Introduction

The Covid-19 pandemic has had the effect of positioning our shared air as a (contested) form of sociality. In the context of this pandemic, air is no longer empty or inert. It is experienced as an affective and political realm. Our mutual imbrication by way of shared gases has been made explicit. What you breathe out, I breathe in.

Acknowledging the entwinement of the human and more-than-human within increasingly fragile air systems, Loenhart has recently argued that we must now design for an ‘atmospherically entangled future’ (2021: 20). If our futures are atmospherically entangled, so too are our learning futures. While atmospheres have entered educational discourse, existing literature focuses on their affective dimensions (Nørgêard 2022; Masschelein et al. 2022; Michels and Beyes 2016). Building on this work, we propose biophysical and meteorological (biometeorological) perspectives on atmospheres be included by introducing air into how we think about the design of leaning futures. If air is fundamental to sociality, so too it must be to learning. We learn in and through communities that breathe together. We learn through discourse and dialogues (Ferreday et al. 2006). Yet, air is an overlooked force in research on learning. Despite air facilitating learning, as it does all life, it is easy to ignore in its seeming invisibility (Irigaray 1999). Paradoxically, it is not until air is withdrawn that it becomes apparent.

Our current historical moment is creating the context for the reversal of this blind spot. We collectively experienced the Covid-19 virus reshape virtually all human relations, including where and how we learn, around air and breathing. This demonstrates how atmospheres are not only designed (Edensor and Sumartojo 2015; Böhme 2017) but can also be a force of design. Of course, it is not solely the pandemic, but also the current climate crisis that brings urgency to the imperative to ask questions about air’s role in the design of learning futures. This paper takes Peter Sloterdijk’s theorisation of ‘foams’ (2016) as an invitation to pay attention to the air and atmospheres of learning. Foams are, at a basic level, interconnected agglomerations of air bubbles. Sloterdijk uses the formal structure of foam as a metaphor, or what he calls a ‘thought-image’ (2016: 54), to interpret the significance of climate-controlled built environments and atmospheres to our modern being-in-the-world. In doing so, Sloterdijk develops an ontology that is deeply relational and habitable.

Following Loenhart’s call to design for atmospherically entangled futures (2021: 20), the question emerges: what is the role of air in the design of learning futures? Methodologically, we address this research question by applying Sloterdijk’s foam metaphor to educational situations to undertake a conceptual exploration of the air and atmospheres of learning. We develop ‘learning foams’ as a novel thought-image to outline the atmospheric entanglements fundamental to education. Drawing on our lived experiences as university educators, we advocate for the need to make air and atmospheres explicit as a life support infrastructure that renders learning and teaching possible. In thinking through air as an infrastructure, we also ask, what constitutes ‘digital air’? We show how further understandings of air as a technical infrastructure emerge by applying a postdigital frame to how we conceive of air’s materiality.

Being attuned to the air and atmospheres is necessary for bringing about breathable learning futures. We see that taking an atmospheric approach surfaces the need for a particular kind of ethical praxis in education that is centred on negotiating togetherness across postdigital relationalities. We propose an atmospheric ethics that foregrounds complex human and more-than-human entanglements in design processes as being requisite to education participating in the broader project of bringing about breathable learning futures. We argue that educational design should question assumptions around student-centred design to embrace more-than-human and ecological design methodologies, learning from ethical design practices in the broader field of design, Indigenous methods that centre caring for Country, and new ‘planty’ (Crosby and Vanni 2023) pedagogical approaches. We believe such orientations in education will help support students in their development of ethical literacies that will be critical for navigating atmospherically entangled futures.

The Withdrawal of Air

Let us begin with a story about the air and the university. The story illustrates the nexus of design, learning environments and air (Tyrrell 2022) that animates this research. Specifically, it is a microethnography drawn from a lived experience of the current climate crisis playing out in the breakdown of designed systems within a university context. As such, it reminds us of the urgency in asking questions about our air when we imagine the design of learning futures.

On a stifling afternoon in December 2019, at the height of the Black Summer bushfires in Australia, the university building where I was working was evacuated. All learning and teaching activity was halted as everyone poured outside into the emergency assembly area. The fire alarm had been triggered. It was not set off by a fire indoors, but by the intense smoke haze coming from outside. This smoke was being put into the atmosphere by a series of fires that ringed the city and had been burning for days. The fires were a long way from the cloistered sandstone halls and shiny glass facades of the inner-city campus. But the air quality had become so poor in central Sydney that smoke from outside was creeping inside of buildings. Numerous other buildings in the area experienced similar evacuations that day, triggered by false fire alarms (Jones 2019). This was a mundane experience compared to the devastation experienced by many others catastrophically impacted by these fires. By the end of that summer, bushfires had taken the lives of 33 people, destroyed 24 million hectares, and killed or displaced nearly 3 billion animals (Commonwealth of Australia 2020: 5). As I stood outside in the emergency assembly area, breathing air thick with smoke, I realised this wasn’t really a false alarm. There could be no learning futures without breathable air.

