Keywords

Introduction

At the heart of this book is a desire to spotlight creative approaches within education which not only ethically facilitate generative practices, but which can be catalysed to instigate ruptions and change within educational systems. This chapter opens the door on this process by introducing the book as a thematically organised collection of direct educational responses to the daunting and unpredictable challenges that we all, human and other-than-human,Footnote 1 now face. Our intention in opening the book by detailing the challenges is not intended to weigh you down with the enormity and impossibility of it all, but rather the opposite—to acknowledge that if we look carefully and responsively, we can identify problems that have emerged in the early twenty-first century within which educational systems are contextualised, and to which we, as an authoring team, believe we should aim to respond as educators. By so doing our aim as editors is to set the scene for the journeys on which our different authors will take you, our readers/engagers, to respond to these problems.

As editors we are also clear that we want to offer direct educational responses. Much of the work in this book stems from complex philosophical thinking which can have a reputation for being disconnected from practice and not applicable in action. We aim to balance the richness of the philosophical heritage of our ideas with a translation of that thinking into practice-based action and provocations for change. This book follows in the footsteps of our team’s previous writing partnerships (e.g. Chappell, Rolfe, et al., 2011), where the authors argued against the limited official future for education offered by neoliberal policymakers. Rather than curtail education to probable futures, similar to the status quo and which fail to deal with the challenges we are facing, this book is arguing for a diversity of radical alternatives, indeed in line with Fielding and Moss (2010), we propose an ethos of overthrowing the current dictatorship of no alternatives.

If the book is then aiming to share and articulate alternative, emergent new approaches to education, what are the challenges that these alternatives are working to address? Chappell (2021) has previously articulated anthropocentric issues as broadly as political violence (Khalili, 2013), democratic subversion (Piccone, 2018), the slouching beast of neoliberalism (Ball, 2016), the climate emergency (Leichenko & O’Brien, 2020) and global disease caused by overpopulation (Grange et al., 2021). This array of emergencies can be seen to sit within Lopez-Claros et al.’s (2020) detailing of twenty-first-century challenges including those derived within environmental, social, economic and security issues, which they argue are compounded by the inadequacy of the governance mechanisms that exist to deal with them. Segueing with this, the University of Lincoln’s twenty-first Century Lab has identified ten grand challenges for this century: increasing inequality of wealth and income; migration and mobility; living in a global society; conflict and war; void of vision and foresight; identities and changing norms in society; mitigating environmental and ecological damage; changing economic powers; technological disruption and civic disaffection. The Lincoln team’s intent is to understand the new roles and relationships that higher education might need to enter into in this context. For our purposes in this book, challenge frameworks like this are helpful to provide context for our discussions. We are not, of course, suggesting that an early years classroom in Italy or a Kenyan secondary school or a US community arts education initiative can solve these challenges; our purpose here is to ask you to turn your educational efforts more firmly to face these identifiable challenges and to address your teaching, facilitating, curriculum and classroom design, policy influencing and studio research towards thinking and acting creatively, using the provocations in this book to generate more relevantly responsive emergent educational futures.

Our chapters arise from higher education to community education, in varied disciplines and transdisciplinary settings and with a range of participant ages. The common connector is that, through creative approaches, all chapters offer emergent alternatives to the Euro-Western traditional, linear, logic-based, verbally centric educational models, which have been exported internationally and are assumed to be universal. There is an intentionally diverse set of underpinnings which reflect a shared understanding that many worlds exist, that educational futures can emerge in many different ways, and that the authors share a desire to creatively counter injustice. And that this can happen through de-centring the human, and/or dominant manifestations of the human, to make better and more space for multiple ways of being and becoming in education. The chapters are organised around the core themes of Creating spaces for ruptions, Dialoguing and Resistings, which offer a means to journey through bigger picture narratives, into relationality and activism whilst honouring the diversity of authors’ ideas.

We lay the ground in this chapter for authors to create meaningful and productive ruptions—disturbances or commotions—in practice and research thinking. We purposefully use the notion of ruptions rather than disruptions. The 1913 Webster’s dictionary describes the term ruption as ‘obsolete’ but meaning ‘a breaking or bursting open; breach; rupture’. This is not the same as the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of disruptions which is ‘disturbance or problems that interrupt an event, activity, or process’. We use the term ruptions because once a breaking or bursting has occurred there is an implication that there is more change to follow, rather than disruptions’ feeling of interruption and therefore halting of a process.

We are interested in exploring the fissures, cracks, wedges and leverages that lead to an inevitable flow of energy or activity which provoke change. We aim to share how we have experienced this to happen through the thinking and practices we describe, and how in turn we aim to provoke you to think and enact change in your own educational contexts. Again, this approach picks up on arguments in Chappell, Rolfe, et al. (2011) where the culminating treatise was for bottom up, cumulative, quiet revolutions. Whilst we are not averse to influencing policymakers, we are aware of the grip of right-wing agendas in many Western countries and beyond currently, which means that, at government levels, creativity and the notion of thinking carefully about research in education are marginalised. Whilst not halting in our efforts for top-down influence, this push for ruptions which can contribute to cumulative change from within, is perhaps more potent.

Ethical, Care-Ful Spaces for Educational Futures

In this opening chapter, we offer insight into how, broadly speaking, ethical, care-ful educational futures might responsively emerge through the generative potential of creativity and its associated ruptions. As a collective, our group has a heritage in the conceptual relationship between creativity and wisdom. This stretches back to the late Anna Craft’s concern that creativity was being spot lit in education without reference to any values frameworks, and if one existed it was one of Western individualism and global capitalism (2006, 2015). In much of her writing between 2006 and 2014, she asked questions about how we might nurture creativity with wisdom and led on a seminal collection of writing by eminent thinkers which grappled with the interconnection between creativity, wisdom and trusteeship (Craft et al., 2008). Central to her intellectual investigations in this area were questions about empathy, pedagogic ethics and responsibility and she left an indication (2015) that a vital part of educational futures work would be “the recognition and exploration of multiple approaches to wisdom itself” (Craft, 2015, p. 137). She began this work with Chappell in their co-developed concept of wise humanising creativity which took a humanist stance on how ethics and wisdom might be practised alongside creativity in education (Chappell, Craft, et al., 2011; Craft, 2013). It is from this grounding that our thinking has extended to engage with new theoretical ideas regarding ethics and creativity and to develop the fresh approaches to educational futures presented in this book.

Consequently, and recognising the continued need for wisdom in our thinking and practice around creativity and educational futures, the ethical dimension of this book is of the utmost importance as we align ourselves to the importance of emerging, care-ful and creative futures. We seek fundamental and creative changes to the ways in which we view the educational landscape. This is entangled with our growing ethical relationship with, and developing understanding of, posthumanism and new materialism. In relation to this, Mulcahy (2022, p. 1003) proposes that affirmative ethics presents ‘as an emergent property of relational assemblages’ of human and other-than-human elements that bring ethical subjectivity into effect. This effect that Mulcahy talks of is intimately connected with otherness, diversity and that which we are capable of becoming (Braidotti, 2019) through creating empowered relationships in which ‘the very essence of the self is contributed by others’ (Postma, 2016, p. 319 in Mulcahy, 2022)—others in this context being human, other-than-human and material.

We regard creative posthumanism as an ethical practice which recognises inclusive values—the dynamic interplay between individuation and integration. This argues for an ethics which is responsive to local communities and their more specific needs, history and practice. The dynamic potential of possible futures then has the space to emerge (the notion of liminality), not be colonised ‘by ideas from the present (Facer, 2016), but instead left radically open’ (Chave, 2021, p. 50). This is an endeavour in which ethics ‘is a practice of activist, adaptive and creative interaction which avoids claims to overarching moral structures’ (MacCormack, 2017, p. 1). It can be understood and practised through notions of pluriversality which seek to cultivate a practical ethics of co-existence and collaboration (Dunford, 2017; Hutchings, 2019). Hence when we think of ethics of care we understand it as moving away from neoliberal attitudes which tend to concentrate on knowledge and expertise rather than morality (Gibbs & Coffey, 2004), into a space which is entangled with a myriad of relationalities between human/other-than-human within differing temporalities and spatialities (Haraway, 2015). Within this entangled space, ethics of care stimulate attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and trust, forming a kinship between bodies, of which an understanding of difference lies at the heart. This kinship is supported through an obligation of care which cannot always be expressed through language because it is entangled with both human and other than human bodies.

To this end, obligations of care are understood as an embodied affective kind of empathy where humans and other-than-humans ‘are intertwined through their ability to affect and be affected by circumstances, environments, and feelings’ (Bennett, 2010, in Wilde & Evans, 2019). Consequently, when being care-ful we are opening a space in which curiosity leads to us seeking to affectively know more about each other emotionally, politically, culturally and socially which then leads to some kind of action (Haraway, 2008, p. 36). Herewith, we see a care-ful approach as a form of relational activism.

In the spirit of this kind of activism, across the book, authors consider the why and how of educational futures from varied perspectives, with clear support for Fielding and Moss’ (2010) argument for alternative futures rather than remaining with the status quo as the only option. There is also shared resonance with Amsler and Facer’s (2017) argument for the role of critical anticipation where they assume those working with educational futures engage in active and critical reflections with futures that are unknowable.

Going into greater detail on this point, we find collective grounding in Osberg’s (2017) arguments against extrapolatory anticipation, that is the temptation to see education as a tool or instrument in perpetuating a particular kind of envisioned education considered as the ‘best’ for human flourishing. The problem Osberg points out is that first the judgement values of contemporary Western society have been used to shape these visions of education, without this being overtly acknowledged. And second, we have been persuaded that this version of education is unavoidable and natural. Osberg suggests that instead we should step outside of this and think about educational futures through symbiotic anticipation. By this she means that we can enter into symbiotic relationships with others without knowing what is yet needed or indeed what is yet possible, and even what cannot yet be imagined. These experimental educational developments are certainly grounded in the pasts of those at play, but they do not aim to predict or extrapolate an educational future from these, but to be pro-actively open-ended and see what emerges. Osberg sees this mode of action as having the potential to experiment with all kinds of others in a posthuman or beyond the human sense and argues that we should respect symbiotic anticipation as a way of thinking about education which is radically different from current Western, neoliberally driven definitions. Approaching educational futures in this emergent way is not always easy as the spaces created by those working to ‘symbiotically anticipate’ can be brutishly colonised by those seeking to maintain the status quo. Rather than seeing these spaces as ‘empty’, we see them as full of potential.

Exploring the potential that arises from symbiotic anticipation requires creativity, hence our use of the term ‘creative’ ruptions in our title. Whilst the ideas about creativity collected here draw inspiration from the works of Anna Craft, in particular her last published book Creativity and Educational Futures (Craft, 2011), as well as collaborative works such as Close Encounters: Dance Partners for Creativity (Chappell, Rolfe, et al., 2011), the ideas have now developed from these humanist, socio-constructivist groundings into new manifestations of thinking which draw us into encounters with powerfully change-provoking concepts such as posthumanism, embodied dialogue, decolonisation, materiality and anticipation. As we approach the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we are surrounded by creative thinking/doing/theorising which has moved well beyond a humanly focused, individualised, psychologically measurable concept. The authors in this book are privileged to be able to draw on ideas which extend creative relationality into conversation with others of all kinds, and which acknowledge the challenges of the Anthropocene, as detailed above, which we are all now facing. We fundamentally understand creativity as an ethical process driven by dialogic relationships between others of all kinds which leads to newness. For example, Harris and Holman Jones’s (2022) manifesto for posthuman creativity studies offers propositions that problematise a humanly exceptional approach to the field; Chappell (2021) explores the affordances, challenges and imperfections of working with posthumanising creativity to expand pedagogical and methodological educational possibilities and disrupt thinking and practice; Burnard (2024, in production) articulates a posthuman theory of multiple creativities which opens spaces for future possibilities through its foundations in pluralism; and Henriksen et al. (2021) argue for the Indigenous foundations of posthumanism to be acknowledged implying a rethink of the politics of creativity.

Supported by these cutting-edge approaches to creativity, we are in agreement with Facer’s (2019, p. 12) argument in which surplus potential represents emergent properties that were unexpected. It is the excess, or additional, which is produced over and above that which might be expected from the input:

it is possible to begin to create educational spaces in which the surplus potential of the past, present and future are visible, in which new ideas are generated, in which the experience of living in complex material and planetary systems that decentre the human can be acknowledged.

Historically, education has been dominated by the constraints of space, place and time arguably representing a position of power that controls, rather than liberates, the lived experiences of students (Lefevbre, 1991). What might become of educational thinking if it were to be freed from imposed constraints and viewed as engaging with space and time in a more dynamic, emergent and creative way?

For example, Chappell and Craft (2011), in their discussion of ‘creative learning conversations’, stress the importance of lived spaces which exude ‘… experiential complexity, fullness and perhaps unknowable mystery…’ (p. 14). Tschumi’s insightful critique of architectural space and use when he says: ‘the inevitable disjunction of the two terms means that architecture is constantly unstable, constantly on the verge of change’ (1996, p. 20) resonates well with the idea of a dynamic dialogic space ‘locating not as a fixed or hierarchical space but as a space of counter-possibilities, where conceptual, emotional/affective, identity and other exploration can occur’ (Chappell & Craft, 2011, p. 15).

The way we think about space matters. It acts as a prism to our understandings of the world, our attitudes and our politics. It affects the way we understand globalisation and localisation. Consequently, an acute awareness of spatiality is central to debates on creativity and futures education. Space is not a neutral backdrop against which humans exist. It is a complex set of interactions which shape and determine how and what people become through seeing space as dynamic as well as a place of production (Massumi, 2011).

To experience an event in space and time is to experience the passing, the becoming and the processing of the just-was and the is-about-to-be. Spatiality works on a variety of levels from the personal to the global but what is apparent is that space is not something static and ethically neutral, a static entity, but is enmeshed with time and is continuously changing (Massey, 2005). It, therefore, has great possibilities and creative potential. Spatial sharing is dialogic and sets up opportunities for the new to arise unpredictably from what Ermine (2007, p. 1) would describe as ‘ethical space’—a theoretical space which exists between ‘thought worlds’ and which respects pluriversality. This understanding of spatiality is highlighted and exemplified in many chapters of this book.

Ethics is also a dominant theme in the book and is understood as the capacity to be cognisant of what harms or enhances the well-being of sentient beings and the environments in which they exist. Within spatial co-existence there is the possibility of conflict, of tension and of the collision of ideas. This can be avoided through reduction of control or domination by either one party or the other but still this interconnected, political meshwork of multiple creativities provides a potential for ruption and reveals the ways in which actions and events can bring about emergence, that which arises spontaneously and unexpectedly—a surplus potential. This dynamic inter-relationality within the mesh is critical in creating ruptions.

An Array of Ruptive Approaches

These questions about how ethical, care-ful educational futures might responsively emerge through the generative potential of creativity and its associated ruptions are situated by the book’s different authors in an array of dominantly posthuman, new materialist, decolonial and feminist approaches. Our authors raise connected but different questions about emergence and change, creating the kind of educational spaces that Facer (2019) encourages.

In order to understand how and why we have come together to co-author this book, and to collect and intensify our thinking using these wide-ranging approaches, it is perhaps worth being aware that all authors are in some way connected to the Creativity and Emergent Educational-futures Network (CEEN) within the School of Education at the University of Exeter. This network has a heritage in the CREATE educational research centre (2007–2014, established by Professor Anna Craft), which developed into the Centre for Creativity, Sustainability and Educational Futures (2014–2018, co-led by Dr. Kerry Chappell and Dr. Fran Martin); with CEEN established in 2018 and co-led by Kerry and Fran until the latter became fully retired in 2020, after which point it has been led by Dr. Chappell. The network’s rationale is to seek to bring together individuals with overlapping and intersecting philosophical orientations, ideologies and values that challenge the status quo on education. Despite our diversity, we all do work that argues for the centrality of difference and emergence in our practices of thinking, being, doing and becoming; the necessity of researching education beyond boundaries and in the spaces between boundaries. From this rationale, and through regular seminars, debates and co-designed research projects, our collective research practice has developed into an entangled and potent set of arguments and examples of disruptive and provocative approaches to creating spaces for new educational futures.

In writing this book we have endeavoured to keep our diversity a vibrant part of the thinking we offer—as Mendible (2017) argues we are now in an age of ‘posts’ which is redefining the Humanities and Social Sciences, amongst other disciplines, through this kind of diversification. As detailed in the opening of this chapter, we see advantages in forefronting complexity when grappling with the anthropocentric crises that we face. Amidst this complexity, though, are the key approaches of the post-human, new materialist, decolonial and feminist. Whilst not aiming to represent all authors’ perspectives on these terms, and knowing that each will deal with them respectively in detail in their own chapters, we offer insight here into our editorial team’s broad understandings of them.

Posthumanism in education entails the fundamental idea that humans, particularly those who have overtly dominated, should be de-centred as the main driver of the educational narrative and action (Chappell, 2018); as a way of thinking and doing, it challenges what we believe to be the false binary between the human and other-than-human and opens the possibility of differently entangled relationships with all others. Humans should not be seen as superior and controlling of other living beings, objects, materials and environments but should be understood as intrinsically enmeshed with them (Braidotti, 2013).

Our thinking resonates with Bozalek and Zembylas (2016) who see posthumanism as embracing a critical view of liberal humanism, which assumes that society consists of equally placed autonomous agents with rational scientific control over others. This critique has consequences for how we understand ethics; Braidotti (2013) argues that we should shift from trying to extend human rights to other-than-humans, to an “ethics of transformation” which encourages ethics to emerge from the enmeshing and interaction of human and other-than-human. In education, this process entails enacting power and relationships differently.

Many of the authors in this book also take advantage of ideas from new materialism, woven alongside posthuman understandings. Amidst a plethora of possible articulations of new materialism, Sencindiver (2019, para 1) helpfully delineates the main pivot of its thinking as:

the primacy of matter as an underexplored question, in which a renewed substantial engagement with the dynamics of materialization and its entangled entailment with discursive practices is pursued, whether these pertain to corporeal life or material phenomena, including inorganic objects, technologies, and nonhuman organisms and processes.

Where this comes to life for many of the authors in this book is in Barad’s (2003) notion of ‘intra-action’. They argue that matter of all kinds, that of human and other-than-human ‘intra-act’. This means that educationally we need to more actively consider and respond to the intertwined agencies of all different kinds of bodies. For Barad, new phenomena are produced through agential intra-actions which change the entangled, intra-acting elements; they are co-constituted by the process. This different understanding of agency is one of the main drivers of this book which positions creative change as central to new emergent educational futures.

In using posthuman and new materialist approaches, authors in this territory also ground themselves in the practice of ethico-onto-epistemologies. This is the notion that as researchers we cannot separate ourselves from our research matter (Barad, 2007). So, our assumptions about the nature of reality and how we come to know that reality are inseparable; intra-actions between humans and humans, and humans and other-than-humans are grounded in kinship and create a mutual, ethical accountability which is inescapable.

Another way that authors frame the emergence of educational futures in the book is through decolonising theories and practices (e.g. Andreotti, 2011; Mignolo, 2007). As Pirbhai-Illich et al. (2022) carefully articulate, these approaches recognise colonialism (the ideology of superiority that fuelled the Western attempt to politically control other cultures and countries), colonisation (violent domination of the colonising nation which forces the erasure of the colonised country’s cultural practices) and coloniality (the logic of Western imperialism underpinning modernity through superiority and separation, claiming to be overarchingly ‘good’ and perpetuated through institutional power structures).

These approaches then work with the processes of decolonising, which, broadly speaking, endeavour to move beyond surface-level shifts of national independence towards practices which work to decolonise minds and bodies away from colonial ways of being, doing, knowing and valuing. Authors in the book working in this area understand decolonising through their praxis, reimagining open, new educational futures which aim to counter injustice and marginalisation. Their work is also in parts shaped by decolonial feminist ideas and practices which recognise how colonialism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism and racism interlock to produce and sustain violence and domination, and therefore refuse these structures and logics and commit to new futures (Lugones, 2010; Vergès, 2021[2019]).

The positioning of these approaches within one publication is not without its tensions. Our decolonising authors clearly resist Western hegemonic epistemic structures, which, for some, include posthuman approaches. Taylor (2020) describes how posthuman and new materialist practices have been criticised by Black, antiracist and Indigenous scholars for their perpetuation of the “‘White episteme’ and Eurocentric academic practices” (p. 26). Taylor’s advice is for White scholars to engage with the discomfort engendered through this stance and to act and think with humility in response. For our multiracial editorial team this includes listening to and honouring the Indigenous ideas which in places have pre-empted the turn towards materiality and de-centring of the human. As Taylor (2020) warns, we need to hear, learn from and act upon these criticisms if our efforts are not to be compromised.

Core Themes

There are three core themes in the book within which authors put to work different elements of the above-detailed framework to consider what it is to be creatively ruptive. They emphasise those elements which are particularly relevant to their arguments and practice, for example, ethics, spatiality, emergence, whilst balancing discussion between the book’s key drivers. The core themes and author contributions follow next.

Creating Spaces for Ruptions

These chapters all offer a breadth of approach to educational futures, considering how new ways of theorising can create spaces for ruptions and change across education.

In Chap. 2, Chappell asks us to consider embodiment and materiality as central to how we might create spaces for new educational possibilities. Via Barad (2007) and her own combined experiences as a movement/dance practitioner and academic focused on dance and creativity in education research, she demonstrates how embodiment and materiality are entangled dialogically within the notion of posthumanising creativity. She argues that, with multiple others, we can create, think and do differently. She shows how this can manifest in embodied, materially driven pedagogy, to disrupt practice and research. Positioning the mind–body binary as a specifically Western problem, she takes an experiential journey through touch and time, offering you examples from different educational settings including the rupturing of disciplinary storylines, the role of multi-epistemic literacy, and the affordances of slowing and playing with time. She concludes by discussing the power of cumulative ruptures which have the potential to create spaces for educational approaches that can match and respond to the rapidly changing global challenges that we face.

Next, in Chap. 3, Turner shares his concept of aesthoecology, demonstrating its relevance at a time of significant change and challenge because it illustrates the importance of ethically creative education in dealing with random and unexpected events (Turner & Hall, 2021). This involves the exploration of notions such as liminality, emergence, and affective anticipation, all of which are features of dynamic systems. These elements of theory are discussed to support the concept of aesthoecology as a framework of ideas, and a creative vocabulary, which critically questions the established ways of being, doing and becoming in current educational practice. Theorising and philosophising on these ideas provide the freedom to think differently, the space to be creative and the courage to provoke radical thinking and action. The theory of aesthoecology is exemplified by reference to the development of an art gallery at a UK community college in which the new and unexpected was a significant element of the richness of provision. Turner works his theory and example to argue that education is enriched by inviting and embracing the unexpected and by exploring the ways in which the new arises spontaneously from our actions.

Sarah Chave provides the final chapter, Chap. 4, in this section, focused on be-wilder-ment. Chave posits that throughout education there needs to be space for bewildering questions when no-one yet knows the answer, a letting-go of certainty, an acceptance of ambiguity, and encouragement of emergence. She argues that this is especially important in this era of climate and ecological emergency where the emergence of new ways of thinking and being are urgently needed, especially when Westernised pedagogy has an increasing desire to sanitise knowledge. This might then manifest in a be-wilder-ing of education processes towards more demanding, rebellious, disruptive educational futures. Following Suzawa (2013), Chave calls for a cognitive revolution towards dialogical reasoning and artistic practice which can open up holistic modes of thought, and examines how encouraging aporia—literally lacking a poros: a path, a passage—can contribute to opening up educational spaces where such creative, holistic thinking is possible: spaces which embrace doubt and see within it questions which can make new understanding possible’ Burbules (1997). Chave argues that such education foregrounds encounters, creative entwinings and care-ful, attentive listening which can re-centre more-than-human voices and forge new relationships.

