Project Director
Professor Karen Malone
Karen Malone is a Professor of Environmental and Childhood Studies, Research Director for the School of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities and member of Centre Urban Transitions at Swinburne University of Technology (SUT). Malone has published 12 Books, 42 Book chapters, and over 50 Journal articles. Her most recent publication Theorising Posthumanist Childhood Studies is the foundation book to the Springer series Children: Global Posthumanist perspectives and Materialist theories she co-edits with Marek Tesar and Sonja Arndt. Malone is co-editor of the International Research Handbook on Childhoodnature (2019). The handbook has 9 sections, 81 chapters and over 200 authors. It is the most comprehensive and significant handbook on childhood and nature ever published. Her most recent sole-authored book Children in the Anthropocene (2018) downloaded 2700 times, explores her research interest in urban childhood ecologies in South America and Asia. She is also first named author of an edited collection titled Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times (2017), that has been downloaded 25,000 times. Other recent publication edited book Urban Nature and Childhoods was published in 2019 with iris Duhn and Marek Tesar. She has been the Chief Investigator of 41 competitive funded research grants with a combined income of 2.4 million dollars. She has successfully supervised 16 doctoral students to completion; and is currently supervising 5 Doctoral students and 1 Masters students. She has provided 40 invited national and international keynote addresses and 43 conference paper presentations.
Contact: kazmalone@gmail.com
Project Team Members
Dr Tracy Young
Tracy is a lecturer-researcher in the Department of Education. Tracy’s work is sustained by a commitment to animal activism and ecological justice and seeks to understand how power structures are reinforced through the political, social and cultural effects of education. Thus, her research is concerned with broad and intersecting themes of education. Recent research aligns three disciplines: early childhood education, environmental education, and human-animal studies where connections and disjunctions of children’s relations with animals in family homes and early childhood education are researched within a critical posthuman and post-qualitative theoretical framework. In this research the complex relations with children, animals and environments provide a space for ethical inquiry that troubles how animal species are socially constructed, culturally reproduced and positioned in early childhood education. Post-qualitative methodologies invite creative practices in her research including theorising with critical posthumanist, ecofeminist, postcolonial and new materialist philosophies. Tracy’s research and writing contributes to wider understandings about the significance of early childhood education in terms of relationality with the human and the more-than-human.
Project Advisory Board
International Members
Dr. Sean Blenkinsop
Sean Blenkinsop is professor of philosophy of education in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He grew up in the boreal forests of northern Canada. With a 30+ year background in outdoor, environmental, and experiential education his interest in environmental sustainable education comes quite naturally. Over the last ten years he has been involved in starting three nature/place-based, Indigenizing, eco-schools (all in the public system) and has written extensively about these experiences and the philosophical underpinnings of eco-education writ large. His latest collaborative book Wild Pedagogies was published in 2018 by Palgrave and a new book focusing on a qualitative research method, eco-portraiture, developed by his research team is due out in early 2021 with Peter Lang.
Contact: sblenkin@sfu.ca
Dr. Peter Blaze Corcoran
Dr. Peter Blaze Corcoran is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies and Environmental Education at Florida Gulf Coast University. He has been a faculty member at College of the Atlantic, Swarthmore College, and Bates College. He has held appointments as a visiting professor at universities in Australia, The Netherlands, Fiji, Malaysia, and Kenya. He has long served as a Research Fellow at the Earth Charter Center for Education for Sustainable Development at University for Peace in San José, Costa Rica. Earth Ethics Institute at Miami Dade College has designated him as an Elder. New posts since his recent retirement include appointments as Senior Advisor to Unity Earth in Melbourne, Australia and Senior Fellow at the International Council for Environmental Economics and Development in New York City. He also serves on the Grant Selection Council of Purpose Earth, a new organization which supports community and environmental activism worldwide. In 2020, University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia appointed him as an Adjunct Professor of Environmental and Sustainability Education. He continues to be active as a scholar on a range of topics in educational and environmental studies through various chapters, journal articles, and lectures. His most recent books include Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education, Wageningen Academic Publishers (2017), and Intergenerational Learning and Transformative Leadership for Sustainable Futures, Wageningen Academic Publishers (2014).
