Collective Coordinator
Professor Karen Malone
Professor Karen Malone is Professor of Education in the Department of Education in the School of Social Sciences, Media, Film and Education at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, is an internationally distinguished scholar known for bridging education, environmental philosophy, posthumanist theory, environmental humanities, and childhood geographies. She has held several key leadership roles at Swinburne including Head of Department of Education, Education Research Director, School Associate Dean of Research and is currently Research Leader of the Swinburne Teacher Education, Engagement and Research Hub (STEERHub). At Western Sydney University she held a cross-faculty Professorial role in Sustainability and was the Director, Centre for Educational Research. Drawing on posthumanist and performative materialist approaches, Professor Malone’s research interrogates and re-configures ontological, epistemological, and ethical binaries, by building alliances between education, the sciences, and the new humanities. Her pioneering work repositions children and education within urban, climate and ecological assemblages, emphasising multispecies ethics, embodied materialities, and planetary care. For four consecutive years (2022–2025), she has been recognised in the Stanford University Top 2% of Most Cited Scientists in the World rankings in Education, Geography, and Social Sciences.
Professor Malone Chief Investigator on forty-five funded projects including four ARC grants, totalling more than AUD 3.5 million. Her forthcoming ARC Linkage Project Plants and Climate Mitigation Futures: Museums, Communities, Knowledges (with Fiona Cameron, WSU) broadens their previous project Curating Museum Collections for Climate Change Mitigation (ARC Linkage, 2022–2026), by extending posthuman educative collaborations with Indigenous and scientific communities to experiment with plant pedagogies, environmental humanities, and climate education futures. Internationally, she has led major projects funded by Swedish Research Council (Mid-Sweden University Eco-democracy in Education staring in 2026) and the Academy of Finland (University of Oulu (CitiRats©). Nationally she is CI on HORIZON funded by QLD Government Mapping Scientific Concepts through Nature Play in Early Childhood Education supporting innovation in early childhood education. To enable educational innovation in the Anthropocene and to shape international education landscapes, in her research she redefines cross-sectoral pedagogy and policy in environmental and climate change education.
Malone has published 13 Books, 52 Book chapters, and over 67 Journal articles. She recently co-authored a book entitled Wild Ecologies, Walking with Glacier; An Educational Novella (2024) with Bob Jickling, Marcus Morse and Sean Blenkinsop. Other current published books include Earthly Methodologies as Unfolding Childhoods (Springer 2025) withe th team of researchers from OsloMet University. Her seminal high impact publications include Research Handbook on Childhoodnature (2020) downloaded 490K times; Theorising Posthuman Childhood Studies (2020) 43K times, and sole-authored book Children in the Anthropocene (2018) 7K times. Two new books are on the horizon and currently in progress Children Sensing Ecologically (Bloomsbury 2026) and Weathering-with Climate Childhoods: Reimagining climate change education in the Anthropocene (Springer 2026). As book series co-editor for Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories and Postqualitative, New Materialist and Critical Posthumanist Research, she supports scholarship in posthumanism, postqualitative inquiry and philosophy in education.
Contact: kmalone@swin.edu.au
Collective Members
National Members
Dr Tracy Young
Tracy is a lecturer-researcher in the Department of Education. Tracy’s work is sustained by a commitment to animal activism and ecological justice and seeks to understand how power structures are reinforced through the political, social and cultural effects of education. Thus, her research is concerned with broad and intersecting themes of education. Recent research aligns three disciplines: early childhood education, environmental education, and human-animal studies where connections and disjunctions of children’s relations with animals in family homes and early childhood education are researched within a critical posthuman and post-qualitative theoretical framework. In this research the complex relations with children, animals and environments provide a space for ethical inquiry that troubles how animal species are socially constructed, culturally reproduced and positioned in early childhood education. Post-qualitative methodologies invite creative practices in her research including theorising with critical posthumanist, ecofeminist, postcolonial and new materialist philosophies. Tracy’s research and writing contributes to wider understandings about the significance of early childhood education in terms of relationality with the human and the more-than-human.