Dialoguing

These chapters enter into more detailed dialogue between humans and other than humans including the environment, materials and system structures to disrupt and to articulate the emergence of new educational futures through relationship and the creation of spatial events.

In Chap. 5, Wren addresses issues of climate change and the Anthropocene through ‘affective embodied empathy’. Empathy is seen as important in assessing complex relationships from an ethically driven, more-than-human perspective and in moving away from environmental education as addressed only from an anthropocentric viewpoint. Empathy is understood as an emergent consequence of affective intra-actions between all relational elements of the environment. Research material is drawn primarily from a field trip to Norway and the reader is invited to share in these experiences. Wren invites engagement in the ‘glow-moments’ (MacLure, 2013) which emerge and encourages the reader to feel affective empathy alongside her. The glow moments are subjected to diffractive analysis which allows an understanding of those spaces of co-creation which disrupt normalised ways of perceiving the environment.

Next, Clarke and Witt, in Chap. 6, stress the importance of sympoiesis (Haraway, 2016) as a notion of thinking with and making-with. This chapter focuses on place-based learning engaging the reader with creative transdisciplinary worldings and the notion of sympoiesis as a collective, making with, transformational experience. This stresses the centrality of care-ful and creative practices which nurture kinship and intra-active relationships. The ideas of sympoeisis are grounded in practical, everyday and lifelong ways in which educators can nurture kinship and in so doing creativity becomes a powerful and provocative agent of change establishing inclusive, non-colonising pedagogies within spaces of posthumanist profusion.

Proposing alternative educational futures through ruptive and creative means is the theme of Chap. 7, by Crickmay and Welsh, in adopting emergent, care-ful, affective and intra-active approaches to music making. They describe improvisatory musical practice with a group of people with young-onset dementia. Three specific theoretical approaches are adopted to understand this practice: open ended and affective dimensions of sense; the notion of response-ability and the ethics of responsiveness; and the emergence of creative energy through transitional states of liminality. The creation of these ethical and care-ful spaces affectively interweave the human, the sonic and the material. Through these dialogic encounters, and with the benefit of theoretical underpinnings, the result is a creative tapestry of music, words and images which arises from the inter-twined agency of all participants.

This section concludes with Chap. 8 by Ben-Horin facing the issues of contemporary society through reference to a research and development case study which promotes the importance of ethical educational futures and the generative potential of creativity. This approach is set in contrast to the current political requirement in higher education which puts emphasis on quality standards and societal impact. Discussion centres on the management issues arising from this dilemma in relation to Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths (STEAM) education as a transdisciplinary and creative innovation. Grounded in the practical experience of leadership roles in higher education, the chapter explores the ethical tensions implicit in introducing futures thinking to engage with challenging and unpredictable global environments.

Resistings

These chapters offer active resistances to existing structures, thinkings and practices by challenging the status quo through combined theory–practice examples.

In Chap. 9, Nancy Katingima Day begins this section by drawing from a theoretical framework known as ‘Utu’ to explore how the ‘aesthetics of life’ of music and music making can deepen understanding and practice of music education and widen perspectives and approaches used in negotiating emergent futures for education, the arts and creativity in Africa and the rest of the world. Positioned as exploring decolonisation, Nancy resists Western hegemonic epistemic structures (including posthuman approaches) to argue for a more geopolitically and culturally positioned framework. Here, music and music making are considered as spaces of disruption, interrogation and negotiation, and as a resistance to the sole use of mechanistic or technical music making.

