Inhabiting the Cracks: Accumulating Creative Ruptions to Change Education

Abstract

In this final chapter of Creative Ruptions, we revisit the claims made in Chappell with Turner and Wren, Creating Spaces for Ruptions and Provocations in Creative Ruptions for Emergent Educational Futures. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. That this book would show how ethical, care-ful educational futures might emerge through creative ruptions; that we would provide hope and show how to do education differently; that we would provide direct educational responses as examples and tools; and that we would show how different authors create productive ruptions. We demonstrate how this has happened 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. As ever, these are the throughlines that have emerged for us as editors, which are undoubtedly multi-dimensional, but there are many other ways that you can travel through this book and enter into new trajectories from it.

In Chap. 1, Chappell, with Turner and Wren, made a number of claims: that authors would show how ethical, care-ful educational futures might emerge through creative ruptions; that we would provide hope and show how to do education differently; that we would provide direct educational responses as examples and tools; and that we would show how different authors create productive ruptions. Across Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, to 12 we offer all these elements, but as an authoring team, we have walked a fine line between staying true to the implied practices of emergentist philosophies and post-qualitative methods, and the desire inherent in neo-liberally influenced educational systems to provide an answer and to demonstrate efficacy and impact. By their very nature, posthuman, new materialist, decolonial and feminist thinking will not provide textbooks and guides on how to do education differently, nor will they offer visions of future education models. As exampled in this book, they will create new kinds of space and do so ethically; they will acknowledge the entanglements of researcher-teacher-learner-environment; they will offer provocations and enact new ways of doing; and they will indicate likely trajectories. For some readers this may be frustrating, but engaging in these ideas and practices requires a fundamental change of approach to teaching, learning, research and relationships, and to the forms of quality judgement that we use in relation to these entangled elements. These shifts in thinking and practice can make it more complicated to put new ideas and practices into conversation with existing theories, policies and pedagogies but nonetheless, we argue that these actions need to be taken to gain the most from the new ideas.

To open the doors on these conversations from our editorial team’s point of view, next we offer a short reminder of the different approaches taken across the chapters. Whilst we know that the book can be read sequentially, journeying through ideas and practices which show how to create spaces for ruptions, to then offer dialogues within these spaces and finally to set a more activist tone through resistings, we will not here offer thematic insights from each of the three sections. We choose instead to deal with bigger questions regarding what we have learned about how we handle creative ruptions and what they in themselves ‘do’. 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. As ever, these are the throughlines that have emerged for us, undoubtedly multi-dimensional, but there are many other ways that you can travel through this book and enter into new trajectories from it.

So, on to a brief reminder of the different approaches taken across the book. In Chap. 1, we introduced the key ideas of posthumanism, new materialism, decolonialism and feminism. We took a critical stance towards liberal humanism (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2016) and positioned posthumanism in education as entailing the fundamental de-centring of the human as the educational driver and the removal of the false binary between human and other-than-human¹ (e.g., Braidotti, 2013). And, with this, we argued, comes consequences that shift us to an ‘ethics of transformation’ which entails enacting power and relationships differently. We argued for New Materialism as offering a renewed focus on the dynamics of materialisation involving corporeal life and material phenomena (Sencindiver, 2019); and also fore-fronted Barad’s (2003) notion of ‘intra-action’ to offer new considerations of the intertwined agencies of all kinds of others through an ethico-onto-epistemological positioning. We also opened up framings through decolonising theories and practices (e.g., Andreotti, 2011; Mignolo, 2007), which reveal colonialism, colonisation and coloniality (Pirbhai-Illich et al., 2022) in order to decolonise minds and bodies away from colonial ways of being, doing, knowing and valuing. In part, authors also draw in 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 differently structured futures (Lugones, 2010; Vergès, 2021/2019).

Bearing these in mind, we now go on to consider the six ways in which the editorial team have learned how to work with creative ruptions and what it is they do.

Working with Creative Ruptions

How do the 11 chapters help us explain creative ruptions further? In Chap. 1, we laid the ground for authors to create these meaningful and productive creative ruptions—disturbances or commotions. We saw ruptions as a breaking or bursting open, a breach or rupture, importantly with more change to follow, rather than just an interruption. In terms of understanding the creative nature of these ruptions, the chapters reinforce and support the idea that creativity is both a powerful learning tool within education and also a means to change education from within. Creativity is understood as dispersed and dialogic (Chappell, Chap. 2), with diverse materials recognised as agentic (Crickmay and Welsh, Chap. 7), with a focus on questioning how creativity occurs rather than who owns it (Witt and Clarke, Chap. 6) and as grounded in relationality and connectivity (Katingima-Day, Chap. 9). Ben-Horin (Chap. 8) discusses the tensions of managing a portfolio of creative research and development projects while ensuring that ethical futures emerge responsively through the generative potential of creativity. Campbell, Dyer and Nash (Chap. 11) also alert us that marginality is a strong vantage point from which to critique the status quo and to drive change.