Dr. Carol Birrell
Dr Carol Birrell is creative ecologist with expertise in environmental humanities, Indigenous studies, ecopedagogy, social ecology, place-based research, climate change and creativity and imagination. She is an accomplished fiction and non-fiction author and artist. Her earth-based arts practice for the last 20 years, called Touched by the Earth, draws together movement, painting, photography, environmental sculpture and poetry, along with Indigenous understandings, as a base for ecological writing and exploring ecological identity. She was recently a Lecturer in Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney, School of Education, and now teaches Aboriginal Education at Wollongong University. Her background of 25 years in teaching includes primary and high schools, geography and Social Sciences, wilderness education and personal development. She writes about her arts practice and ecological thinking on her blog entries on the website Touched by the Earth https://carolbirrell.wordpress.com/
Contact: carolleebirrell@gmail.com
Dr. Marcia McKenzie
Marcia McKenzie is Professor of Global Studies and International Education, in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Victoria Australia. Dr. McKenzie’s current research projects include leading the Sustainability and Education Policy Network (2012-2020), the Director, Monitoring and Evaluation of Climate Change Education (MECCE) project (2020-2026), and ‘The development and mobilization of UN policy programs: Mitigating climate change through education’ (2019-2024). She has also recently led three global UNESCO consultancies, including ‘Country progress on climate change education: A review of national submissions to the UNFCCC,’ and ‘ESD and GCED up close: Cognitive, social and emotional and behavioral learning in Education for Sustainable Development and Global Citizenship Education from pre-primary to secondary education,’ as well as a new study on inclusion of environment in K-12 policy and curricula across 50 countries. Encompassed within Dr. McKenzie’s empirical projects are theoretical and applied contributions at the intersections of comparative and international education, global education policy research, and climate and sustainability education, including in relation to policy mobility, scale, affect, intersectionality, and other areas of social and geographic concern. She is also author/editor of four books, including: with Eve Tuck, Place in Research: Theory, Methodology, and Methods (Routledge, 2015); and with Andrew Bieler, Critical Education and Sociomaterial Practice (Peter Lang, 2016); and is co-editor of the Palgrave book series Studies in Education and the Environment. She held a year-long Australian Endeavour Executive Fellowship in 2018-2019, and been inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. The following links provide information on her significant contribution to the field of sustainability education in Canada and globally. Director, Sustainability Education Research Institute (SERI) Project Director, Sustainability and Education Policy Network (SEPN) Associate Member, School of Environment and Sustainability .
Contact: marcia.mckenzie@unimelb.edu.au
Dr. Fiona Cameron
Dr. Fiona Cameron is a Associate Professor Research Fellow at Western Sydney university and a leading thinker and internationally recognized scholar in museum and heritage studies. Over her academic career she has successfully attained seven ARC projects (five as lead CI, two as CI 2) and a prestigious ARC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sydney as lead CI (2002–2004). In 2005, as lead CI, I was awarded an ARC Linkage grant “Reconceptualising Heritage Collections with the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) and transferred to Western Sydney University. She is a member of the Centre for Cultural Research (CCR), now the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) at WSU. This intensive, research-focused environment supports competitive grant capture. As a result, in 2007, she received an ARC Linkage “Hot Science Global Citizens: the Agency of the Museum Sector in Climate Change Interventions” involving five museum partners (Australia, US). In 2010, she was awarded a prestigious Rachel Carson Fellowship (professorial appointment) and spent six months (Sept 2011 – March 2012) at the Rachel Carson Center, a joint research centre between Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and the German Deutsches Museum of Science and Technology under the leadership of Professor Drs Christof Mauch and Helmuth Trischler. She also held a visiting fellow position at KTH Environmental Humanities Lab, Stockholm, in 2018 under the directorship of Dr Marco Armiero to conduct research for my forthcoming monograph, Museum practice and the environmental posthumanities (Routledge 2020). high-quality outputs comprising 79+ publications including: a multi-authored monograph and a second forthcoming (Duke 2017; Te Papa Press ), 3 collections (senior MIT Press, Routledge), 23 chapters (15 sole, 8 lead), 3 journal special issues (lead), 29 refereed articles (24 sole, 5 lead), 7 refereed proceedings (6 sole), 2 articles (1 sole), 11 reports (10 lead, 1 sole), 3 climate policy documents along with 2 sole-authored monographs (MIT Press, accepted; Routledge 2020 forthcoming).
