyard’s (2017) phrase: the first body which sees itself in the everyday sense as intimately singular (we eat, sleep, speak, go about our daily lives); and the second body whose existence and actions are profoundly interrelated with human and more than human others both near and far. Both are involved in the many practices that go into co-creating worlds with what is given around us, worlding practices that many indigenous scholars, such as Yunkaporta (2019) see as part of a profound porosity that exists across ‘boundaries’ of existence and across time.

Before outlining my argument in detail, I consider how this focus on worlding as a practice (and indeed as an education) is different from the recent turn to ‘the world’ and ‘things’ so prevalent in educational theory in recent years. For example, Biesta’s (2021) “world-centred” education; Masschelein and Simons’ (2013) emphasis on extracting things from the world to put it to novel use, thereby making things common; and Vlieghe and Zamojski’s (2019) “thing-centred pedagogy” and teacher’s love of the world as central to educational practice are all instances of how educational theorists have sought to bring the world into conversation with educational practice. While not definitive in anyway, these scholars’ turn to figurations of ‘the world’ and the things of which it is made up, invites some consideration of what ‘the world’ is actually standing for in these invocations. That is, ‘the world’ is a large category, and what is meant by it is often assumed: sometimes referring to cultural artefacts, sometimes to inherited tradition, sometimes to ‘nature’, sometimes to a generalised environment. At times it is something we share simply by being in it, at others it is something teachers are tasked with introducing students to, as if they weren’t already a part of it. My point is not to critique these positions outright, but rather to raise the question as to the kinds of relations that are on offer when ‘the world’ is invoked in our work and how they constitute possibilities and limitations for thinking educationally about conflicting worlds more specifically.

While many who write on the significance of the world for education within the field (such as those mentioned above) draw on Hannah Arendt’s work to leverage us out of our inwardness and psychologisation of learning toward a more expansive, political sense of ourselves, there is a potential risk that what constitutes ‘the’ world continues in that modernist tradition which sees both the world and the earth as something entirely ‘outside’ the subject. As decolonial anthropologist, Escobar (2015), emphasises: “we are facing modern problems [ie, problems such as the climate crisis that have emanated from the project of modernity] for which there are no longer modern solutions” (15). Thus there is disjunct, to my mind, between modern formulations of ‘the world’ and the plurality of worlds as they exist in the present as well as between ‘the world’ and the natural, earthly dimensions of existence. In light of current ecological degradation, where conflicting worlds (not just conflicting views of the world) are so evidently at stake in contestations over the environment I see it as the purpose of educational theory to begin the work of considering what these alternatives might be, expanding beyond the Arendtian formulations to which I now turn.

Arendt’s view of the world

Phrases such as “love of the world”, which Arendt is most famous for in educational circles, is based on her complex ideas of the world as a shared sphere of existence with others. Arendt, and to some degree the theorists she has inspired in education, view the world as one that appears between ‘men’ who are engaged in something in common together, separate from the earth:

The world itself, in so far as it is common to all of us… is not identical with the earth or with nature… It is related rather to the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man-made world together (1998: 52).

For Arendt, the world lies at the core of our coming together, separating and connecting us, through its material appearance. It is a fabric that ties us together and it is also something we share that is external to us. “To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it” (52). Thus rather than ‘putting things on the table’ as is a common refrain in educational theory (e.g., Masschelein and Simons, 2013), Arendt’s table is itself the thing that not only binds us but that also keep us at a discrete distance. And this is important for Arendt – that the space created by the world allows for something to emerge within it; not only does each and every one have a relation to the table one sits at, but we are compelled to acknowledge that there are others with whom we share the table – someone leans on it too heavily at one side and the table tilts, disrupting objects that might be on it. So simply sharing it in common is not enough if we do not recognise that the others we share it with also have a relationship to it and that, as a consequence, we are all invested in the table to make it work for us. In an important sense, this is politics for Arendt. “At the center of politics lies concern for the world….Wherever people come together, the world thrusts itself between them, and it is in this in-between space that all human affairs are conducted” (2005: 106). The world, for Arendt, is the space which links human pursuits and actions.

At this juncture, I want to raise two points. First, Arendt’s view of the world would seemingly go a long way to making evident how people are fundamentally connected with one another through what we share in common. In naming the world as an inbetween space for disagreement, human affairs and politics, Arendt takes the world to be that common space in which plural voices can be heard (even if not always listened to). Thus conflict is here understood as occurring within our common world: each of us has political commitments, and while they might be at odds with each other they have at their source a concern for the space between us. The world, as this inbetween space that appears or ‘thrust itself’ between us, is thus the terrain upon which these conflicts play out. In Arendt’s view there are not ‘conflicting worlds’ just a ‘conflicted world’ which we all share. In this way, she makes a strong case for how we are bound to each other through the world we make together. And this is a significant point insofar as it enables us to introduce a sense of responsibility for this shared space that we create with others. In this Arendt asserts that there is a relational quality to the world insofar as it is made (and remade by new generations). To return to the example of the mine in Sápmi territory through Arendt’s thinking, there is profound disagreement about the world: the herder and mining executive represent different views of the space that appears between them. However, I wish to suggest that it is not simply disagreement about a hole in the ground that is at stake, offering two different visions of the one world we share. It is more about what counts as ‘world’ that is the source of disagreement in the first place: for the herder the borders of the world are not separate from nature, while the mining executive’s world is a more human-centred entity. This leads me to my second point.

Secondly, one would think that Arendt’s ideas of the world do offer something to our project of ‘landing on Earth’ in that since we all share a world in common each of us has a important stake in making that world liveable. Yet, Arendt is clear that the world is not the earth, but rather human-made and therefore imbued with human meaning. In this, Arendt’s ideas of the world are built on a modern separation between culture and nature, which in these times of environmental crisis leave little room for manoeuvring (either educationally or politically). The world is indeed messier for both human and more than human others: a hole in the ground is not only part of the human-made world but becomes linked to the lives of others and other species.

However, Ephraim (2018) in her book Who Speaks for Nature? offers an innovative reading of Arendt’s earth/world divide, seeking to show a different side of Arendt than what is usually given. Ephraim understands that “the tendency to treat nature and politics as though they were radically different orders of reality runs deep in the history of political thought” (p. 5). She seeks to revitalise an account of the centrality earth plays in Arendt’s conception of the world. In an unusual reading Ephraim sees that like the world, the earth for Arendt also appears between us. Reading against the grain of some of Arendt’s own statements (such as those I quote above), Ephraim highlights how Arendt sees the appearance of nature as contained in the world, particularly in her later work, The Life of the Mind. Ephraim writes, “Arendt writes here of a single world, containing both the natural, organic entities and processes that she elsewhere associates with the earth, and the durable, artificial things that owe their existence to human work” (p. 39). I find her reading compelling, and it goes a long way to extend Arendt’s conception of the world in ways that are potentially productive for educational responses to the ecological crisis. Nonetheless, I am curious about the way in which a ‘world-building’ project (that is political action for Arendt) can fully take account of the ‘natural’ while still acknowledging the primacy of human action. To see the ‘single world’ as one composed of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ does not in itself challenge the hierarchized relation between them. Although this was admittedly not Arendt’s project, I think it is worth considering that ‘nature’ is surely more than what ‘appears’ to humans. While an Arendtian view of the world recognises the relational and shared basis of its constitution, there is also a profound human-centredness that is privileged even as the world might include natural elements. Conflict in this Arendtian single world that Ephraim portrays remains caught within the limits of human meaning and action (ie, one has different views and positions on this single world), as opposed to displaying the effects of the existing relationalities that have gone into making ‘a’ world in the first place.

My point in this section to highlight that how Arendt locates the world as inbetween does not quite go far enough in pushing us to think about how that world not only thrusts itself or appears between us, but emerges out of, and is generated through, the very interactions that constitute a table, and other artefacts, themselves, as I discuss below. While acknowledging the importance of relationships and agency in this inbetween space, Arendt’s notion of the world (even Ephraim’s expanded reading of it) does not fully address significant questions as to whose world and which objects (aspects of nature, things, ideas, forms, artefacts) can/do appear to ‘us’? Who is this ‘us’ for whom such objects appear as ‘the world’? What kinds of relations make possible certain ‘appearances’ over others? Surely politics is not simply made possible once objects have appeared as a question of concern, but in how they got to be there in the first place and come to ‘count’ as ‘the’ world for certain people over others. The reindeer do not count the same way as minerals do for the UK mining company; the statistical language does not count without reference to the land for the Sámi. These worlds reveal not only different appearances, but more significantly, they embody histories of extraction, statistical rationality, and capitalist growth, on the one hand, and bodily practices of herding, seasonal living, and relations with land and animals, on the other hand. Two different onto-epistemological systems collide here. Moreover, even with respect to everyday objects themselves, such as tables, cars, food, maps, etc. there are histories of connection are already embedded in their actuality and in their materiality – both so-called ‘natural’ histories of what they are made from (trees, plants, fossil fuels, insects, water, air) and their human production (the loggers, miners, the equipment, child labourers, farmers and migrant workers) that go into making them part of our worlds in the first place. It is this larger, cosmopolitical set of emergences, in Isabelle Stengers’s (2010) sense, that Arendt’s world as that which is ‘thrust’ upon us doesn’t quite get at, even if it does sometimes acknowledge the ’natural’ within its borders. For her, politics lies more in what humans do with the world (out of concern) than it does in the actions that constitute the world in the first place. For her the world remains closer to noun rather than verb.

