When I was invited to write the Foreword for this remarkable book, I knew I was in for a treat, but I didn’t fully appreciate the gift it would be. I have known both editors and some of the authors for a number of years, and have spent time with many of them at Southern Cross University. The editors and I share commitments within other projects, so I am very aware of their work in education. With that said, as I read the book, I gradually came to more fully appreciate the community of practice that the book represents. Moreover, I came to appreciate the profound sense of reciprocity that permeates everything about the way this book is conceived, enlivened and enacted. I feel like I received it as a gift from friends and colleagues, and I can feel that the process of imagining and creating the book was also a circulation of gifts among these friends and colleagues.
I want to pause for a moment and think about gifts and how this book is a gift. Settlers aligned with the modern West (minority world) have often understood gifts as individually defined and offered as a token of affection without expectations. This conception is aligned with a strong sense of individualism and often given as a purchased commodity. Many Indigenous cultures understand gifts from a collective point-of-view, where systems of social exchange create forms of sociality that recognise a collective indebtedness: gifts are given and gifts are returned. In this reciprocity, there is a certainty to the continuation of culture as well as relations within the culture. There are still other cultures and groups around the world that understand the reciprocity of gifts between these conceptions, where there is not an obligation, and the spirit of the gift may be received individually or collectively. Within these and other conceptions there is an understanding of how people relate to one another as well as how they relate to and through non-human things. Without turning this foreword into a scholarly essay on gift giving, I will say that many scholars study gift exchange across the world. That is not my intention here. Instead, I want to posit that it is a generous gift for its commitment to intellectual exchange through creative and critical experiments. It also demonstrates a very different conception of how artist-scholars-educators can be committed to being in, of and through the world, and ultimately, how they exchange gifts within their circles.
This book is uniquely created as an arts-based companion to a richly conceptual book entitled Touchstones for Deterritorializing Socioecological Learning: The Anthropocene, Posthumanism and Common Worlds as Creative Milieux. While the first book is a complex and highly theoretical offering to the field of education and particularly to socioecological learning through the touchstones of the Anthropocene, posthumanism and common worlds through creative milieux, this companion text creatively engages with the content in the first by pursuing arts-based thought experiments as the authors worked the touchstones. The result is a richly evocative and provocative text that is utterly innovative in the field.
The exchanges in this book feel like gifts as they are abundantly rich in creative experimentation, shifting our attention from standard academic prose to narratives, scripts, found poems, and visual collages. These exchanges invite us to perceive the world differently, living alongside our ecological roots as well as our humanly concerns. These exchanges gift us with demonstrations of qualitatively different engagements, offering us openings to new ways of receiving the world and in turn new ways of being in and of the world. It also offers us demonstrations of how we might give back to the world, of how we may offer gifts to the world. It disrupts how the academy interacts within itself as well as with society. We are eager to receive these extraordinary gifts and I know we will be inspired to return even more by circulating what we imagine within other circles closer to home or perhaps further afield.
One of the most unique premises of this book is its relationship with the first scholarly text and thus its commitment to companionship. There is an inherent relational nature to each offering that thinks alongside the first text, as a companion. There are also the authorial relations within each chapter and simultaneously with all of the authors in the book: they too are companions creatively engaging with the touchstones. This network of relations was skilfully arranged through retreats where the collective of authors read, wrote, created and discussed a range of concepts as a community of inquirers. The authors were intellectual, physical and creative companions gifting one another and us with demonstrations of deterritorializing socioecological learning. The power of this book is not only in the companionship between these two independent texts, it is rooted in the creative thinking alongside that gifts us with powerful new insights and understandings, and I would say, ways of being with and alongside one another. It also gifts us an opportunity to witness what we are able to do collectively when we take up timely yet challenging ideas, and pursue them individually and together. Witnessing this work is a gift. We can immediately understand how we could enact these challenging ideas. What a gift. Through the power of expression, imagination and the creative milieux, we are able to see the world anew, differently and diffractively. Such a profound gift.
As I draw this to a close, I wish to thank editors Alexandra Lasczik and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, and all of the authors, for their commitment to embodying and enacting the touchstones. Readers will be forever grateful.
This book is pure gift. Thank you.
Rita L. Irwin
Distinguished University Scholar
Professor, Art Education
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada