Critical place as a fluid margin in post-critical environmental education

Abstract

Positive claims about place pedagogy in education are problematized through this small-scale interpretive study of internationally mobile students’ experiences of outdoor environmental education. Of specific interest in this empirical study of learners’ pedagogically constructed experiences of place are the fluid subjectivities, cultural dispositions, environmental consciences, and ecological assumptions they already bring ‘globally’ to the ‘place’ of the educational intervention, and the hybrid ‘splaces’ we conclude they then temporarily embody – at least, during and after the experience. The study empirically advances an ongoing need for post-critical inquiry in environmental research by incorporating a range of theoretical and conceptual resources that work the boundaries, ‘margins’, and tensions that lie somewhere ‘in-between’ the spatially projected place/local and planet/global discourses.