The ridge-to-reef approach on Cicia Island, Fiji

Many Pacific countries and territories embrace an officially recognized ‘ridge-to-reef’ approach to environmental management. This is the case of Fiji, where the Lau Seascape Strategy 2018–2030, led by Conservation International, aims for integrated natural resource management across 335 895 km2. This area includes Cicia Island, which deserves particular attention since, years before the design of the Lau Seascape Strategy, its population developed its own informal ridge-to-reef scheme, involving a combination of certified organic agriculture and locally managed marine closures. Based on 1 month of ethnographic fieldwork, this paper presents this scheme and highlights local perception and conceptualization of its positive effects on both the land and the sea. These reflect the iTaukei (Indigenous Fijian) concept of vanua, which intrinsically connects the health of the land, the sea, and their (human and non-human) dwellers, while stressing the importance of addressing land-sea processes and management efforts beyond an ecological perspective, i.e. through an engagement with the iTaukei relational ontology.

Indigenous Understandings: Fusing Landscape and Skyscape

The talk examines the relational ontology of the Native American Lenape Delaware people who form part of the larger Algonquian-speaking group of North America. It is sometimes said that in the past as people contemplated the night sky, they ended up telling stories that were meant to explain what they saw in the sky above. Certainly, there is ample proof for the existence such astral tales when viewed cross-culturally. What I discuss, however, is the way in which what the Lenape people saw and experienced on earth was projected onto the stars above along with the associated cosmovision and belief system they embraced. Instead of passive sky-watching, they were fusing together landscape and skyscape. In the case of the Lenape cosmovision discussed here I will show that it is intimately linked to the tenets of bear ceremonialism. It was a remarkable belief system that managed to weave together landscape and skyscape: what was happening on earth and experienced on a daily basis was exteriorized, given expression and importance by projecting aspects of this rich earthly belief system onto the massive sky screen above.

Slow Scholarship: Propositions for the Extended Curriculum Programme

Higher education has been deeply affected by neoliberalism and corporatisation, with their emphasis on efficiency, competitiveness and valorisation of quantity over quality. This article argues that in the context of South African higher education, and in the Extended Curriculum Programme (ECP) more particularly, such commodification of education is problematic. The article explores what the Slow movement has to offer ECP in terms of scholarship. It seeks to answer the question: How might ECP be reconfigured using Slow imaginaries? Various academic disciplines and practices have incorporated Slow philosophy to develop alternative ways of doing academia; however, it has hitherto not been considered for programmes such as ECP. This article approaches Slow pedagogy for ECP using posthuman and feminist new materialist sensibilities that are predicated on a relational ontology. The article puts forward the following 10 propositions for a Slow scholarship in ECP using ideas from posthumanism and feminist new materialism: practice attentiveness through noticing, engage in responsible relations, diffract rather than reflect (thinking together affirmatively), render each other capable, enable collective responsiveness, explore creatively, making thoughts and feelings possible, enact curiosity, ask the right questions politely, foreground process rather than product, and create conditions for trust by wit(h)nessing. It is argued that by practising Slow scholarship with these propositions, ECPs might resist market-driven imperatives that characterise contemporary academia.

The Animistic Way: Contemporary Paganism and the Posthuman

This article aims to explore the affinities between contemporary Paganism and the posthuman project in how they approach the non-human natural world. On the one hand, posthumanism explores new ways of considering the notion of humans and how they are linked with the non-human world. On the other hand, Neopaganism expands this reflection to the spiritual domain through its animistic relational sensibility. Both perspectives challenge the modern paradigm where nature and humans are opposed and mutually disconnected. They instead propose a relational ontology that welcomes the “different other.” This integrated relationship between humans and the “other than human” can be understood through the semiotic Chora, a notion belonging to Julia Kristeva that addresses how the subject is not symbolically separated from the world in which it is contained.

Heather’s Homestead/Marotahei: The Invasion of the Waikato and Ways of Knowing Our Past in Aotearoa New Zealand

The British invasion of the Māori region of the Waikato in 1863 was one of the most pivotal moments in the colonisation of Aotearoa New Zealand. It has been the subject of multiple authoritative histories and sits at the centre of historical discussions of sovereignty, colonial politics and the dire consequences of colonisation. This article approaches this complex historical moment through the personal histories of a Māori/Pākehā homestead located at the political and geographic epicentre of the invasion. This mixed whanau/family provides the opportunity to explore a more kinship-based ontology of the invisible lines of influence that influenced particular actions before and during the invasion. It does so by mobilising two genealogical approaches, one by author Hugh Campbell which explores the British/Pākehā individuals involved in this family and uses formal documentation and wider historical writing to explain key dynamics—but also to expose a particular limitation of reliance on Western ontologies and formal documentation alone to explain histories of colonisation. In parallel to this approach, the other author—William Kainana Cuthers—uses both formal/Western and a Māori/Pasifika relational ontology of enquiry, and in doing so, allows both authors to open up a set of key insights into this pivotal moment in the history of Aotearoa New Zealand and into the micro-dynamics of colonisation.

Insect-Thinking as Resistance to Education’s Human Exceptionalism: Relationality and Cuts in More-Than-Human Childhoods

This article discusses the “more-than-human” turn in qualitative inquiry and education, engaging with the critiques presented by philosophers, animal studies scholars, and educational scholars toward the “too easy” adoption of an inclusive relational ontology. Based on Barad’s concept of re-turning, the article develops a methodology of insect-thinking, which folds memories as well as scientific and “low theoretical” sources in and out the analysis to re-narrate child–animal encounters as entangled with place, time, class, poverty, displacement, imagination, and planetary futures. Insect-thinking produces irritations and interruptions to the human exceptionalism that underpins educational research and childhood studies. Based on conflicts, avoidance, and violence in child–insect relations, the authors discuss “cuts in relationality” and propose insect-thinking as means to approach more-than-human worlds as both shared and incommensurable.