Contact: f.cameron@westernsydney.edu.au
Dr. Sarah Crinall
Sarah Crinall was a Research Fellow for Professor Malone on the funded research Children in the Anthropocene project in particular focusing on research theme sensorial ecological knowing with children. She has published extensively after completing her PHD in 2017. Her thesis ‘Blogging art and sustenance: Artful everyday life (making) with water’ won the AERA best research thesis research award in 2018. In 2019 she published her thesis as a sole-authored book Sustaining Childhood Nature: The Art of Becoming Water published in the Springer book series Children: Global Posthumanist perspectives and materialist theories.
Contact: sarah.crinall@scu.edu.au
Dr. David Cole
A/Professor David R. Cole is the founder of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene: https://iiraorg.com/. David is a philosopher of education and author, having produced more than one hundred significant publications and fifteen books. He believes that the problematics of the Anthropocene can only be approached through collective practice and thought. Firstly, the complex dynamics that are at play need to be understood and rethought beyond limiting assumptions. Secondly, this exploration has to be translated to practical action on the ground that can be followed by communities. David works as an Associate Professor in Education at Western Sydney University, Australia.
Contact: david.cole@westernsydney.edu.au
Dr. Iris Duhn
Professor Iris Duhn is currently working at the School of Education, University of Tasmania. She has specific expertise in the sociology of childhood/critical childhood studies, and philosophy of childhood. She frequently publishes on sustainability, curriculum, globalisation and professionalism, new materialism and its methodologies in early childhood. As an expert in early childhood education, her research leadership contributes specifically to an ongoing focus on the importance of including young children’s voices in complex issues around their learning and in conceptualization of the concept of multi-species agency in the Anthropocene. Her research in this area supports explicit foci on the development of new concepts and theories that respond to the challenges of climate change and loss of biodiversity and its effects on concepts of ‘childhood’ in a rapidly changing world. Duhn has been a Chief Investigator on externally funded projects in New Zealand and in Australia (including two Australian Research Council funded projects). Since her first full time academic appointment in 2007, Duhn has published consistently with a total of 46. Most of these publications appear in high quality journals and book chapters are published by well regarded publishers (Routledge, Springer). Her overall Google Scholar citation count is well over 1000, with 635 citations since 2015. Duhn was invited to edited a Special Issue for the leading journal in the field of environmental education research Environmental Education Research (2018 Impact Factor 2.255) and the Special Issue was published in 2017 (co-edited with Malone and Tesar). She is an Editorial Board member for Environmental Education Research, for Contemporary Issues In Early Childhood and for the New Zealand Educational Review.
Contact: iris.duhn@utas.edu.au
Dr. Linda Knight
Professor Linda Knight is an artist and academic who specialises in critical and speculative arts practices and methods. Linda devised ‘Inefficient Mapping’ as a methodological protocol for conducting fieldwork in projects informed by ‘post-‘ theories. In her role as Associate Professor at RMIT University, Australia Linda creates transdisciplinary projects across early childhood, creative practice, and digital media. Together with Jacinta Leong, Linda is a founding member of the Guerrilla Knowledge Unit, an artist collective that curates interface jamming performances between the public and AI technologies. Linda has exhibited digitally and physically in Australia, UK, USA, Canada, NZ, and South America and has been awarded arts research grants and prizes with international reach and impact, most recently this includes two Australian Research Council Discovery projects that designs novel technologies for framing and enabling young children’s active play.
Website: https://lindaknight.org/ Inefficient mapping IG: @lk_inefficient_urban_maps GKU: https://guerrillaknowledgeunit.com/ Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com.au/citations?user=0jYWOFwAAAAJ&hl=en
Contact: linda.knight@rmit.edu.au
Dr. Marcus Morse
Marcus Morse is an Associate Professor at the University of Tasmania on outdoor and environmental education. He grew up in Tasmania, where he spent a great deal of time on the island’s rivers, coastlines, and mountains that inspired a love of being outdoors. He has worked in outdoor environmental education and nature-based tourism contexts in Australia, Nepal, Norway and Canada. Marcus’ teaching is focused on place-responsive, attentive, and relational outdoor and environmental education, and he is currently the Program Director of the new Bachelor of Outdoor and Environmental Education and Diploma of Nature Based Guiding degrees at he University of Tasmania. Marcus’ research interests include environmental education, community engagement projects, place, river experience, and wild pedagogies. Prior to returning to the University of Tasmania in 2023 Marcus was Program Director for Outdoor and Environmental Education at La Trobe University, Bendigo (Australia). He was a founding member of the Wild Pedagogies international research group and organised the Australian colloquium which took place on the Franklin River in Tasmania’s South-west. He has a wide range of peer-reviewed publications and has recently co-authored a book entitled Wild Ecologies, Walking with Glacier; An Educational Novella (2024) with Karen Malone, Bob Jickling and Sean Blenkinsop.
Contact: m.morse@latrobe.edu.au
International Members
Dr. Sean Blenkinsop
Sean Blenkinsop is professor of philosophy of education in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He grew up in the boreal forests of northern Canada. With a 30+ year background in outdoor, environmental, and experiential education his interest in environmental sustainable education comes quite naturally. Over the last ten years he has been involved in starting three nature/place-based, Indigenizing, eco-schools (all in the public system) and has written extensively about these experiences and the philosophical underpinnings of eco-education writ large. His latest collaborative book Wild Pedagogies was published in 2018 by Palgrave and a new book focusing on a qualitative research method, eco-portraiture, developed by his research team is due out in early 2021 with Peter Lang. He recently co-authored a book entitled Wild Ecologies, Walking with Glacier; An Educational Novella (2024) with Karen Malone, Bob Jickling and Marcus Morse.
Contact: sblenkin@sfu.ca
Dr. Peter Blaze Corcoran
Dr. Peter Blaze Corcoran is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Studies and Environmental Education at Florida Gulf Coast University. He has been a faculty member at College of the Atlantic, Swarthmore College, and Bates College. He has held appointments as a visiting professor at universities in Australia, The Netherlands, Fiji, Malaysia, and Kenya. He has long served as a Research Fellow at the Earth Charter Center for Education for Sustainable Development at University for Peace in San José, Costa Rica. Earth Ethics Institute at Miami Dade College has designated him as an Elder. New posts since his recent retirement include appointments as Senior Advisor to Unity Earth in Melbourne, Australia and Senior Fellow at the International Council for Environmental Economics and Development in New York City. He also serves on the Grant Selection Council of Purpose Earth, a new organization which supports community and environmental activism worldwide. In 2020, University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia appointed him as an Adjunct Professor of Environmental and Sustainability Education. He continues to be active as a scholar on a range of topics in educational and environmental studies through various chapters, journal articles, and lectures. His most recent books include Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education, Wageningen Academic Publishers (2017), and Intergenerational Learning and Transformative Leadership for Sustainable Futures, Wageningen Academic Publishers (2014).