Contact: peterblazecorcoran@gmail.com
Dr. Bob Jickling
Professor Jickling is a long-time Yukon resident who taught environmental ethics and environmental education at Yukon College for many years. Bob Jickling has been an active practitioner, teaching courses in environmental philosophy; environmental, experiential, and outdoor education; and philosophy of education. He worked as a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University after many years of teaching at Yukon College. He continues his work as Professor Emeritus at Lakehead University. Jickling has published one authored book, several edited volumes, numerous book chapters, and papers in a variety of scholarly journals. He has served as an advisory editor to four international journals. His research interests include philosophical inquiry into environmental education, environmental ethics, and relationships between environmental ethics, education, and pedagogy. Jickling was the founding editor of the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education in 1996, and he co-chaired the 5th World Environmental Education Congress in Montreal, in 2009. He has also received the North American Association of Environmental Education’s Awards for Outstanding Contributions to: Research (2009) and Global Environmental Education (2001). In 2012, he received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in recognition of contributions to Canada.
Contact: bob.jickling@lakeheadu.ca
Professor Michael Paulsen
Michael Paulsen is a philosopher and associate professor specializing in educational research at the University of Southern Denmark. He serves as the head of the Center for Understanding Human Relationships with the Environment (CUHRE), which focuses on advancing ecological literacy in the population. His academic contributions include authoring several books and articles on environmental education and pedagogy in the Anthropocene era. In collaboration with his colleague, Sara Mosberg Iversen, he leads a research project that involves developing and applying a speculative cli-fi role-playing game addressing climate issues for young people. https://portal.findresearcher.sdu.dk/en/persons/m
Contact: mpaulsen@sdu.dk
Dr Pauliina Rautio
Pauliina Rautio is a Senior Research Fellow of Education at the University of Oulu, Finland, and an Adjunct Professor of Education at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Her research interests cover human-environment relations with a recent focus on child-animal relations in specific. These interests are approached from a non-anthropocentric perspective and with critical qualitative methods, also in the two research projects Pauliina leads: AniMate (2018-2021) on child-animal relations and CitiRats (2020-2024) on young people, citizen science and difficult companion species. Pauliina is a member of the editorial boards of Australian Journal of Environmental Education and the Canadian Journal of Childhood Studies.
Contact: pauliina.rautio@oulu.fi
Dr. Dawn Sanders
A/Professor Dawn Sanders Sanders engages in a range of research and writing partnerships both in Europe and further afield. She is particularly active in trans-disciplinary multi-media partnerships with researchers working in arts-based research for example https://snaebjornsdottirwilson.com and humanities https://herbaria3.org oriented around plant-based research. She regularly participates in co-authored publications as well as single author contributions and has built editorial relationships through books, special issues and special collections in issues. Notably the recent special issue and editorial in Plants People Planet: https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ppp3.10059 and the editorial and collection on Botanic Gardens in Environmental Education Research: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504622.2018.1477122 . Sanders brings a transdisciplinary identity to her research practice and teaching. In addition to her teaching and research work Sanders is an active reviewer of journal articles and grant applications; for example, she has reviewed early career and student submissions to the National Science Foundation, USA and the Icelandic Research Fund for Graduate Students, Iceland.