Next, in Chap. 10, Ghemmour seeks to critically discuss and unpack what decolonising the mind may mean to achieve authentic praxis and shape educational futures through the lens of reflexivity and positionality—in terms of [our racialised] identities, embodiment, and power and privilege. He uses a process of reflexivity, self-examination and positionality to resist normative ways of thinking and being to expand current decolonial thinking, efforts and praxis happening within UK higher education. Ghemmour’s decolonising approach endeavours to encourage (re)imagined ways to keep educational and decolonial futures open to possible, ethical, creative and inclusive praxis. The ultimate goal is to invite readers to (re)consider the link between decolonial praxis and reflexivity, and achieve authentic emancipatory education grounded in creativity, ontological plurality, action and critical consciousness.

In Chap. 11, Campbell, Dyer and Nash follow by exploring care as a radical act of resistance and consider how educators conceive of, receive, enact and embody the various forms of care (Tronto, 2005) required to fuel creativity, and what the interdependencies are, if any, between care and creativity in establishing new approaches to learning in higher education. Questions arise from the process of dialogue during a Creative Fellowship workshop into what potential creative methodologies there are to explore when considering de-conditioning the workshop, moving away from a site of social and capital violence toward the re-generative. They also ask what wider social implications could come about from embedding radical cultures of ritual and care in the workshop setting. The learning gained from this could usefully support others who seek to centre care, resist from within, or develop care-ful, ethical educational futures.

Finally, in Chap. 12, Natanel closes this section by exploring how embodied ecological practices might stretch the space/time of teaching and learning in higher education, in ways that (re-)orient students and teachers towards justice and solidarity. Their journey begins with a walk designed to provide a break from the weight of study, however, unexpected ruptures open them up to new modes of teaching and learning, connecting to each other and the land, and working toward material and epistemic decolonisation. By moving together outside, they connect settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel with the (present-day) coloniality of Britain—in ways that insist on their accountability and action which grounds them in a broader ethic of care and sense of shared struggle. Natanel argues that the connections made along this journey become the roots of a decolonial feminist ecology.

In the final Chap. 13, as editors we revisit the claims made in this chapter around the emergence of ethical, care-ful educational futures, the educational responses we might provide; and different authors’ approaches. We demonstrate how these elements have all been addressed by dealing with the bigger questions around how we handle creative ruptions and what they in themselves ‘do’ through the notion of accumulation thresholds. We go on to demonstrate how the creative ruptions in this book respond to various wicked problems, and then end by offering ways of thinking-being-doing to push matters forward. This includes considering how we can expand our emotional repertoires from anxiety to also include hope and courage, positioning the contribution of this book in relation with colleagues working in decolonisation and possibilities studies.

Conclusion

We conclude this chapter simply by turning you towards the ruptions that the three sections make. We ask you to read on and engage with the writing, films, images, audios and other provocative media that the authors use, whilst remaining alert to our shared emphasis on a care-ful, ethical approach to making space for emergent educational futures. We ask you to remember the influence of others of all kinds amidst the diversity of what the different chapters offer, and, if this idea is familiar to you, to work with the chapters as an assemblage of thoughts and suggestions which provide varied ways in for intra-acting.

As we pointed out at the start of this chapter, the challenges that we currently face can be overwhelming and when combined with futures-anxiety can leave us feeling hopeless. In coming together under the umbrella of CEEN, we have recognised how the camaraderie of the network helps us to push back against this lack of hope, and access the power of accumulating, bottom-up change which we are sharing with you here.

Our book continues the work begun by thinkers like Anna Craft, providing us with fertile ground in the inter-twining of creativity, educational futures and wisdom. Together these bring with them an activist mindset for cumulative and at times radical change. We are all passionate that there is an urgent need for this sort of thinking, action and change in education. So, we ask you to find ways to take the authors’ ideas into your own practices and research wherever possible, and, where you can, to bring your students into these processes. We offer the chapters as a praxis toolkit for everyone in education, not just the lecturers and teachers, as ultimately it is our students, participants and learners who need to be equipped to develop education to reset the course of a post-Anthropocentric future.