Many of the authors write from positions of marginalisation and we aim to find strength in this for creative change. Through our readings of the chapters, we have gleaned six crucial insights into how we might work with creative ruptions in a way that balances care and risk (Fig. 13.1).

Fig. 13.1

Working with creative ruptions to balance care and risk

Firstly, we are strengthened by repeated examples of how to live with unpredictability and discomfort. Crickmay and Welsh (Chap. 7) show us how to pay attention to unforeseen possibilities in their posthuman reading of a co-creative music education practice, providing improvisation as a dialogic process through which to experience bodies, sounds and other materialities as generative of new teachings and learnings. Chave (Chap. 4) urges us to be ready for unexpected and unforeseen ways to address the ecological and climate threats through educational practice that pushes back against the colonizing constraints of the present by focusing on be-wilderment; the very act of which generates the unknown. This idea and its practice are intensified eloquently by Campbell, Dyer and Nash (Chap. 11) who charge us not to let our teaching become ‘toothless’ in service of a neo-liberal transmission of knowledge to student-as-consumer; they ask us to take risks with feelings of discomfort and uncertainty. Ghemmour (Chap. 10) equally shows how decolonising approaches can encourage uncomfortable but purposeful self-questioning to challenge the educational status quo. And Natanel (Chap. 12) shows how to use walking and sensing to break from the difficulty and weight of normative study and to extend the space for learning.

Secondly, we can see that practicing in ethical spaces plays an essential part in our collective handling of creative ruptions. Activism based on an ethics of care enshrines what Walker (2007) describes as an expressive-collaborative ethics in which negotiation, collaboration, expression and agreement are foregrounded and highlight power relationships as a political concern in pedagogical contexts. Consequently, as Bozalek and Zembylas (2016), point out, it is impossible to separate theories of epistemology (of knowing), from ontology (being) and from ethics. This is illustrated well by Crickmay and Welsh (Chap. 7); they describe their work with music and those with dementia in which people with dementia are valued for their different and creative ways of being and knowing; Turner (Chap. 3), discusses his theory of aesthoecology, emphasising the symbiotic, ethically bonded relationship between aesthetics (the affective) and ecology (the connected); and, Witt and Clarke (Chap. 6) talk of pedagogies of attention that exhibit ethico-onto-epistemological practices that appreciate the entanglement of caring, doing and knowing. As editors, we can see spaces are created to provide for alternative futures to emerge ethically. Spaces represent opportunity and potential—a dynamic liminality from which the new arises spontaneously and can be valued for its own expression of uniqueness—with the possibility to counter injustice and marginalisation. Being equipped to engage multiple perspectives allows for meaningful dialogue in ethical spaces of engagement (Ermine, 2007). A clear example of this is apparent in Chave’s Chap. 4 which examines the notion of aporia—literally lacking a path—she considers how spaces which are creative, invite doubt and are uncertain so that new understandings become possible, which re-centre more-than-human voices and allow transitional and marginal perspectives to be asserted more strongly.

Thirdly, our co-authors show us how to live and work with entanglements without becoming lost in over-complicated relationships. We can then understand their power in relation to fast-moving challenges, by their embedding in kinship and community. Chappell’s (Chap. 2) own writing sets the tone for this at the outset, when considering embodiment and materiality through touch and time. She demonstrates how working with multi-epistemic literacy (and, in so doing, honouring Indigenous and arts-based epistemologies, too), and attending to what might be understood as simple everyday practices such as walking and touching can open us up to entanglements with other ways of being and becoming. She argues that this fine-tuned attention to relations can equip us with the ability to quickly morph our responses to fast-changing wicked problems. Witt and Clarke (Chap. 6) similarly cultivate relations through what they call kin-centric pedagogies which emphasise collective co-creation with spaces and places. Importantly they stress that these relational pedagogies do not end when we leave a place; they continue in dialoguing, making, new thinking and transformations. Here they show the continuous and collective nature of how pedagogies might be. Katingima-Day (Chap. 9) explores the intricate links between aesthetics and our experiences of life through the African concept of Utu, to articulate how we experience an aesthetics of life. This offers insight into how, by prioritising relationality and connectivity, Western hegemonic approaches can be decolonised. She leads us away from mechanistic frameworks to a more dispersed aesthetics which acknowledges the belongingness of varied entities. Katingima explains Utu as describing the essence of being and becoming human by participating in life, and in so doing demonstrates humans’ entanglements with other entities and the value of thinking about education as a creative and dynamic process, woven into the living fabric of the people and generated within communities. Furthermore, Natanel (Chap. 12) articulates how walking in local landscapes can help to reflect on the lives of settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel, leading to imaginations of ‘who we might be, what we might do and where we will have gone’. By doing this, Natanel shows how understanding lives as entangled with the environment across continents can lead to decolonial thinking.