This vignette illustrates the need to design for atmospheric entanglement. It prompts reflection on the way climactic conditions are changing so rapidly and becoming so extreme within the climate crisis that designs are not keeping pace. The smoke alarm did not malfunction—it performed exactly as it was designed to. Rather, the conditions that the design anticipated radically changed. The air became an agential force participating in the university’s operations, disrupting any intentional learning design that had been put in place for students that afternoon.

Uneven Air

Recent studies have shown that air quality plays a significant role in the quality of learning environments, especially in terms of comfort, productivity and learning efficiency (Peters and D’Penna 2020; Shi et al. 2017), as well as personal well-being (DeLauer et al. 2021). When we think about breathable learning futures, it is important to emphasise that not all air is experienced equally. The quality of air caused by levels of atmospheric pollution is not evenly distributed, but varies globally across nations, regions, cities and neighbourhoods. In his exploration of the air and atmospheres of global megacities, Peter Adey shows how pollution is distributed unequally and thus becomes a marker to expose inequality. Adey argues that ‘In the testimony of pollutants and choking effluvium, an analysis of air reveals who belongs and who does not, who is deserving and who is not in a constellation of megacity inequality’ (2013: 291). Along with the extreme air conditions in megacities across the globe, regional locales within nations also experience radically different air quality. Many scientific studies in the USA, for example, document how air quality is lower in Black and Hispanic neighbourhoods, pointing to clear racial and socio-economic disparities in air pollution exposure (Tessum et al. 2019).

The racial politics of air is not limited to air quality, but also extends to how literal access to air can be denied by racial violence. This is underlined in the Black Lives Matter movement’s annunciation of Eric Garner’s and George Floyd’s words, ‘I can’t breathe’ (Gumbs 2015). Such articulations that resist white weaponising of air through acts of racial violence and oppression have precedent in Franz Fanon’s description of colonised peoples as occupying a state of ‘combat breathing’ (1967). Fanon used this phrase to show how the French colonisation of Algiers was not just an occupation of territory or resources, but of the whole atmosphere and breathing conditions of the people and place. These racial mobilisations of breath unlock a tension that while breathing is a universal experience for humans, breathing is not experienced universally. Not all air is equal. Power and privilege come in to play in determining whose air is contaminated and constricted. In a text written at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Archille Mbembe elegantly linked the social ruptures experienced because of the virus with climate change, capitalism and race through the thread of the breath. Mbembe laments:

Before this virus, humanity was already threatened with suffocation. … the long reign of capitalism, has constrained entire segments of the world population, entire races, to a difficult, panting breath and life of oppression. To come through this constriction would mean that we conceive of breathing beyond its purely biological aspect, and instead as that which we hold in common, that which, by definition, eludes all calculation. By which I mean the universal right to breathe. (Mbembe 2021: 61)

Mbembe exposes how the air we breathe is not purely part of a biological process, but also affectively and politically charged. We will return to the political and affective dimensions of air in our discussion of atmospheric ethics, after introducing this paper’s central idea of ‘learning foams’.

Learning Foams

The network metaphor has been applied to learning and education contexts since the 1990s with networked learning (NL) emerging as a pedagogical theory to account for the way learners interact and relate with others, with learning spaces, and with learning resources and materials in the context of digital technologies enabling new modes and rates of connectivity (Beaty et al. 2002). Along with NL, other pedagogies evoke the network form either explicitly, as is the case with ‘professional learning networks’ (Littlejohn et al. 2019; Poortman et al. 2022), or implicitly, as with ‘connectivism’ (Siemens 2004), ‘learning communities’ (Smith 2004), ‘communities of practice’ (Wenger et al. 2002) and the ‘community of inquiry’ model (Garrison 2017). These concepts and pedagogies, each in different ways, allude to the clustering and gatherings in various proximities, densities and relations of the multiple agents and situations that constitute learning. They move us beyond linear, instrumentalist or teleological views of learning to account for complexity, ambiguity and relationality in learning processes.

While the network is an important metaphor to conceptualise such relations and connections that underpin learning processes, recent dialogue has argued for a reconsideration of NL to better account for our current postdigital context (Carvalho, Goodyear, and de Laat 2017; NLEC 2020, 2021). For example, Lesley Gourlay reflects on reservations about the term ‘networked’ in that it may fetishise ‘interaction for its own sake’ and that it ‘implicitly favours a particular type of human—confident, articulate, orientated towards observable “connections”’ (2021). Johnson et al. complicate abstracted conceptions of the digital network by contextualising it in terms of evolutionary biological processes such as cellular niche-construction and environmental endogenisation (2022). They argue that the ‘node-arc’ or ‘wiring’ model of the network represents only the endpoint of connections rather than the temporal environmental processes that produce them.

The term entanglement is gaining traction in education literature as a way to nuance the network metaphor by emphasising complexity and relationality over connectivity. The deployment of entanglement as a concept to help understand the complex interrelations that constitute learning reflects Karen Barad’s influential research into quantum entanglement (2007), along with sociomaterial theorisations of learning (Sørensen 2009; Fenwick and Landri 2012), which are themselves informed by Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory (2005a, b). For example, the recent contribution of ‘entangled pedagogy’ (Fawns 2022) rejects the pedagogy/technology dichotomy in education to explore how both forces are multiple and mutually constitutive in learning processes. Another example is the recent discussion of ‘ecopedagogies’ that invokes an ecological metaphor to describe the array of new educational forms that respond to ‘the earth, animate and inanimate beings and objects, algorithms and postdigital platforms and the political and social restrictions and possibilities therein as indeterminate ecosystems' (Jandrić and Ford 2022: 7).

