Upcoming Event
Join us for a DARE talk by Dr. David Rousell, Associate Professor of Regenerative Education at RMIT, Melbourne.
David’s research focuses on creatively reshaping the education and cultural sectors in response to the urgency of climate action. His collaborative work with diverse educational communities has established an international evidence base for creative, transdisciplinary, and climate-responsive education across formal and informal learning contexts. His recent projects re-imagine the learning infrastructures of cities in response to the climate and biodiversity crisis, ubiquitous digitisation, and the urgencies of decolonising public institutions. This work has brought public attention to the diverse impacts of planetary changes in the lives of children, young people, and communities through the co-production of films, installations, exhibitions, alternative curriculum frameworks, and digital platforms in Australia and internationally.
Presenter Bio:
Dr. David Rousell teaches and researches across education, art and design, philosophy, geography, and cultural studies. He is a Fellow of the Regenerative Futures Institute and a core member of the Centre for Urban Research and the Digital Ethnography Research Centre. He is also founding convener of the Local Alternatives research platform and Critical Forest Studies Collaboratory.
For the past decade, David’s collaborative research has led to the development of new theoretical and methodological approaches at the nexus of environmental philosophy (ontology, ethics, aesthetics, politics), environmental education (pedagogy, curriculum, design), and environmental art and design (history, theory, practice). Through research and teaching value the situated knowledges and experiences of educational communities, his work has led to significant social impact through co-designed transformations of schools, universities, galleries and museums, urban and regional municipalities, businesses, and cultural organisations.
David has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles, chapters, and books and 8 edited special issues across a range of fields, including environmental education, cultural geography, ecological philosophy, environmental art, architecture, and design, childhood and youth studies, decolonial studies, multispecies inquiry, and the posthumanities.
His books include Immersive Cartography and Post-Qualitative Inquiry (Routledge, 2021), Doing Rebellious Research (Brill, 2022, with Pamela Burnard, Elizabeth Mackinlay, and Tatjana Drogovic), Posthuman Research Playspaces: Climate Child Imaginaries (Routledge, 2023, with Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles), and Process and Place: A field guide to speculative research (Routledge, in press, with Nina Williams and Tara Elisabeth Jeyasingh).
David’s research has attracted over $2.5 million in national and international research funding.
Date/Time
Monday, October 26
Time: 1:00 - 2:30 p.m.
Place
EDB 8620.1, SFU Burnaby campus
(Online with Zoom is optional)
DARE Seminar 8
Mastery’s Paradox: Making Friends with Strangeness in a More-Than-Human World
Book launch, reading, art exhibit & conversation with Tanya Behrisch
What might be possible if we changed our understanding of mastery? We often understand mastery as expertise, control, certainty and the ability to make the world bend to human intention.
What if mastery also requires something quite different: humility, receptivity and the capacity to live well with what we cannot fully know or control?
Join SFU Adjunct Professor, artist and author Tanya Behrisch for the launch of her new book, Mastery’s Paradox: Making Friends with Strangeness in a More-Than-Human World (Peter Lang Publishing). Bringing together philosophy, education, ecology and art, Mastery’s Paradox explores our encounters with otherness: the strangeness of ourselves, of other people, and of the more-than-human world.
Showing original oil paintings in various stages of progress, Tanya asks what older understandings of mastery might teach us about living and learning in a time marked by powerful pressures toward efficiency, certainty and control, but also by deep uncertainty fueled in part by the very technologies supposed to equip us for such control.
The afternoon will include a short reading and reflections from Tanya, followed by dialogue with audience members.
The gathering invites us to stay with some generative questions: What do we gain, and lose, through our desire for certainty and control? What can art, education and the living world teach us about not knowing? And how might becoming more comfortable with strangeness change the ways we learn, lead and live together?
Faculty, staff, students, friends and curious minds are warmly invited.
Presenter Bio:
Tanya Behrisch is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Education and the Director of Co-operative Education at SFU. A scholar, educational leader, writer and visual artist, her work explores questions of mastery, otherness, uncertainty and our relationship with the more-than-human world. Her scholarship draws on hermeneutics, philosophy of education, arts-based inquiry and ecological thought, alongside her experience in educational and organizational leadership. Tanya completed her PhD in Philosophy of Education at SFU in 2022. Mastery’s Paradox is her first book and features 80 of her original oil paintings.
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