Fourthly, we see authors working with transdisciplinarity as a means to handle creative ruptions. Their work is transcending the boundaries of a range of disciplines to use a variety of perspectives to address complex issues (Benatar, 2000) and in so doing pushes back against normative education. Wren’s consideration of empathy (Chap. 5) and Witt and Clarke’s (Chap. 6) exploration of sympoiesis through field visiting are actively working across boundaries of the arts, poetry, psychology, social welfare, creative writing, philosophy and education. Henriksen et al. (2015) and Kligyte et al. (2019) argue that when embodied thinking is seen as part of the transdisciplinary process, it becomes a creative liminal space where the tensions within unknown possibilities can be held in an exploratory place. Hence, when Witt and Clarke are collage making to explore new possibilities for transdisciplinary learning, they are affectively exploring the liminal spaces through creative embodiment from which ruptions arise through participation. Campbell, Dyer and Nash’s work (Chap. 11) is transdisciplinary in nature as it seeks to invite reflective conversations between HE leaders and educators from various disciplines alongside others from outside the university. In this way, by reflecting on the process of transdisciplinary practice and the conversations that arise from it, reflexivity can lead to an understanding of different social phenomena which can alter prior assumptions (Von Seggern et al., 2023), providing broader perspectives on challenges and issues. Ben-Horin (Chap. 8) discusses a case study that explores the role of leadership in higher education to ensure that ethical educational futures emerge responsively through creativity to facilitate integration of research, development and innovation in educational programmes. To this end, the chapters in this book are an attempt to kickstart careful communication through the emergence of provocative and ethical methodologies that create conversations which can involve pluralistic possibilities for educational futures. With embodied processes also being a key part of crossing boundaries, this book offers a way for educators to understand how to approach transdisciplinary learning through creativities that can lead to (ruptive) democratic educational futures (Burnard et al., 2022).

Fifthly, we see how attending differently can re-order power and bring through what has previously been denied or hidden. Turner (Chap. 3) opens us up to this way of working initially through his discussion of aesthoecology as a specific way of identifying thinking about education. He argues that the melding of aesthetics and ecology, which both inherently attend differently to affect, offers a pivotal (political) balance between forms of perception, thought, production and action. He takes this political imperative as a driver for dissensus (Ranciere, 2010), or conflict, identifying the opportunity to disrupt the status quo and to creatively re-order power relationships. Chave (Chap. 4) attends to the intense notion of love, grounded in affection and seeing it as a source for social change, with the potential for solidarity which can generate ethico-political pedagogies that have the potential to address injustices and suffering. Later in the book, authors draw these threads of re-balancing power by asking us again to attend differently. For example, Wren’s (Chap. 5) work on affective, embodied empathy forefronts a thoroughly sensorial engagement with environment which brings through messages and understandings which had previously been hidden because of a dominant focus on the intellect. Ghemmour (Chap. 10) identifies reflexive decolonising practices as a means to include into HE the valuable yet neglected knowledge of Global Majority students’ experiences, identities and cultural heritages, and thus re-order power. Similar approaches are advocated by Campbell, Dyer and Nash (Chap. 11) in their work with care as radical resistance and indeed as an act of political educational warfare (Lorde, 1998).

Sixthly and finally, we note our authors going beyond the word when working with creative ruptions. Chappell (Chap. 2) shines a direct spotlight on the importance of going beyond the word through film, technologies such as AR and VR, choreographic scores, martial arts, and indigenous and posthuman walking practices. She highlights the mind body split as a particularly Western problem that we in the West need to overcome (Fullagar & Zhao, 2018). She encourages a practice of cumulative ongoing rupturing as educational responses to both the climate crisis and the neoliberalisation of education. If, as a reader/engager, you have read the book sequentially you might well then experience a powerful accumulation of these ideas and practices throughout the chapters. For example, Turner (Chap. 3) picks up the flow and continues to go beyond the word through exploration of the sensory and affective, symbiotically entwined with the aesthetic and environmental within aesthoecology. Wren (Chap. 5) joins the flow, offering a detailed journey through her embodied musings to understand affective environmental empathy through photographs, Padlets, swimmings, poems, videos and sound recordings whilst also encouraging us as readers/engagers to try all of these practices ourselves. Crickmay and Welsh also draw us beyond the word sometimes asking us to listen—and I repeat their request here. As you read this final paragraph in this section, I ask you, to listen to Chap. 7’s Crickmay and Welsh’s Audio: Poised on the Edge.