In dialogue with these ideas, we apply Sloterdijk’s foams metaphor to educational situations to conceive of ‘learning foams’ as a novel thought-image for conceptualising the atmospheric aspects of the entanglements that enable learning. A network is a vital form for visualising intersecting points through connecting lines and their joining nodes. However, as Sloterdijk points out, the network is ‘reductive’ (2016: 237) in its geometry as it creates an abstraction of a two-dimensional world. The network is not a habitable metaphor. Foams, on the other hand, are inherently organic and voluminous, providing a useful figure for thinking through relations as atmospheric entanglements (Fig. 1). Put another way, the foams metaphor articulates our entangled spatiality modelled on interconnected climates and atmospheres. It simulates our being-in-the-world as a being that is dependent on habitable, breathable forms, the most fundamental of which is planet earth. As Latour notes in his reading of Sloterdijk, ‘[u]nlike networks, spheres are not anaemic, not just points and links, but complex ecosystems in which forms of life define their “immunity” by devising protective walls and inventing elaborate systems of air conditioning’ (2011). As foams are inherently aerated, they blow a breath of air into the network metaphor, encouraging us to acknowledge the shared air and atmospheres that sustain the complex entanglements of learning.

Fig. 1
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Diagram comparing network and foam structures. Created by Jessica Tyrrell based on an image by Stefan Ritter, originally published on Medium.com

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Foams are, fundamentally, collections of interconnected air pockets or bubbles. In fact, Sloterdijk’s initial definition of foams is ‘air in unexpected places’, as when air enters water it creates frothy foams, or when air enters earth, it creates foamy pumice (2016: 27–28). Emerging in latticed or honeycombed structures of cellular clusters of bubbles or spheres, foams are containers of air and atmospheres (Fig. 2).

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Scanned image of soap foam bubbles. Image created by André Karwath. (Wikimedia Foundation 2004) (CC BY-A-SA 2.5)

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Sloterdijk uses foams to build a habitable relational ontology for our contemporary being-in-the-world. By using foams as a thought-image, Sloterdijk makes clear how our modern being-in-the world is constituted through spatial structures and infrastructures. These produce and maintain atmospheres and air conditions that support life in thick densities and close proximities. The apartment block is a prototypical example (2016: 529), as a cluster of connected but separate units designed to insulate, and thus enable, our existence in controlled climates. As such, these foam structures take on what Sloterdijk calls an ‘immunity’ function (2016: 233). Sloterdijk’s example of the apartment complex as a foam structure could easily be extended to modern university buildings, as imagined in the comparison of forms between Figs. 3 and 4. This view would position the most implicit function of a university campus as being climate conditioning and the construction and control of atmospheres conducive to learning. But what happens, as with the vignette that prefaced this paper, or in the case of the Covid-19 pandemic, when these insulation structures break down, are contaminated or constricted? It is important to note that Sloterdijk sees the ‘immunity’ function of co-isolated cells not just as self-defensive or protective, but also as entailing the capacity for creativity and relationship formation. They are ‘immune systems that dream beyond themselves’ (2016: 232) because foam structures are stabilised not just by defensive means but also survive through ‘primary extensibility’ (2016: 232).

Fig. 3
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Microcellular plastic micrograph. Image created by Gandhi Iitdelhi. (Wikimedia Foundation 2014) (CC BY-A-SA 4.0)

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Fig. 4
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UTS Business School Building in Sydney designed by Frank Gehry. Image created by Summerdrought. (Wikimedia Foundation 2016) (CC BY-A-SA 4.0)

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The foams metaphor is pertinent to educational design as it creates a thought-image for human and more-than-human entanglements. If, as Tim Fawns shows, an ‘entangled pedagogy’ is appropriate to our networked postdigital context (2022), what forms do we have to model this, to visualise the behaviours and characteristics of entanglement? The characteristics of foams identified by Sloterdijk are suggestive for understanding aspects of learning in a postdigital, globalised education context. Foams are not static or fixed; they are in ever-emergent processes of structuring and restructuring, of composition and decomposition. Unlike networks, foams display rheological behaviours, or a ‘processual dynamic’ (2016: 48) as they are always in motion. Foams are ‘heterarchical’ because, while possessing structure, the structure is multifocal and without a centre (2016: 23). Foams are never singular; they are organic multiplicities of units that display both ‘co-isolation’ and ‘co-fragility’ (2016: 36).

The characteristic of ‘co-isolation’ points to the way that each cell, while inherently interconnected, is also a universe within itself. ‘Co-fragility’ acknowledges that each cell in a foam environment shares a wall or membrane with another, creating a mutual enmeshment where if one bubble in the system bursts it impacts the greater structure. Foams are fragile entities: they are flexible and expansible structures that allow for ‘local improvisations and creativity’ (Widmer and Klauser 2020: 263), but may also be permeated, rupture or collapse, meaning they actively engage with ‘border maintenance’ and ‘maintaining immunity’ (Borch 2008). As with Zygmunt Bauman’s conceptualisation of ‘liquid modernity’ (2000), foams represent a contemporary condition characterised by the fracturing of grand structures into volatile plural forms subject to constant change. Both ideas of ‘co-isolation’ and ‘co-fragility’ speak to the relationality of cells within a foam, whose dynamics and behaviours are governed by ‘contagion’ and ‘imitation’ (Sloterdijk 2016: 240–241) where individual cells affect each other mimetically via their shared walls and membranes, creating tensions between ‘stability and instability’ and ‘adjacency and separation’ (Sutherland 2019: 201).

Foams are:

  • In dynamic processes of formation and deformation

  • Heterarchical structures without centre

  • Co-isolated and co-fragile: their units simultaneously define their individuality and their interdependence

  • Containers of air and atmospheres that create self-insulating and immunising climates

  • Organic spatial forms for producing both protection and expansion (relationships).

Sloterdijk sees these qualities of foams as illuminating for analysing material patterns of human and more-than-human togetherness, or ‘spatial multiplicities’ (2016: 232). He suggests:

The foam metaphor has the merit of capturing the topological allocation of creative and self-securing creations of living space in an image. It not only reminds us of the tight proximity between fragile units, but also of the necessary self-enclosure of each foam cell […] Thus the notion of foam evokes both the co-fragility and the co-isolation of these units stacked in dense lattices. (Sloterdijk 2016: 235–237)

One of the reasons that air may have previously been ignored in philosophy (Sloterdijk 2016: 62–63), and little-discussed in education literature, is that it seems immaterial and invisible. Air has formerly been implicit. Indeed, it is not until air is withdrawn, that it becomes explicit. For example, when breathable air is withdrawn by pollution that produces haze, paradoxically, air also becomes more visible. In theorising foams, Sloterdijk shows how our modern situation has produced a series of ‘airquakes’ (2016: 85), such as the gas warfare of WWI, that have cumulatively positioned ‘…air mixtures and atmospheres [as] objects of explicit productions’ (2014: 964–965). In our contemporary globalised context, as Latour paraphrases, ‘air has been made explicit; air has been reconfigured; it is now part of an air-conditioning system that makes our life possible’ (2005a: 105). It is the paradox of air, that this vital function as a life support system only becomes clear in its withdrawal or breakdown. Lauren Berlant has noted this tendency in humans’ relationship with infrastructures more broadly. Berlant sees that it often takes a malfunction or ‘glitch’ within an infrastructure to surface its importance as a ‘world-sustaining relation’ (2016: 393). Moreover, Berlant notes that such a glitch or failure ‘opens up the potential for new organisations of life’ (2016: 393). Foams provide a spatial, breathy image to render air visible as an enveloping medium of our interrelations. This makes air explicit as a life-support infrastructure for learning by modelling our being-in-the-world as a being in air-filled foams, or ‘being-in-the-breathable’ (Sloterdijk 2009: 48).

The fractal scalability of the foam metaphor is useful in that the pattern repeats across micro to macro gradations. On a biophysical level, we can zoom in to see foam structures in soap bubbles or microscopic renderings of cell clusters. Likewise, a macro view of a city, such as imagery from an aerial satellite, repeats the cell-like clusters in the physical agglomerations of apartment complexes or densities of motor vehicles in traffic flows (Sloterdijk 2016: 281).

The postdigital learning spaces of higher education, including physical campuses and classrooms, as well as hybrid and online learning environments, and even individual devices and apps, can each be analysed as learning foams at different scalar levels. If the apartment block is Sloterdijk’s prototypical example of a foam, this analysis can equally be applied to the modern university campus which shares many architectural similarities. The agglomeration of buildings within a campus creates an ‘archipelago’ of what Sloterdijk terms ‘atmospheric islands’ (2016: 315). Though interconnected, it is important to note that each island in a campus archipelago is not experienced equally. For example, comparing which faculty buildings are equipped with air conditioning to those that use fans for ventilation is a revealing power analysis of different higher education disciplines.

Zooming in from the macro view of the campus to individual buildings, these each in themselves constitute a foam of nested classrooms, offices and meeting rooms. Connected within an overall structure, these individual cells are separated by walls, doors, windows and corridors—membranes of ‘co-isolation’ (2016: 237). Each classroom, again, is a foam made up of clusters of students who might join with or separate into agglomerations with peer groups, chairs, coffee cups, desks, laptops, pens and phones. These assemblages have different temporalities, with some more ephemeral and others more sustained, but are always in processes of change and motion. The characteristics of ‘co-fragility’ and ‘co-isolation’ (Sloterdijk 2016: 236) across individual cells mean they enact relations and dynamics of imitation and contagion (2016: 240–241). This could be understood as affective resonances or memetic transmissions of behaviour or moods (Brennan 2014). That is, learners in a classroom or online learning environments tend to reproduce the expectations and atmospheres they receive and affects tend to resonate through these atmospheres.