Beyond ‘One-World world’

While I am not suggesting that Arendt does not appreciate the sheer plurality of the human condition and the various attachments, concerns, and thoughts about the world that speak to its diversity (quite the contrary), I nonetheless seek to push ideas about the world into different terrain. What I wish to explore in this section is how Latour’s call for ‘landing on Earth’ in a time of environmental crisis requires us to move beyond what Law (2015) has referred to as the “One-World world” as a basis for how to think about our educational pursuits. This is a world, as I explore below, that has been the central force of colonisation through institutions such as schools, a world that ignores the plurality of different ways of being and becoming that emerge through different worlds and existences (what I describe below as worlding practices), a world that has generated conflict about ‘the world’ since only one definition of the world matters. The claim to educate ‘for the world’ or to place ‘the world’ at the centre of education can too easily fall into the trap of seeing the world as a unified thing for which we have a common concern; plurality is then located in how each of us comes to understand and act upon the world with others, without ever asking the question of what this world consists and how it came to be there.

As Escobar (2015) has put it, Law’s conception of the One-World world captures the core of the modern project as one of scientism, imperial expansion, capitalist logic, and universality; everyone exists in the same world defined and shaped by Eurocentric power/knowledge matrix, enforced using strategies of enslavement, genocide, and mass subordination, sometimes with accompanying missionary and so-called civilisation efforts. This ‘world-building’ as he sees it, becomes self-contained and immune to the ways of life and being of ‘others’. Law’s One-World world is an onto-epistemological stance that privileges – and legitimises – political ways of being. Drawing on Boaventura Sousa de Santos’s Epistemologies of the South as a framework for understanding plural forms of life beyond the global north and west, Escobar instead advocates for a ‘pluriverse’ where multiple worlds are recognised, open to different political, epistemological and ontological possibilities (15). For Escobar this does not collapse into some kind of relativism, since it moves beyond the onto-epistemological regime that divides everything up according to a universalistic centre in the first place. The zero sum logic of ‘you’re either for universalism, or against it’ (the latter is seen to run the risk of a rabid post-truth stupidity) simply reinstates the Eurocentric world as the centre of the universe itself. Rather, the pluriverse introduces another logic altogether that sees not different worlds as deviations from the Eurocentric centre but accepts different worlds as the starting point for politics, knowledge, and our ability to move beyond the world/earth divide. What Escobar and others are suggesting is that the ways in which we emerge as subjects are fundamentally tied to the ‘worlds’ that different human communities co-inhabit and co-create – where there is no neat divide between culture/nature; mind/body; thought/action. And yet living with this plurality is difficult since many onto-epistemologies have been relegated to non-existence through the very strategies of securing the One-World world. We can think of forced institutionalisation through residential and boarding schools of indigenous peoples, not only in Canada and Australia, but in Scandinavia as well, where Sámi children were taken away from parents to attend such schools. Thus the One-World world has depended on the silencing of other worlding practices. ‘The’ world between us, then, is one that has emerged from this move to erase. It has been an effective strategy that disables any ‘alternative’ views from gaining validity. What scholars such as Escobar and Sousa de Santos attempt to excavate is the importance of such multiple marginalised worlding practices that are built on relational ontologies as opposed to ontologies of separation and exclusion. In contradistinction from the One-World world, this relational ontological commitment can be “defined as one in which nothing preexists the relations that constitute it” (Escobar, 2015: 18 – emphasis in original). Such a commitment does not conjure a divide between nature/culture but is enacted through practices that do not recognise such a divide from the beginning. From the position of the pluriverse, ‘the world’ is not something that ‘thrusts’ itself in-between; ¹ instead there exist ‘worlds’ in the plural which are already enmeshed in the ways we live with/through them. They are lived realities as opposed to an array of objects, artefacts, ideas, natural forms that ‘we’ share in common. Thus the challenge for ‘landing on Earth’ is to what degree we can accept and face these worlds of entanglement as offering non-modern responses to the environmental crisis wrought by modernity itself.