QR Code 16 Audio X: Poised on the edge—Bass note D

In this final chapter, we are indeed poised on the edge. So far, we have considered how we can work with creative ruptions. Understanding these six ways of working, we are at the precipice, ready to consider the book’s creative ruptions and their productivity. Carrying us over that edge, Crickmay and Welsh (Chap. 7) and Katingima-Day (Chap. 9) go beyond the word through the inclusion and discussion of voices, images, sounds and instruments. In Chap. 7, they encourage us to think of music making as a fundamentally embodied experience, entangled with the instruments and the world; so that those living with dementia can teach us to focus on learning as a response-able encounter that is emerging towards unforeseeable futures. Katingima-Day eloquently supports us to positively step from the edge into the unknown of the ‘not yet’ through the experience of Utu, a Kiswahili concept regarding the essence of being and becoming human by participating in life. Here she argues that affect is an active, non-material and metaphysical participant in music and music making, life and therefore learning. She is clear that this awareness of affect opens new creative possibilities and, we would argue, the potential for ruptions both in music making encounters and wider educational systems. If you have listened to Crickmay and Welsh’s Poised on the Edge, depending on your reading speed, this should have come to an end in your ears right about now, as we leap off that edge to dive into the book’s ruptions.

What Do Creative Ruptions Do?

So, our readings show us, the editorial team, that to work with creative ruptions, often from a place of marginalisation, we need to find ways to live with unpredictability and discomfort; practice in ethical spaces; allow entanglement but not over-complication; work with transdisciplinarity; attend differently to re-order power; and move beyond the word. Handled in this way, then, what work do ruptions do?

Learning from the snowballing messages of the chapters, as editors we are clear that creative ruptions are radical, that is they affect the fundamental nature of things, and that they are irreversible. In conversation we have compared our experiences of feeling that whilst the past remains with us, there is ‘no going back’ once we have engaged with posthumanism, new materialism, decolonialism and feminism. They are all powerful tools which allow us to think, make and do the educational world differently. We understand that these creative ruptions will not in themselves solve the wicked and Anthropocentric problems that the authors have in their sights. By definition these problems are complex and weblike, requiring approaches from multiple vantage points. The strength of the creative ruptions, and their underpinning theories and practices, though lies in their own complexity and weblike dispersal. If, for example, we take the Baradian notion of intra-action as articulated by Chappell (Chap. 2), Barad (2007) conceives of agency as a relational performance enacted within an entangled assemblage of material and embodied humans and other-than-humans where ideas and phenomenon emerge through the intra-action. This immediately constitutes us all as mutually dependent. With agency complexly dispersed in this way, creative ruptions have reach into the weblike roots of wicked problems; and if such ruptions accumulate they have the potential to intensify their power for change through the layering of their fissures and cracks.

This articulation of creative ruptions also requires of us a different understanding of change and progress. In Chap. 1 we have already pushed back against a linear, logical view of progress towards an envisioned future, by applying Osberg’s (2017) ideas of symbiotic anticipation (pro-actively exploring in an open-ended way beyond the human) and Amsler and Facer’s (2017) call to have the courage to critically anticipate futures which are currently unknowable. This push back is also reinforced in disciplines such as psychology where, for example, Ross (2023) challenges a traditional cognitive view of progress as a linear trajectory from ignorance to knowledge, arguing that creative cognition involves an extended and dynamic system of non-linear possibility generation. These stances are important as, whilst a creative ruption may be generated by our interventions with multiple others, equally we may find ourselves more in the role of recipients, when ruptions such as the Covid-19 pandemic or the rollout of artificial intelligence overtake us, and we need to respond via symbiotic and critical anticipation.

Thus, change via creative ruptions is radical and irreversible and can be unexpected. We cannot tell therefore when smaller ruptions such as the ones detailed in these book chapters will either individually or collectively reach—what we are choosing to call—an ‘accumulation threshold’ (Zhang et al., 2021), and spill into irreversible change with significant momentum and beneficial spread. We find this notion gives us courage when the enormity of the problems we face can feel overwhelming. This book is already an example of positive spread, operating perhaps like a rhizome (Deleuze & Guattarri, 2013), rehabilitating thought as a creative and dynamic enterprise, across the lifetime of the Creativity and Emergent Educational Futures Network at the University of Exeter. Set up in 2018, ideas instigated and spread by Anna Craft, Deborah Osberg, Fran Martin and Kerry Chappell have been taken up, chewed on, adapted and reinvigorated in new contexts by the authors in this book and beyond. And we aim that through your reading and engaging with the book, this beneficial spread of ideas and practices will spread further in a rollout of creative ruptions. We know that these sometimes seemingly small instances of spread can have big effects. Each author or authorial team already has broad impact with their ideas whether at professorial or PhD level, or in between. For example, Natanel’s (Chap. 12) focus on decolonialist feminist ecologies has developed from her interest in doing things differently in education to think about women, sexuality and violence in new ways. This has led to her enacting radical feminist pedagogies with teachers and students in her HE classrooms, where she explores and develops decolonial and anticolonial orientations. Turner’s educational ideas (for which he received an OBE) were played out in a large community college in England where he worked collaboratively with colleagues and others to centre a gallery at the heart of a new college building. These actions were informed by early-stage thinking about aesthoecology, and continue to have ramifications for the education of thousands of young people and their families.