Contact: dawn.sanders@gu.se
Dr. Arjen Wals
Arjen Wals is a Professor of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological Sustainability at Wageningen University. He also holds the UNESCO Chair of Social Learning and Sustainable Development. Wals is also a Visiting Professor at Norwegian Life Science University in Ås where he supports the development of Whole Schools Approaches & Sustainability. His recent work focusses on transformative social learning in vital coalitions of multiple stakeholders at the interface of science and society. His teaching and research focus on designing learning processes and learning spaces that enable people to contribute meaningfully sustainability. A central question in his work is: how to create conditions that support (new) forms of learning which take full advantage of the diversity, creativity and resourcefulness that is all around us, but so far remain largely untapped in our search for a world that is more sustainable than the one currently in prospect? He writes a regular research blog that signals developments in the emerging field of sustainability education: www.transformativelearning.nl For a short introduction to his work have look at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqB4ryiS4cY
Contact: arjen.wals@wur.nl
National Members
Dr. Carol Birrell
Dr Carol Birrell is creative ecologist with expertise in environmental humanities, Indigenous studies, ecopedagogy, social ecology, place-based research, climate change and creativity and imagination. She is an accomplished fiction and non-fiction author and artist. Her earth-based arts practice for the last 20 years, called Touched by the Earth, draws together movement, painting, photography, environmental sculpture and poetry, along with Indigenous understandings, as a base for ecological writing and exploring ecological identity. She was recently a Lecturer in Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney, School of Education, and now teaches Aboriginal Education at Wollongong University. Her background of 25 years in teaching includes primary and high schools, geography and Social Sciences, wilderness education and personal development. She writes about her arts practice and ecological thinking on her blog entries on the website Touched by the Earth https://carolbirrell.wordpress.com/
Contact: carolleebirrell@gmail.com
Dr. Marcia McKenzie
Marcia McKenzie is Professor of Global Studies and International Education, in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Victoria Australia. Dr. McKenzie’s current research projects include leading the Sustainability and Education Policy Network (2012-2020), the Director, Monitoring and Evaluation of Climate Change Education (MECCE) project (2020-2026), and ‘The development and mobilization of UN policy programs: Mitigating climate change through education’ (2019-2024). She has also recently led three global UNESCO consultancies, including ‘Country progress on climate change education: A review of national submissions to the UNFCCC,’ and ‘ESD and GCED up close: Cognitive, social and emotional and behavioral learning in Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship Education from pre-primary to secondary education,’ as well as a new study on inclusion of environment in K-12 policy and curricula across 50 countries. Encompassed within Dr. McKenzie’s empirical projects are theoretical and applied contributions at the intersections of comparative and international education, global education policy research, and climate and sustainability education, including in relation to policy mobility, scale, affect, intersectionality, and other areas of social and geographic concern. She is also author/editor of four books, including: with Eve Tuck, Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods (Routledge, 2015); and with Andrew Bieler, Critical Education and Sociomaterial Practice (Peter Lang, 2016); and is co-editor of the Palgrave book series Studies in Education and the Environment. She held a year-long Australian Endeavour Executive Fellowship in 2018-2019, and been inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. The following links provide information on her significant contribution to the field of sustainability education in Canada and globally. Director, Sustainability Education Research Institute (SERI) Project Director, Sustainability and Education Policy Network (SEPN) Associate Member, School of Environment and Sustainability .
Contact: marcia.mckenzie@unimelb.edu.au
Dr. Fiona Cameron
Dr. Fiona Cameron is a Associate Professor Research Fellow at Western Sydney university and a leading thinker and internationally recognized scholar in museum and heritage studies. Over her academic career she has successfully attained seven ARC projects (five as lead CI, two as CI 2) and a prestigious ARC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sydney as lead CI (2002–2004). In 2005, as lead CI, I was awarded an ARC Linkage grant “Reconceptualising Heritage Collections with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) and transferred to Western Sydney University. She is a member of the Centre for Cultural Research (CCR), now the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) at WSU. This intensive, research-focused environment supports competitive grant capture. As a result, in 2007, she received an ARC Linkage “Hot Science Global Citizens: the Agency of the Museum Sector in Climate Change Interventions” involving five museum partners (Australia, US). In 2010, she was awarded a prestigious Rachel Carson Fellowship (professorial appointment) and spent six months (Sept 2011 – March 2012) at the Rachel Carson Center, a joint research centre between Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and the German Deutsches Museum of Science and Technology under the leadership of Professor Drs Christof Mauch and Helmuth Trischler. She also held a visiting fellow position at KTH Environmental Humanities Lab, Stockholm, in 2018 under the directorship of Dr Marco Armiero to conduct research for my forthcoming monograph, Museum practice and the environmental posthumanities (Routledge 2020). high-quality outputs comprising 79+ publications including: a multi-authored monograph and a second forthcoming (Duke 2017; Te Papa Press ), 3 collections (senior MIT Press, Routledge), 23 chapters (15 sole, 8 lead), 3 journal special issues (lead), 29 refereed articles (24 sole, 5 lead), 7 refereed proceedings (6 sole), 2 articles (1 sole), 11 reports (10 lead, 1 sole), 3 climate policy documents along with 2 sole-authored monographs (MIT Press, accepted; Routledge 2020 forthcoming).