Worlding practices in light of the environmental crisis

In their decolonial critique of climate emergency discourse, Blaney and Tickner (2017) agree with Escobar that different worlds emerge from different cosmologies. In their view, “difference is not about engaging across perspectives on or in a single world. Rather, it is about struggling and working to craft encounters across ontological difference…” (298). This means, for them, shifting from either/or logics that position contradiction as the main discursive frame toward “contrast” that makes “the ontological politics at play visible and thus disturbs the self-sealing logic of modern ontology” (307). This move is important both for my purposes here in terms of education, and for responding to the environmental emergency more generally. How to think of different worlds as simply different practices of worlding and how they might contribute to ways of framing a response to the crisis? This does not make all worlds equal for being able to respond to the emergency – indeed (modern) ones that are rooted in a rigid separation between nature and culture cannot provide such a response; rather, I am suggesting that worlding practices that see themselves as worlding practices, that is, as ones of interconnection as opposed to separation, are more amenable and flexible for redressing the very relationality that is contributing to current planetary destruction.

For instance, in the article “Worlding beyond ‘the’ ‘end’ of ‘the World’” Mitchell and Chaudury (2020) begin by posing a key question: “It is often said that the ‘end of the world’ is approaching – but whose world, exactly, is expected to end?” (310). Their point is not to minimise the effects of climate change or to downplay the mass extinction and loss of diversity of the planet, but to focus on ‘the world’ and how apocalyptic discourses about the end of it are symptomatic of ‘whiteness’. For them doomsday discourses of the Anthropocene frequently centre the ‘loss of the world’ in terms of what the global north and west see themselves as losing. The perceived lack of alternatives within these necropolitical narratives is challenged, however, by futurisms defined by Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour, which embody different worlding practices that expand conceptions of humanity, nature, and the planet itself (310). What Mitchell and Chaudury demonstrate in their piece through various examples is how rich and diverse worlding practices can “imagine multiple futures and alternatives to apocalypse. They also re-frame the end of whiteness, as a structure of domination, as an opening for the emergence of plural worlds” (321). What this means is that worlding practices are not simply about individuals coming together through encounters with a One-World world but are constituted through a plethora of possible connections that can come to challenge modern/colonial frames of the environmental crisis itself.

Worlding as an educational practice – A way to conclude

Akin to what the authors above suggest, alternatives to the notion of a One-World world exist as important entry points for thinking about educational responses to the climate emergency and the kinds of encounters that are made possible. Tyson Yunkaporta (2019) outlines some of the ways Indigenous (specifically Aboriginal) knowledges might be helpful in responding to planetary crises. Refusing a privileged epistemological position, or a romantic vision of these knowledges, he instead suggests how they can provoke those of us who live within western frameworks to see one’s own systems of living through new eyes – not with hubris but with humility. Yunkaporta is clear that closed system thinking, which currently dominates globally, creates worlds that are unsustainable. Earth’s creatures do not live in a “closed system” where each element is assigned fixed value within a hierarchy (e.g., the minerals are in the ground ready for human use; the incision into the skin of the land is so statistically minute so as not to matter) but an ‘open system’ that is itself living, changing, moving and adapting where multiple patterns of relationality are possible between diverse elements, from birds and water to rock and reindeer, and where change in one element brings about change in others (hence an incision into the surface of the earth matters by virtue of its repercussions on other elements of the system). Moreover, open systems are relational in that they encounter and interact with/in multiple systems, multiple worlds. For example, at the level of kin, Yunkaporta writes: “The child’s aunty is also somebody’s child, at the centre of her own system. Every time you meet someone and establish your relationship to each other, you are bringing together multiple universes” (46).

These worlding practices also operate at the level of culture and social arrangements. Yunkaporta gives a hint as to how to think educationally about them through ‘sand talk’ imagery, which is an Aboriginal practice of drawing symbols in the sand to communicate thought, ideas, worlds. One of the sand-talk images (Figure 1) he uses to organise his writing depicts two ‘worlds’: one is the abstract realm of mind and spirit; the other the concrete realm of land, relationships and activity (or everyday earthly life). What is significant is the looping back, forth, around and between them. These lines signal the metaphors (images, songs, rituals, gestures, dance) that connect these two worlds and in so doing co-constitute these worlds as meaningful “places of overlap” (111) that are the sites of “creation”, of earth as a living entity – where learning and education can and indeed do occur. “Creation is not an event in the distant past, but something that is continually unfolding and needs custodians to keep co-creating it by linking the two worlds together via metaphors in cultural practice” (Yunkaporta, 2019: 110).

Figure 1.

Sand-talk image of two worlds (Yunkaporta, 2019).