As a collective, contextualised within the wider group of researchers, practitioners and scholars who have taken up posthuman, new materialist, decolonial and feminist ideas, we have not yet experienced our ‘accumulation threshold’, but we are ready for it. In the section that follows next, from the point of view of this book, the editorial team considers how the chapter ruptions are contributing to wicked problems, thus potentially building to an accumulation threshold that will see these practices spill over in an irreversible way.

How Are We Responding to Wicked Problems?

So, how do these creative ruptions respond to wicked problems? Wicked problems are not just difficult, they possess a complexity that involves multiple possible causes and outcomes and internal dynamics that are far from linear (Peters, 2017). For a problem to be wicked, in addition to being complex it is also multicausal, multiscalar and interconnected.

Consequently, wicked problems can never be completely solved, they are interdisciplinary and multiple stakeholders may have conflicting agendas (Rittel & Webber, 1973). They are very similar to hyperobjects (Morton, 2013) which are problems that, as opposed to being linear and rational, implicate all actants as being part of a web or net and, therefore, difficult to disentangle. As Morton puts it, ‘The more I struggle to understand hyperobjects, the more I discover I am stuck to them.’ (p. 28). Witt and Clarke (Chap. 6) refer to this as multiple engagements in a mesh of intra-action. Wicked problems challenge society, policy makers and institutions and include issues such as climate change, refugees, terrorism, digital warfare and loss of biodiversity (Termeer et al., 2019). They are part of all of us and as such are part of the politics of discomfort (Campbell et al., Chap. 11). To take the climate crisis as an example, it is far greater than that induced by anthropogenic activity, important and worrying as that is—it is the immense and ramifying complexity of the issues that define it as a wicked problem.

The climate crisis will be the harbinger of many other wicked problems which will beset the planet and its inhabitants, human and other-than-human alike. For example, changes in climate are likely to lead to catastrophic weather events which will displace very large numbers of people from their homelands. The United Nations (Human Rights) claimed that of 59.1 million people internally displaced in 2021 across the world, most were displaced by climate-related disasters, much higher than displacement due to armed conflict (United Nations, 2022). The overall effect on more-than-human populations is, of course, incalculable but hugely significant. The depletion of the rainforests and the damage to coral reefs are but two examples. McKinnon (2022), for example, points to the climate crisis as being not just due to greenhouse gas emissions but also to ‘a product of historical injustices, current inequalities, institutional inadequacies and the abuse of power’ (McKinnon, 2022, p. 2). She goes on to say that these issues challenge our most fundamental convictions of what makes for flourishing societies and meaningful individual lives—surely also our aim as educators. Climate change and its emergent consequences, therefore, is something that must be at the core of education and futures thinking. This book illustrates how radical, ruptive and creative approaches contribute to that alternative educational mode of thinking and being, not to solve wicked problems, but to perceive them in a new light—prisms which diffract the light and, through ruptions, break the status quo and allow a different way of being, knowing and valuing.

For example, Chappell (Chap. 2) refers to this as a multi-epistemic literacy and Chave (Chap. 4) suggests that this requires a letting go of certainty and an acceptance of ambiguity. Many of the authors in this book approach these problems through a posthumanist and new materialist lens. Wren (Chap. 5), invites the reader to creatively think-with-the-environment, and Witt and Clarke (Chap. 6) expand notions of dialoguing with the world in a collaborative and collective ma(kin)g. Wren refers to the increasing stresses put onto the planet due to climate change (Chap. 5), and Chave (Chap. 4) refers to the climate and ecological emergency as a space for bewildering questions, where no-one yet knows the answer. Turner (Chap. 3) refers to catastrophic events which will become more frequent and unpredictable, in which climate change plays a major role, but, more generally, points to the idea that this spills over dramatically into massive geopolitical uncertainty. How does society and, more particularly, education deal with these unknowns? Leadership in higher education can play a significant part in this and Ben-Horin (Chap. 8) draws attention to how this might be achieved in risky and improvisational ways through seeing students and teachers as co-creators of emergent content drawing on the disciplines of both art and science. Overall, this book cannot give definitive answers to all the questions posed by wicked problems but it can promote different understandings and eco-philosophies of our inter-connected relations with the world, seeking the ethical spaces and opportunities for creative ruptions and emergent solutions.

Accordingly, we are now talking about climate justice, as well as climate change, incorporating the web of wicked problems, which will arise. This is captured well in Sect. 3 of the book (Resistings) in which, for example, Natanel (Chap. 12) draws attention to the wider ramifications of connecting racial justice with food, land and climate justice. Flexible awareness of the impact of these problems, alongside potential educational pedagogies and emergent solutions, sews the golden threads of creative ruptions throughout the book and seeks, if not demands, radical change to our education systems accordingly.