Further zooming in to a micro view allows us to see individual devices used for learning such as each laptop or phone within a classroom as itself another foam filled with constitutive bubbles of apps, windows, frames and tabs, all networked to meshesFootnote 1 of other digital assemblages. At any one moment, a student’s laptop in a classroom might be simultaneously connected to multiplicities of changing online groups, communities and communication channels—some more associated with explicit, formal learning purposes than others. Through interactions and connections on various levels and at differing rates, they create learning foams. Foams describe the density and complexity of these sociomaterial entanglements in a way that models their spatiality, relationality and processual dynamics as situated in fundamental relation to air as a life support infrastructure for learning.

Postdigital Air

While a chat bubble on a phone does not enclose literal air within it, as a classroom does, the aerated nature of the foam metaphor opens up an interesting question around what might constitute ‘digital air’? For example, the digital air enveloped by a students’ laptop could variously be thought of as the affective atmosphere (or mood) of an online Zoom class running on the device, the Wi-Fi signals that travel from the laptop through the air to facilitate its connectivity, or ‘the cloud’ as a ubiquitous atmospheric metaphor of networked computing. A postdigital analysis reminds us that none of these examples are ever wholly or only digital (Peters et al. 2022). Though an online class is digitally mediated, it is made up of the organic inputs of breathing bodies distributed in their dispersed and diverse locales—in apartments, cafes, on the train and at the park. Thus, a postdigital lens sees the air of a Zoom classroom, for example, as both ‘biological and informational’ (Jandrić et al. 2018: 895).

Similarly, the air within a face-to-face classroom is both biometeorological and informationally or technically mediated. Inside a classroom, the air is filtered, ventilated and conditioned through material infrastructures such as vents, ducts, windows, air conditioners and fans. In modern university campuses, these are often centrally programmed and regulated by digital systems. Beyond the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) technologies that moderate our indoor learning atmospheres, the air also acts as a medium thick with digital signals and waves of technological infrastructures, from Wi-Fi to mobile communication and satellite positioning data—what Jennifer Gabrys has termed ‘atmospheres of communication’ (2017: 48).

Digital technologies do not just use air as a medium, they also leverage it as a resource through the energy intensiveness required to maintain computing and data infrastructures. The lightness of the cloud euphemism belies the very real material effects of energy-intensive data storage systems whereby material infrastructures of server farms keep the ‘immaterial’ of the digital alive. Benjamin Bratton has conceptualised ‘the Stack’ (2015) as a megastructure that encapsulates the extractive planetary magnitude of physical hardware and software infrastructure across the globe that constitutes our digital being. Of course, along with the living, functioning Stack is its decaying sister in the e-wastelands of Guiyu, China and other dumping grounds for the obsolete technologies of the global north. As Bratton laments, ‘the Stack terraforms the host planet by drinking and vomiting its elemental juices and spitting up mobile phones’ (2015: 83). The energy used in the production and operation of digital devices and their networks is not immaterial. This energy consumption and its concomitant carbon emissions creates a feedback loop from digital spaces and technologies to physical air and atmospheres. In the context of the (post)-Anthropocene (Gough 2021; Wallin 2017), just as our bodies are filled with microplastics, our air is conditioned with particles and gases that are by-products of technical processes that enable digital life and learning.

Along with the heat and greenhouse gases produced by server farms that facilitate cloud computing and other data storage and computationally intensive technologies such as streaming, blockchain and data mining for machine intelligence, recent reports show big technology platforms Amazon, Google and Facebook are heavily invested in fossil fuels through their financial assets (Vaccaro and Moinester 2022) and supply chains (Wu, Kitchin and Yu 2022). Neil Selwyn has recently noted how environmental harms are ‘glossed over in most discussions of education and technology’ (2023: 79) and has called for the sector ‘to re-imagine education technology in scaled-back and slowed-down forms’ (2023: 72) in response to climate collapse. Indeed, air is not the only fundamental element that acts as a life support infrastructure of digital technologies, as data centres require enormous amounts of water to cool and raw minerals for their components (Valdivia 2022). Like Borges’ fable of a 1: 1 map that covers the whole territory that it charts, our digital activity is covering the planet in a map that devours the very area it surveys. Arturo Escobar characterises this relationality between the planet, bodies and technology as a ‘geopolitics/biopolitics of the digital’ (2018: 43) and Kate Crawford has described AI as ‘metamorphic’ in the scale of its physical cost on the planet (2021: 49). If we are postdigital, then, we are also necessarily postnatural, as one category collapses the other. Postdigital air, then, can be located in the way technologies leverage air as a medium and consume it as a resource. The atmosphere is dense with digital signals and the physical air we breathe is conditioned by damaging emissions that are the by-product of our digital existence.

An Atmospheric Ethics

‘…design always refers to a resonant assembly, not a singular entity’ (Loenhart 2021: 67).

