ABSTRACT
The purpose of this paper is twofold: to use post-human ideas to advance theoretical understanding of outdoor learning and to evaluate post-humanism’s analytic capacity by putting it to work with empirical data from research studies on young people’s outdoor learning. In doing so, the focus on ‘nature’ immediately throws up conceptual problems. The Western romantic view of Nature as a special, even sacred, space set apart from mundane human lives is so pervasive (particularly amongst urbanites who have had a liberal education) that slippage into this way of thinking is very easy. However, through a post-human lens, there is no separate sphere of nature; nature and culture are ‘mangled’ together at every point, from the kitchen to the mountain top, as ‘the agency of matter is intertwined with human agency’ (Hekman 2010, 24). How then to write about young people engaging in just such ‘sacred spaces’, like woods and moorlands, without resorting to reified notions of nature? This is all the more important because the young people in the research studies I am discussing do not romanticise nature at all. Alaimo and Hekman (2008) use the term ‘bodily
*Email: jocey.quinn@plymouth.ac.uk
and Education, Vol. 25, No. 6, 738-753, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2013.831811
i , r ke ircus, Plymouth, UK
nature’ to express the materiality of nature post Nature. However, this is problematic, as some of the experiences I shall discuss seem to exceed the bodily frame and be both material and ineffable. I have considered coining the term ‘open nature’, which could be helpful in conveying a sense of forests and moorlands, but negatively would serve to sub-divide nature in a binary way. Ultimately, finding a solution to this philosophical problem of naming is not within the scope of this article. Therefore, I have attempted to work with the term ‘nature’ in ways which do not lapse into humanism and do not position it in opposition to culture. If this is not always successful, this is because romantic views of nature are mangled up in my materially and culturally constituted subjectivity.