However, we also argue that to change the core of education to tackle the climate crisis, a challenge to neoliberalism is also needed. Neoliberalism is a political approach that favours free-market capitalism, deregulation, and reduction in government spending. What arises from this viewpoint in education is an accumulation of wicked problems to overcome which directly affect the identity, relationships and subjectivity of educators as they try to keep up with unreasonable requests of accountability to meet performative goals (Ball, 2016). This is because neoliberalism centres the human in the world and thus it is by that that all things are measured (Snaza & Weaver, 2015). This ultimately creates a hierarchical structure where any perspective beyond the human is dismissed as less valuable. When education is unwilling to accept that the world is more than human it ignores the possibilities that once humans cease to exist on this planet, other species will still go on to survive (Wallin, 2017). This book is an attempt to create ruptions in a neoliberalist-dominated agenda in education from posthuman and decolonial viewpoints. For example, by taking a new materialist approach, Wren has highlighted the interconnectedness and blurring of boundaries between entities through creating a space of co-creation between the human and more-than-human. Furthermore, Witt and Clarke alert us to a posthuman fusion by exploring sympoietic relations through making kin to celebrate collective co-creation of learning spaces for more-than-human flourishing. Both chapters advocate for collective, posthumanism which are necessary for destabilising individualism and the pursuit of self-interest in neoliberal education so that a more cooperative understanding of education emerges (Kretz, 2014). In addition, the growth of ecology was imbued with colonialism and all too often scientific global discoveries configured the world from a Western and anthropocentric perspective. These colonial stances were used to justify social and environmental control to the detriment of existing knowledge systems in order to develop global economic systems largely based on despoilation and extraction (Trisos et al., 2021). We argue that it is necessary to disrupt the neoliberalist machine through decolonial and posthuman approaches. The wider culture that neoliberalism has created, in which progress is measured by universalised human knowledge rather than seeing humans as materially connected to their environment (Lerch et al., 2022), is one of the challenges that the ideas of creative ruption seek to address.

Therefore, to rethink individualised human knowledge production, Chappell’s exploration of touch and time sees knowledge as emerging through multi-epistemic literacies and by slowing down. This, she argues, causes ruptions in neoliberalist education as it moves away from seeing learning as a commodity for market-driven outcomes which do not allow for hesitation, non-linear and multiple ways of thinking (Chappell et al., 2021). Furthermore, Campbell et al.’s chapter challenges the notion that neoliberalism focuses on professionalised knowledge which does not allow for alternative forms of thinking (Lerch et al., 2022). They use collective forms of reflection to resist measurable, quantifiable education models in favour of a non-linear, non-logic-based approach that allows for non-productive moments to be fore-fronted. These authors argue that non-productive moments are an essential part of the learning journey which allow for agency, an essential part of wellbeing and thriving (Patrick, 2013). Conversely, our push against neoliberalist education extends beyond the learner as we also see in Chappell’s chapter when she explores transdisciplinary practice. In a number of projects, she shows how educators have been encouraged to foster adaptability and resilience to give them the capacity to navigate uncertainty in a rapidly changing world. This can also be seen as a crucial part of the educational experience as identified in the 2018 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report (Schleicher, 2018).

Finally, by taking a decolonial viewpoint, Katingima-Day (Chap. 9) and Ghemmour (Chap. 10) challenge Western dominated hierarchies by problematising inclusivity, diversity and equity. Through the resisting of these structures, they call for a critical examination of power dynamics within educational institutions and encourage the recognition of marginalised voices and perspectives from the edges of neoliberal education systems.

Although, in this section, we have only taken two specific wicked problems as examples it is quite clear that the link between the two renders them even more difficult to tackle because of the entangled, net like nature within which they exist. The Roosevelt Institute (2019), for example, in its report Transcending Neoliberalism: How the Free-Market Myth Has Prevented Climate Action, points to the ‘role of ideology in creating our climate crisis’ (p. 4), and we contend that neoliberal ideology has also infected the UK education establishment in a negative way. The authors in our book, therefore, look to create cracks and fissures in the system through creative ruptions, to challenge and subvert, the normative stance of anthropocentric educational practice. Only in this way might we provide the skills and opportunities for the next generation of practitioners and students to face the big challenges of the century.

Although authors in this book have not directly addressed artificial intelligence (AI), we feel that it is worth at least a brief discussion as a currently emerging global challenge, the impacts of which are rapid, pervasive and unpredictable in terms of ethics and care. In particular, we note the fear of AI’s growth in relation to education where there are anxieties about these technologies replacing teachers (Gocen & Aydemir, 2020); creating poverty, disrupting data security, changing human behaviours (Huang et al., 2021); and misplacing autonomy and agency (Khosravi et al., 2022). There is also a concern that AI is being used by ‘big tech’ as a neoliberal tool for the concentration of power (Verdegem, 2022) which replicates existing social injustices based around race, gender, sexuality, disability and more.