Contact: f.cameron@westernsydney.edu.au
Dr. Sarah Crinall
Sarah Crinall was a Research Fellow for Professor Malone on the funded research Children in the Anthropocene project in particular focusing on research theme sensorial ecological knowing with children. She has published extensively after completing her PHD in 2017. Her thesis ‘Blogging art and sustenance: Artful everyday life (making) with water’ won the AERA best research thesis research award in 2018. In 2019 she published her thesis as a sole-authored book Sustaining Childhood Nature: The Art of Becoming Water published in the Springer book series Children: Global Posthumanist perspectives and materialist theories.
Contact: scrinall@gmail.com
Dr. David Cole
A/Professor David R. Cole is the founder of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene: https://iiraorg.com/. David is a philosopher of education and author, having produced more than one hundred significant publications and fifteen books. He believes that the problematics of the Anthropocene can only be approached through collective practice and thought. Firstly, the complex dynamics that are at play need to be understood and rethought beyond limiting assumptions. Secondly, this exploration has to be translated to practical action on the ground that can be followed by communities. David works as an Associate Professor in Education at Western Sydney University, Australia.
Contact: david.cole@westernsydney.edu.au
Dr. Iris Duhn
Professor Iris Duhn is currently working at the School of Education, University of Tasmania. She has specific expertise in the sociology of childhood/critical childhood studies, and philosophy of childhood. She frequently publishes on sustainability, curriculum, globalisation and professionalism, new materialism and its methodologies in early childhood. As an expert in early childhood education, her research leadership contributes specifically to an ongoing focus on the importance of including young children’s voices in complex issues around their learning and in conceptualization of the concept of multi-species agency in the Anthropocene. Her research in this area supports explicit foci on the development of new concepts and theories that respond to the challenges of climate change and loss of biodiversity and its effects on concepts of ‘childhood’ in a rapidly changing world. Duhn has been a Chief Investigator on externally funded projects in New Zealand and in Australia (including two Australian Research Council funded projects). Since her first full time academic appointment in 2007, Duhn has published consistently with a total of 46. Most of these publications appear in high quality journals and book chapters are published by well regarded publishers (Routledge, Springer). Her overall Google Scholar citation count is well over 1000, with 635 citations since 2015. Duhn was invited to edited a Special Issue for the leading journal in the field of environmental education research Environmental Education Research (2018 Impact Factor 2.255) and the Special Issue was published in 2017 (co-edited with Malone and Tesar). She is an Editorial Board member for Environmental Education Research, for Contemporary Issues In Early Childhood and for the New Zealand Educational Review.
Contact: iris.duhn@utas.edu.au
Dr. Linda Knight
Linda Knight is an artist and academic who specialises in critical and speculative arts practices and methods. Linda devised ‘Inefficient Mapping’ as a methodological protocol for conducting fieldwork in projects informed by ‘post-‘ theories. In her role as Associate Professor at RMIT University, Australia Linda creates transdisciplinary projects across early childhood, creative practice, and digital media. Together with Jacinta Leong, Linda is a founding member of the Guerrilla Knowledge Unit, an artist collective that curates interface jamming performances between the public and AI technologies. Linda has exhibited digitally and physically in Australia, UK, USA, Canada, NZ, and South America and has been awarded arts research grants and prizes with international reach and impact, most recently this includes an Australian Research Council Discovery project that designs novel technologies for framing and enabling young children’s active play.
Website: https://lindaknight.org/
Inefficient mapping IG: @lk_inefficient_urban_maps
GKU: https://guerrillaknowledgeunit.com/
Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=0jYWOFwAAAAJ&hl=en
Contact: linda.knight@rmit.edu.au
Dr. Marcus Morse
Dr Marcus Morse is Senior Lecturer and Program Convenor for Outdoor Environmental Education at La Trobe University, Australia. Marcus grew up in Tasmania and has worked in outdoor and environmental education roles in Norway, Canada, Nepal, and Australia. He has a passion for teaching on extended outdoor programs where his teaching focuses on relational understandings of place and ways in which education can promote social and cultural change required for hopeful futures. Marcus’ current research interests are in the areas of wild pedagogies, posthuman education, place-based pedagogy, and community engagement projects (CityStudio). Marcus has been awarded both university-wide learning and teaching, and research awards. Over the past five years he has published more than 20 journal articles and book chapters as well as presenting at international conferences.
https://scholars.latrobe.edu.au/display/mmorse
Contact: m.morse@latrobe.edu.au
Environmental Sustainability in the Anthropocene 