To make a class is to make an atmosphere. As teachers, we know that every class has an affective atmosphere. Or, more specifically, multiple affective shimmers that create shifting and subjective micro-atmospheres or moods. When humans assemble in groups to learn, a myriad of affects are thrown up that are also constituted by the design and conditions of the learning environments, technologies, pedagogies, learning activities, learning resources, socio-cultural expectations, temporalities, power dynamics, moods and feelings of belonging or not belonging, etc. (Brennan 2014). Along with the affective atmospheres of learning are the biometeorological atmospheres; the air that envelops us together, that enters inside us and unites us as a group of learners together. When we join together in a room full of learners, whether a small or large group, we create a unique shared breathspace: a literal zone of proximity—to play on Vygotsky’s concept (1978)—through which our breath and breathing intermingles together in situ along with the other more-than-human elements of that place. Those more-than-human elements are multiplicities in themselves. Focusing on one element, the air we breathe, we can see it is not singular but exists as a mixture of gases, particles and vapours. We inhale oxygen molecules that have been recycled by the plant-life around us. Mixed with oxygen and nitrogen are carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide molecules in densities that reflect fossil fuel-based energy production. As Sloterdijk emphasises, the foams that envelop atmospheres are never singular, they are ‘multiplicities of multiplicities’ (2016: 279).

Similarly, when we learn online, we are enmeshed in postdigital air that not only enables human connectivity across distributed groups, but also blurs the lines of the biological and informational by intermingling breathing bodies with Wi-Fi signals, cloud computing with carbon emissions and bodily affects with the digitally transmitted envelope of the mood of a Zoom call. Each breathing body joining together in an online learning setting also does so from vastly different breathing spaces. Postdigital air qualities vary radically across the globe and even within cities because the material infrastructures that support the connection of different pockets of learning environments (e.g., internet access, electricity reliability and capacities of devices) are unevenly distributed. As Tyrrell and Shalavin note, ‘… while a [learning] platform may display a slick and consistent online interface, there is fundamental unevenness to the infrastructure that physically delivers that interface to end users and, thus, an unavoidable unevenness in the experiences that are facilitated in the process’ (2022). For teachers facilitating interactive online sessions with geographically distributed learners, there are challenges in attending to the unevenness of their breathing spaces in fragile foams of varying proximities, as one bubble bursting can impact a whole session. Not only are online learning settings multiplicities in that they are always biologically and informationally constituted, but they are also multiplicities in being constituted by distributed pockets of uneven breathing spaces that vary vastly in air quality around the world.

Learning foams are a way of visualising, and thus analysing, such atmospheric entanglements of giving habitable form to the complex ‘resonant assemblies’ that enable learning. Learning foams are a way of thinking about how patterns of being-together, or breathing-together, are sustained in the world. Foams delineate the proximities, intimacies and boundaries through which air and atmospheres entangle us. Foams are structures that encourage us to pay attention to our shared air and the conditions that sustain it, attuning us to our fragile planetary entanglements in and with nature, ecologies, technologies, pedagogies, materials, temporalities and forms of power, affect, and sociality. If we think of ourselves, in Sloterdijk’s term, as ‘co-fragile’ bubbles in a foam together (i.e. our protection is predicated on the protection of the delicate systems that sustain us), then what do we owe each other? What does this mean for how we behave with and for the human and more-than-human others that make up the foamy atmospheres that enable both life and learning?

Foams are inherently spatial and relational as they are grounded in an understanding of our shared atmospheres as an interconnected co-fragility. Thus, imagining learning through the prism of foams, situates learning as a process dependent on complex multiplicities of planetary interdependency, both human and more-than-human. Such an understanding of learning surfaces ethical questions in terms of how learners, educators, researchers and those involved with educational design and policy should navigate the relationality of these complex interdependencies. Sloterdijk identifies how foams, as a fundamentally relational ontology, surface ethical questions of how we should be together when being together necessarily entails densities of proximity with multiple others within spatial multiplicities. Sloterdijk uses foams to put forward the notion of an ‘atmospheric ethics’ that ‘formulates the good as the breathable’ (2016: 242). Unpacking this idea, he sees that such an atmospheric ethics:

Describes the most fragile as the starting point of responsibility. It credits persons and cultures with the atmospheric effects of their actions; it emphasizes climate production as a core civilization process. (Sloterdijk 2016: 242)

To see learning through the thought-image of learning foams requires extending the networked learning metaphor to more deeply account for the way education systems and infrastructures are part of fragile planetary systems that must be carefully maintained. As we teach and learn in the midst of a climate crisis, educators, learners, researchers and policymakers have an ethical imperative to maintain the balance of these life-sustaining infrastructures through their work. A core question for educators to ask then becomes, what are the atmospheric effects of my design or policy actions? What climates are produced by my decisions? Loenhart echoes Sloterdijk’s articulation of an ethical dimension in the discussion of atmospheres, asserting that a focus on air and breathing orients us towards a multispecies solidarity as all living organisms rely on air for life (Loenhart 2021). Loenhart sees the atmospheric as a speculative frame to design the future conditions of this solidarity and asserts the potential of the atmospheric, when viewed as alive and agential, to become ‘a constitutive framework of societal and political involvement’ (Loenhart 2021: 24). Similarly, Mbembe foregrounds breath ‘as that which we hold in common’ and concomitantly asserts ‘the universal right to breathe’ (Mbembe 2021) as situating air not just as a biological necessity but as a basis for a new ethical praxis. Derek McCormack also locates the atmosphere as a ‘commons in motion’ (2018: 16), which he sees as raising the ethical question of ‘how to live in relation to the elemental energies of air and atmosphere’ (2018: 9). Being truly attentive to our shared air and atmospheres ultimately delivers us to a socio-political view that air, as a shared life support infrastructure for human and more-than-human existence, cannot be discussed without raising ethical questions of how we negotiate our complex entanglements to constitute fairer, more equal and more sustainable ways of being together.

