Matter and Mind: on embodied ethics, education, and the environmental imaginary

This major research project is the culmination of a visual autoethnographical exploration and experimentation with relationality and environ-mental education in an urban setting. Charting a metamorphosed research process, these pages unravel the theory and practice of ethical contemplation in daily city life, and the affective dimensions that this sort of environmental learning can evoke. Unpacking the experiential grounds of relational philosophy, art is used to illustrate my process as it revealed itself to me.* The project included five interviews with environmental scholar-educators and the story-data that emerged from those conversations inhabits the work. Lived environmental ethics and the general tendency towards an urban blind spot in environmental education informed the artistic process of making sense of subjective embodiments in the city. A creative embodiment of subjectivity in the city is the reoccurring original character and image of Loona. Acknowledging response-abilities and gathering around shared environmental and ethical sensibilities, with notions of difference held firmly in hand, offer ways for us all to share this only Earth. A practice of thinking differently about and with the world, nature and our human place in each and both is a beginning. Complicating and multiplying our multi-species relationality is part of this praxis. The arts of living with where we are, enacting an ethics of hope and practicing thinking-making are results of this major research project. Worry, celebration and narrating hope, while being always accountable to the affective dimensions of our environmental work matter.