Background and aims

 ^{(Foto: Lake Bled, Slovenia © Spannring)}

This project aims to resolve the perceived clash between culture, nature, ethics, and policy in the Anthropocene through a critical inter-disciplinary approach. It offers a new space for the exploration of elemental water and the development of water literacy. Water animates all life and critically relies on appropriate conditions for expression, co-evolvement and lifesupporting reorganization. A critical aspect of the research project is an innovative, inclusive ecopedagogical approach that inspires a range of stakeholders, and is invested in disrupting pre-existing structural obstacles and perceptions of the more-than-human world as "resource" or "environmental service provider". 

Nature has been increasingly commoditised and ecologically degraded through lack of effective, companion-centred mutual respect and ethical governance and wise stewardship of nature (Hawke&Palsson 2017). By centering ecology and navigating new ecological justice through new hydro-logics, the proposed research will champion connectivity and resilience, awe and wonder. The flow on aims and effects of these motivations is to inspire accountability in educational design and citizen engagement that speaks with nature, rather than about nature as a passive and subordinate ‘other’.  This necessarily inter-disciplinary project has three main objectives:

I. To understand and co-direct water and its connections more holistically as having environmental, economic and cultural value through ecological literacy; 

II. To enact water literacy as understood philosophically and socio-culturally through the application of CAS towards new ontological direction;

III. To advance ecological restorative justice and intersubjective ethics in theory and praxis through innovative philosophy and bio-respect for elemental worlds founded in distinct, creative and inclusive pedagogy.