Enacting an atmospheric ethics in education requires a move beyond ‘human-centred’ or ‘student-centred’ educational design to account more fully for the more-than-human agents at stake in design processes and outcomes around learning. One such approach in the broader design community that rejects the anthropocentric assumptions of human-centred design is ecological design. Coined as a term in the 1990s (Van der Ryn and Cowan 1996), ecological design involves both human and other natural systems being holistically integrated in design processes (Escobar 2018: 44). Gustavo Blanco-Wells discusses how a more-than-human perspective can encourage design practices that he terms ‘ecologies of repair’ (2021: 2) and María Puig de la Bellacasa calls for the ethos of care to be elevated in design to allow a ‘mode of attention to a more than human life-sustaining web’ (2017: 217). While environmental education emerged as a practice in the late 1970s and the concept of a ‘learning ecology’ exists in educational discourse (e.g., Dau 2022), such ecological formulations do not presently account for the inclusion of more-than-human perspectives on elemental agents such as air or atmospheres in learning.

Loenhart proposes an even more specific position than a broadly ecological approach. He encourages design to move towards a ‘biometeorological’ orientation in order to respond to the needs of an atmospherically entangled future (2021: 67). Loenhart describes such an approach as enabling ‘a practice of co-design in more-than-human constellations of co-operation’ (2021: 67). Loenhart speculates that:

Informed by meteorological phenomena such as radiation, convection and conduction, via vegetal and animal aliveness, microbial pervasion of all being, climate-performative evapotranspiration, their cybernetic augmentation, to societal ecological practices, biometeorological design also renegotiates principles of composition and the interaction of the actors involved. This way of designing proposes an amalgamation of performative capacities, the corresponding aesthetics, and ontological experiences in the biometeorological. Gradually, the noise and vibrations of the more-than-human and the biodiverse, the liminal, the elusive and the ephemeral of countless systemic couplings can find their way into the space of design. (Loenhart 2021: 67)

While Loenhart’s vision inspires fruitful speculation, his text lacks practical examples of implementation of biometeorological design. It is important to acknowledge that, in an Australian context, First Nations peoples have been practicing design that balances the needs of natural systems and humans for millennia. Drawing on the deep expertise of this traditional knowledge and connection to Country in the context of contemporary design and technology, Palawa woman Angie Abdilla (2020) practices ‘Country centred design’, an Indigenous-led design approach based on an inherent critique of the way a Western worldview places humans at the top of hierarchal relations with their environments in human-centred design ideologies. Budawang woman, Danièle Hromek, is also a practitioner centring Indigenous peoples’ ways of being, doing and knowing at the heart of design, asserting that connection and care for Country is a central design principle that should be practiced by Indigenous and non-Indigenous designers alike. Describing the understanding of Country held by First Nations peoples in Australia, Hromek reflects that:

Country has a relational methodology, by which I mean that we, people, are related to all things through Country, including flora, fauna, earth, rocks, winds, elements – from the most diminutive microbe to the amorphous ocean. This methodology of relationships keeps everything in balance, as no single entity is privileged above another. (Hromek 2021: 50)

Design approaches that move beyond the human/student-centred to ecological, biometeorological, Country centred and other more-than-human-centred orientations are necessary to support the development of an atmospheric ethics in education. This is echoed by Greg Misiaszek’s view that ‘It is essential within ecopedagogical spaces to … decenter Western epistemologies’ (Misiaszek 2020: 749). Educational practices that follow an atmospheric ethics might include plants, as the natural recyclers of air, being elevated in how we think through the design of future university learning environments. The use of plants and other natural forms in spatial design and built environments is part of the field of biophilic design. Peters and D’Penna analyse literature on the benefits of biophilic design specific to urban university campus settings and present recommendations for incorporating it into higher education spaces, such as the use of natural materials in classrooms. Doxey et al. (2009) carried out a controlled experiment to show that biophilic design that introduces plant life (i.e., indoor plants) into university classrooms promoted ‘positive feelings’ (2009: 391) in students. Abdelaal and Soebarto reviewed literature to uncover a link between biophilic design and the fostering of innovation learning in higher education (2018). They interweave their literature review with an historical analysis of how medieval Islamic Golden Era architecture ‘applied specific techniques and strategies so that human intellectual curiosity could flourish through direct and indirect contact with nature’ (2018: 108). They argue that ‘in contrast, the architecture of modern universities has lessened students’ multisensory focus and engagement with nature’ (2018: 108).