Despite these fears, there is also a feeling that AI will not be able to replicate certain human qualities such as intuition (Herman, 2021); emotion (Schiff, 2021); creativity, empathy and critical thinking (Kissinger et al., 2021). So, there are calls for finding ways for humans to live alongside and embrace AI, so as to take advantage of AI’s positive capabilities (Herman, 2021). To put this into action, recent research has proposed that we understand the machine/human relationship as relationally produced (Perucica & Andjelkovic, 2022); as creative (Author Unknown, 2023); and as a spur to move away from dualistic thinking (Dahlin, 2023). We would argue that the ideas and practices within this book have the ability to create ruptions which can respond in this way to AI as a new, emergent wicked problem. This is because many of these approaches promote relational and pluralist thinking through creativity.

Also, as Luckin (2023) and Luckin et al. (2022) argue, we need to make sure that moving forward in relationship with AI, we understand that it has the capacity to fundamentally disrupt education, and that we positively work with this. They urge us to use AI for its data processing capacities, and to see humans as the creative and critical thinkers. The approaches in this book suggest a more entangled, less centrally human controlled stance to this relationship, but we are certainly in agreement with Luckin and her team that we need to be alert to the ethical harm of the profit-driven imperatives of big tech AI. Drawing again on Osberg (2017), we argue that it is through symbiotically anticipatory AI-human relationships that this impending wicked problem can be responded to without knowing what is coming, but in a way which actively takes long-term ethical responsibility for the future. As Luckin emphasises, failure to change is not an option.

Thinking-Being-Doing to Push Matters Forward

So far in this chapter, we have articulated strands and threads that have resonated for us as an editorial team. We were interested to see, in the spirit of post-qualitative research, what would emerge if we offered another way to actively assemble these threads together. In this spirit, we asked two authors from the book, Sharon Witt and Helen Clarke, to predominantly work with the images in the book to create an assembled collage as an alternative leaping off point for you as readers/engagers.

In the spirit of post-qualitative research (Maclure, 2013), they have created a lively collage as a provocative call to action (Fig. 13.2).

Fig. 13.2

The collage hanging

Here, collaging is an expansive act, where imagery, words, phrases, diffraction, paper sculpture, theory, chapter snippets, figures and materials are enmeshed and put to work with all the creators can ‘muster’ (St. Pierre, 2011, p. 622). Collage is generated and generative to produce ‘new connections’ (Maclure, 2013, p. 229) (Fig. 13.3).

Fig. 13.3

An excerpt from the collage

During co-construction, themes, comments, and questions of thinking, making and doing education differently emerge—repeating, spiralling, folding/unfolding, turning back, moving forward, tracing and retracing. Collage weaves a web of bold ideas in a mesh of strands and threads creating a ‘way of relational knowing … which involves multisensory responses in a particular moment…. produced in collaborations’ (Somerville, 2008, p. 212). Like Holbrook and Pourchier (2014, p.760) Sharon and Helen do not ‘seek complete or final works or concrete answers … the collages are constituted as contemplative spaces’ that are partial, constantly changing, dynamically (in)forming and deliberately inciting further encounters.

Together with Sharon and Helen, we invite readers to explore the collage (Fig. 13.4).

Fig. 13.4

Screenshot of collage film and QR code

Please consider: Which ideas have resonance for you? What feelings are stirred up within you? What is activated within your practice? What can you do differently? Where do you stand? How does this connect and enliven what you have engaged with in the book’s chapters?

If you have accessed the threads of the collage above, you will by now be on your own journey, possibly a diffractive one (Barad, 2007). Your ideas and doings may be spreading out in multiple directions, cutting together apart with theories that you are interested in, practices with which you are familiar, bending and diverting trajectories to take you in your own new directions from the provocations to produce your own teachings, activisms and learnings. In parallel, and perhaps still intra-acting with those trajectories, we also now offer our editorial team’s departure points. We entered this space with a quote from Facer (2019, p. 12):

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.

This book has created intersecting educational spaces which tap that surplus potential, which generate new alternative educational futures, whilst honouring the need for emergence. Chapters have acknowledged complexity and have worked to de-signify and de-centre humans, and within human interrelations have worked to de-centre dominant Western narratives and practices. Surplus potential is frequently a phrase associated with economic growth but the interpretation in this book is far more complex and exciting than that. What has been written by the authors has exceeded the expectation that any of us might have envisaged. In extensive dialogue about the chapters, we have been engaged in the witnessing of emergent knowledge and understanding that has been transformational; we hope you have found this to be the case too.

As we move forward, we are alert to accumulation thresholds which may be reached and which could cause large-scale ruptions that we can contribute to and build upon. Given where we are at the time of writing, it is hard to predict if, for example, AI will trigger this kind of change. It is almost certain that there will be an accumulation of climate-related factors that coalesce to further negatively and irreversibly damage the planet. Other, as yet, unpredictable and emergent phenomena are likely to create future ruptions. Perversely, perhaps, we need not to be surprised by this. As the first of the learnings regarding how to deal with creative ruptions suggests, we need to know how to live with unpredictability in education. There is the very real potential for some kind of current systems collapse or upheaval; acknowledging this removes a false sense of security that we as humans are in control, and being acquainted with these kinds of ideas will allow us to deal with them better.

