Abstract
The foundational purpose of Australian outdoor education is to explore the three-dimensional relationships between self, others, and the environment. However, implicated within the disciplining narratives of adventure hegemony, the type, depth, and quality of our relationship with the environment can become compromised. Using a political ecology in education approach, with posthumanist and ecofeminist perspectives, this chapter argues for a closer examination, and critique, of the taken-for-granted practices in outdoor education. The author suggests that in calling attention to the constraining hierarchies of discursive practices, there is opportunity for outdoor education to produce the conditions of possibility to include additional ways of knowing, thinking, being, and doing towards a moral inter-dependency and inter-connection with more-than-human worlds.
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I acknowledge the critique of posthumanism, in that it could just be another anthropocentric tactic, producing the same structures of domination within humanist conceptions of responsibility in that we explicitly know what is best for the environment (Calvert-Minor, 2013; Chagani, 2014). However, I counter this argument with the idea that this critique is equally enmeshed within anthropocentric rationalisation, suggesting a human domination over more-than-human worlds, in itself.
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Riley, K. (2018). (Re)turning to the Sacred Trails: (Re)storying Connections to More-than-Human Worlds in Outdoor Education. In: Gray, T., Mitten, D. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Women and Outdoor Learning. Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53550-0_38
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