By making our learning spaces more ‘planty’ (Crosby and Vanni 2023), we can not only improve air quality and provide students with sensory stimulation, but also create educational environments that physically reflect our atmospheric entanglements by letting the ‘outside’ vegetal world into learning spaces, thus enacting the broader biodiversity of the planet within the climate of the university. In his book, Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (2020), Daniel Barber shows how pre-modern architects worked in dialogue with natural systems to cool buildings through strategies such as building positioning, façade shading and the use of systems of louvres to direct air flows. With the advent of technical HVAC systems, architecture could effectively circumvent the natural world by creating artificially insulated environments through design. Rather than working in balance with natural environmental conditions, Barber reflects that, ‘modern architects and others came to accept and attend to climate as an obstacle to be overcome, rather than a process available for dynamic cultural engagement’ (2020: 21).

By insulating humans from natural forces, modern architects and designers have collectively worked to construct the concept of a separate impermeable inside to the outside world. Yet, if we conceptualise our lifeworlds as playing out in ‘co-fragile’ bubbles collected together in foams, we understand that we are always spatially interconnected to our surrounds. The membranes that insulate and immunise us are in constant processes of forming and deforming. Just as paying attention to breathing focuses us on the porousness of our bodies as we bring exterior gases and particles inside us (Ferri 2018: 7), the future of design can no longer insist on hard boundaries of inside and outside, but rather must be based on design processes and practices that work with our atmospheric entanglements and in balance with the fragile planetary systems that support them.

In educational design guided by an atmospheric ethics, plants might participate not just in creating healthy and sensually stimulating learning environments, but also in shaping pedagogies and learning activities. Further than students learning about plants as part of science or biology studies, an atmospheric ethics would centre plants in practices of knowledge production and learning across disciplines. For example, a recent conference presentation by botanist Rosanne Quinell shared the idea, playing off the existing pedagogy of ‘students as partners’, of a pedagogy that situates ‘plants as partners’ (Iys et al. 2022). This framing elevates plants from an object of learning to think about learning with plants in a way that equally benefits the learners and the plants.

In Carvalho et al.’s expressly more-than-human ecopedagogy, plants are situated as teachers (2020). The authors argue that harnessing powerful plant knowledge, as in their study of Indigenous shaman practices in Brazil, creates transformational frames that break down the teaching/learning binary and facilitates a shift in the conceptualisation of learning as a mental function to learning as a broader ‘movement of life’ (2020: 145). Crosby and Vanni propose the approach of ‘planty design activism’ (2023: 4) by considering plants as allies in design futuring work. They have recently used seed balls as campaigning artefacts to educate publics about the lifeworld of plants in urban contexts around the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. Lebo and Eames (2015) discuss using planty characteristics such as cultivation and ‘trellising learning’ to develop approaches to sustainability education that draw on permaculture design principles.

Online learning environments could also become more (metaphorically) planty by using design approaches like ‘digital gardening’ that are based on a logic of care rather than the more typical design paradigm centred on a logic of anticipation. Applying such a logic of care to the design of online learning environments might be one way to respond to Selwyn’s call to reimagine our assumptions and use of educational technology in the context of the climate crisis through ‘scaled-back and slowed-down’ approaches (2023: 72). The emerging concept of digital gardening describes a slow, intentional knowledge-growing practice by users cultivating bespoke online landscapes of information that are tended to gradually over time. Proponents position this in opposition to the increasing ‘streamification’ of information seen in news and status feeds (Caulfield 2015). Many digital gardeners prefer the ethos of privately hosting their sites and applying handcrafted UI design to avoid replicating the power structures of big tech platforms (Basu 2020). Teaching digital gardening skills could become a way of supporting students’ broader digital literacy as atmospherically ethical learners by inviting critical design approaches that resist the increasing commodification and privatisation of educational technology through logics of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017).

Considering different approaches to partnering with plants for learning across all disciplines—from business to engineering to law—highlights the transdisciplinarity of an atmospheric ethics of learning in acknowledging complex entanglements, not just between learners, but also with the teeming subjectivities of our varied environments that cannot be bounded by traditional disciplinary delineations.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that our learning futures are atmospherically entangled. We have situated biometeorological air as a force in the design of learning futures. We have presented ‘learning foams’ as a novel lens for visualising and thinking about human and more-than-human atmospheric entanglements. We show how learning foams extend and reorient the existing network metaphor in the context of networked learning, allowing it to take on a more habitable, organic and processual dynamic. By using foams as a new thought-image to introduce biometeorological dimensions into existing affective readings of educational atmospheres, we foreground air as an explicit life-support infrastructure that enables learning. We have shown how such a foregrounding of air orients us towards an atmospheric ethics. This ethics is founded on the decentring of humans as both designers and users of learning to pay attention to our deep entanglements, not just with other beings but also with the planet and its sustaining elements. Educators, learners, researchers, designers and policy makers alike must become attuned to atmospheric entanglements in order to participate in producing breathable learning futures. We suggest that orienting learning towards being-in-the-breathable through more-than-human design principles and planty pedagogies will support students in developing an atmospheric ethics as part of the skills needed to navigate atmospherically entangled futures. Future research could extend this conceptual work by applying our proposal for an atmospheric ethics in educational design to practical learning situations. Future research could also introduce or make explicit other elemental planetary background infrastructures such as water or minerals into sociomaterial analyses of postdigital education.