I can’t look away from the UK weather forecasts for the next few days. I keep looking up different places I know and thinking about how unprecedented this is and about the people and other animals most at risk. What can education be when the systems that could allow some stability are collapsing?

I think this work of education needs to be happening in all the messy, temporary boundary spaces that could hold regeneration, repair or imagining otherwise. These spaces can bring together minoritised groups, marginalised ways of knowing, educators committed to social and environmental justice, the wide range of academic disciplines we need to understand wicked problems, the people in power who are able to see what needs to change and more …

These spaces could be assemblies, commissions, courses, programmes, curations, networks, projects and more. They might pop up temporarily online and/or coalesce round a shared natural or urban space or cause. They will inevitably entangle ecosystems, people, technologies, ideologies, cultures and structures. They need to be connected and revisited over time with enough consistent presence to support action and reflexive evaluation. These need to be spaces of true hospitality, striving to welcome whoever comes and however they arrive. Deep consideration should be given to who feels welcome, whose customs are valued and who has the power to do the welcoming.

The practices of these spaces could be practices of repair, reimagination, weaving, regeneration, adaptation, hospitality and care. These spaces need to hold and support grief, fear, anger, playfulness, joy, and hope. They need to acknowledge historic inequalities and patterns of harm. Participating in these spaces, we need to work gently but urgently towards mutual understanding by co-creating and re-creating frameworks and other boundary objects that enable enough shared understanding for collaborative regenerative action in the world. Despite the urgency, these spaces need to hold uncertainty and disagreement. We need to value persistent experiences of confusion, stuckness and messy emergence.

Please tell me where I can find more spaces like this!

These are some of the sources that inspired my thinking here:

de Oliviera, V. (2021). Hospicing modernity: Facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. California: North Atlantic Books.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures). Duke University Press.

Holland, D., D. Skinner, W. Lachicotte Jr., and C. Cain. 1998. Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kimmerer, R. (2020). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Penguin.

Molz, J. and Gibson, S. (2016). Mobilizing hospitality

Ross, J. (2023). Digital futures for learning: Speculative methods and pedagogies. New York: Routledge.

Ruitenberg, C. (2016). Unlocking the world: Education in an ethic of hospitality. New York: Routledge.: The ethics of social relations in a mobile world. New York: Routledge.

Star, L. (2010). This is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 35(5), 601-617.

Tsing, A., Deger, J., Saxena, A. and Zhou, F. (2024). Field guide to the patchy anthropocene: The new nature. Stanford University Press.

Wenger-Trayner, E., Fenton-O’Creevy, M., Hutchinson, S., Kubiak, C., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2014). Learning in landscapes of practice: Boundaries, identity, and knowledgeability in practice-based learning. Routledge.

Photo by Ben Hershey on Unsplash