Furthermore, futures anxiety, or perhaps more precisely eco-anxiety, is seen as an inevitable consequence of continuous change and sometimes rapid and unforeseen emergent events. The balance is set between an acute awareness of the earth crisis whilst simultaneously maintaining hope and determination that positive action can and will make a difference to the future. This requires a radical change in thinking and doing. Eco-anxiety arises not only from ‘a poverty of imagination’ but also a ‘poverty of hope’ (Damhof & Gulmans, 2023, p. 51). They suggest that poverty and hope are intimately connected—imagining the impossible turns out to become a necessity—a radical act of hope (ibid.). However, to act on the hope also requires courage in the face of difficulty and an ethical sense of making differences to any possible future. Futures Literacy (Miller, 2018) is the skill to imagine the future in different ways and in different contexts which might elicit a new way of thinking and a sense of agency through perceiving and embracing emergence when it occurs. Miller (2018) suggests that when we imagine more, and when we explore multiple futures, we perceive more in the present, which is all we have to act upon. Seeking and seeing creative ruptions provides an attitude of hope and agency for the future, thus addressing perceived feelings of futures anxiety. Further, Freeman (2023, p. 73) suggests that to ‘succumb to despair is not only fatalistic but “problematically” safe’ and that, although difficult, it is imperative to hold on to hope in order to sustain a sense of the possible.

As part of quelling futures anxiety and turning to hope, courage and determination, despite a dominant neoliberal narrative that aims to hoodwink us into believing that we must continue with the Western rationalised status quo, as a collective of Creative Ruptions authors, we are not alone. And neither are you as readers/engagers. Decolonial colleagues are taking the courageous and necessary steps to call for a deconstruction of the Western project that is modernity, but to do this with care and humility. In Hospicing Modernity, De Oliveira (2021) has drawn together a powerful call to arms to face our crises with maturity and integrity. She is clear, as we are, that there is no quick fix and that in her words we need to ‘interrupt’ the patterns that are destroying our communities and our planet. She offers thought experiments to reimagine how we can respond to crises, to expand our capacity to hold space for pain and grief, to interrupt our satisfaction with neoliberal and colonial habits and create space for change. There are others tackling similar issues at different levels. For example, Pirbhai-Illich et al. (2024) offer practical approaches to decolonising educational relationships in higher education. With a core focus on relationships they offer caring, accessible and critically honed insights into process, grounded in extensive experience and practical exercises. They show how to decentre from dominant Euro-centric models through an actionable de/colonial imaginary, to contribute to the wider project of working for a more just world. The work of our Resistings authors especially can be entangled with these approaches and provide an opening to begin thinking about how these approaches can be actioned in any given situation especially through the process of critical reflection, so that ruptions begin to spread across a wide range of different educational contexts. Colleagues in Possibility Studies are coalescing around similarly activist thinking and practice too. Drawing on Osberg (2017) and Amsler and Facer (2017), we are putting forward an argument here for critical, symbiotic anticipatory approaches to educational futures which gel with those in Possibility Studies. Together all our work can contribute to the spread of ideas that is necessary for accumulation thresholds to be reached. Resonating with Chappell’s chapter in this book, Facer (2023) calls for the cultivation of the temporal imagination to use as a critical resource for futures thinking. Grounded in theorists such as Greene (2011), she proposes that using our temporal imaginations can allow us to see our own understanding and practice of time as just one possible timeframe. Facilitated to see this from the outside we can then become aware of other timescapes and to engage in dialogue with others through and within these. As Chappell argues, a focus on understanding time differently and as Facer argues, imaginatively, is a strong tool for creating space for new futures which challenge dominant narratives and look to respond to the wicked problems we face.

We also take heart from Escobar (2023), who pushes beyond questioning our conceptions of time, to challenge our understanding of reality per se. Our work in this book completely resonates with this call. Escobar encourages us all to explore the complex cultural political work of imagining the future and begins by highlighting how deeply shaped this process is by current Western centric notions of modernity. As we have done in this book, he asks us to disrupt the onto-epistemic foundations. We clearly respond to his call here by employing posthuman, new materialist, decolonial and feminist theories and practices; we are, however, not in the business of imagining new futures and telling readers/engagers how to achieve them, but in providing the theories, tools, provocations and examples that allow readers/engagers to create space for the kinds of ruptions that can contribute to responding to wicked, Anthropocentric problems in a flexible and responsive way. And we need to respond bravely. As Bayo Akomolafe (2023) states:

When a crack appears in the mighty wall, the only thing scarier than letting it grow unbridled, the only thing more worrisome than allowing it breath, is sealing it up—for the thesis of the crack is to call into question the form we’ve assumed, the nobilities we cherish, the stories we assume to be true. The crack is the monster’s gift—a reminder that the fixity of the postures we take on often prove more dangerous than the threats we presume to withstand….

…we must now inhabit the cracks…