Educationally speaking, the task is not to mirror these specific (metaphorical) ways of Aboriginal being in our western schools or other sites, but to ask ourselves how to keep the “spark of creation” (111) alive as part of one’s own worlding practices. As Yunkaporta himself adovates, creating “complex connectivity” (112; 154) instead of “linear, abstract, declarative knowledge” (112) would allow for a more haptic, sensory element to be seen as central to the purpose of education itself. To reiterate, his point is not that global north scholars ought to appropriate indigenous frameworks (quite the contrary!), but to find patterns of relationality in one’s own historical, spiritual, and land-based practices, beyond the narrow conceptions of ethnicity and nationhood, which the populist right attempts to mobilise to exert their own One-World world. ² While Yunkaporta provides a glimpse into Aboriginal knowledge systems, the point is that those outside them should be looking for their own patterns of relationality and metaphor that can infuse one’s life in all its complexity. For Yunkaporta, metaphor is key to addressing the current environmental crisis:

You don’t need to believe in ghosts to balance spirit and live the right way in this world. You can use any metaphor you like—for example ego, id, superego and persona. Frontal lobe, monkey brain, neo-cortex and lizard brain. Athos, Porthos, Aramis and d’Artagnan. Harry, Ron, Hermione and Malfoy. Monkey spirit, Pig spirit, Fish spirit and Tripitaka. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Whatever stories your cultural experience offers you, you can still perceive spirit through metaphor and bring it into balance to step into your designated role as a custodian of reality (109).

Another complementary way of framing this is through what Daisy Hildyard (2017) refers to as the “second body.” Drawing mainly on scientific as well as existential/phenomenological explorations of how we live through our bodies, and indeed how we create worlds with them, Hildyard offers a picture of what she sees as a profound split in human existence, at least in global north/western understandings of it. On the one hand, the first body is the individual, physical one that goes about its daily routines, making breakfast, travelling by train, sitting in a chair and typing frantically with shoulders slightly hunched and a frown on the face. The other, second body is the bio-planetary one that is constantly and globally connected to ecosystems, networks of life and exchange, through water, air, bacteria, the food we eat, the fuels we burn, the minerals in the microchips that we need to type into our computers. While some indigenous and feminist scholars would identify the source of the climate problem as lying in this very split, in other words in seeing that we have two bodies in the first place, Hildyard’s thesis is that we live these simultaneously and her argument seeks to displace the individual body of modernity as the sole one that matters to living a life in relation. In taking up an investigation into one’s own cultures of relationality as non-indigenous people, which have been largely occluded from western narratives, and de-investing in ways of thinking that seem to come as second nature means granting importance to the second body and how it is intertwined with the first. Indeed, centring the second body within education means creating opportunities for experiencing these entanglements: bringing awareness to our planetary connections, listening to what plants, animals, objects have to say, generating and recovering metaphors in Yunkaporta’s sense (meaning images, gestures, movement) that link the worlds of first body to those of the second.

All this, to me, gives us a way of engaging in education as a worlding practice. No longer is ‘the world’ a singular one ‘thrust between us’. Instead, it is about the living body as it enacts itself in a relational field with everything that it is part of. Seeing education as a worlding practice would enable us in the west and global north to actually develop an embodied sensibility toward the ways a (statistically relative) small hole in the ground can disrupt patterns of mating and grazing and a lifestyle of herding, toward the fragility of the ground created by mining that threatens other plant, animal, human and insect life, and toward the wind carrying polluted air caused by mining to others in far-reaching places that have never heard of Jokkmokk.

Seen in this way, education is less about teaching youth, for instance, the skills of caring for something (although such a skill can surely be learned) and more about designing and curating encounters that address this interdependency directly. It is about allowing students to experience the interconnection that already exists. Think of educational settings through which trees, plants, insects, ideas, numbers, books, and maps are encountered. All of these things are constituted by past and present relations with other things, including the teachers and students who come into contact with them, playing with, touching, smelling, studying, discussing, trying on, and adapting them to their current situation and in that process becoming a (new) subject – with the things thereby being carried forward into different futures. On such a view, a student who grows a plant is not merely ‘someone who is in relation to the plant’, but becomes the carer and grower the plant needs if it is to survive; the plant becomes a source of oxygen that journeys through the breath into the body of the student becoming a vital source in its own right; and that breath is shared by others and in turn with a host of other plants. Ultimately, these acts of worlding can educate us about interconnection in ways that do not separate the world we live in and the world we live from (Latour, 2017). They enable us, in other words, to put our feet back on Earth.