Contact: peterblazecorcoran@gmail.com
Dr. Bob Jickling
Professor Jickling is a long-time Yukon resident who taught environmental ethics and environmental education at Yukon College for many years. Bob Jickling has been an active practitioner, teaching courses in environmental philosophy; environmental, experiential, and outdoor education; and philosophy of education. He worked as a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University after many years of teaching at Yukon College. He continues his work as Professor Emeritus at Lakehead University. Jickling has published one authored book, several edited volumes, numerous book chapters, and papers in a variety of scholarly journals. He has served as an advisory editor to four international journals. His research interests include philosophical inquiry into environmental education, environmental ethics, and relationships between environmental ethics, education, and pedagogy. Jickling was the founding editor of the Canadian Journal of Environmental Education in 1996, and he co-chaired the 5th World Environmental Education Congress in Montreal, in 2009. He has also received the North American Association of Environmental Education’s Awards for Outstanding Contributions to: Research (2009) and Global Environmental Education (2001). In 2012, he received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in recognition of contributions to Canada. He recently co-authored a book entitled Wild Ecologies, Walking with Glacier; An Educational Novella (2024) with Karen Malone, Marcus Morse and Sean Blenkinsop.
Contact: bob.jickling@lakeheadu.ca
Associate Professor Riika Hohti
Dr. Riikka Hohti works as Associate Professor of Sustainable Futures in Education and Ethics in the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include child-animal relations, time and temporality, and post-anthropocentric education. Currently, she leads the Children of the Anthropocene research project which focuses on the affective atmospheres and multispecies relations in the lives of children and young people, in the context of multiple environmental crises. She also leads the Academy Research Fellow project MoreChild, which takes the microbe, the fossil, and the weather as starting points to develop new figurations of childhood for the post-Anthropocene times. Hohti’s research often engages in methodological thinking alongside topical interests, and she has developed feminist posthumanist and multispecies ethnographic approaches to retell and re-theorize more-than-human childhoods.
Contact: riikka.hohti@helsinki.fi
Professor Michael Paulsen
Michael Paulsen is a philosopher and associate professor specializing in educational research at the University of Southern Denmark. He serves as the head of the Center for Understanding Human Relationships with the Environment (CUHRE), which focuses on advancing ecological literacy in the population. His academic contributions include authoring several books and articles on environmental education and pedagogy in the Anthropocene era. In collaboration with his colleague, Sara Mosberg Iversen, he leads a research project that involves developing and applying a speculative cli-fi role-playing game addressing climate issues for young people. https://portal.findresearcher.sdu.dk/en/persons/m
Contact: mpaulsen@sdu.dk
Professor Pauliina Rautio
Pauliina Rautio is a Professor of Biodivesity Education at the University of Oulu, Finland. Pauliina leads a transdisciplinary research team Animate, founded in 2016. The original team of four focused on bringing forward children’s perspectives on the significant animals in their lives. Over the years, she writes we have grown into a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the human, social, and natural sciences. With more than 2M€ in external funding, we currently investigate the positions of other animals in culture and society, and how diverse human–animal relations contribute to biodiversity loss. We collaborate with citizens, environmental organizations, and artists from various fields. Through these transdisciplinary approaches, we explore how human existence and the definition of humanity are shaped through relationships with other animals; especially those that are overlooked, considered harmful, or otherwise marginalized. In doing so, we highlight the importance of multispecies justice as a central theme in education and human growth. Our current research includes considering homes as sites of domestic biodiversity and multispecies coexistence, exploring the roles and fates of other animals in scientific knowledge production—from entomology to laboratory animal research—and investigating the possibilities and forms of fellow feelings, or multispecies empathy. We also conduct proof-of-concept studies and collaborate with diverse stakeholders (e.g., the Martha Association / Martat and the Finnish Nature League / Luontoliitto) to help bring perspectives of multispecies justice into practice.
Contact: pauliina.rautio@oulu.fi
Dr. Dawn Sanders
Professor Dawn Sanders Sanders engages in a range of research and writing partnerships both in Europe and further afield. She is particularly active in trans-disciplinary multi-media partnerships with researchers working in arts-based research for example https://snaebjornsdottirwilson.com and humanities https://herbaria3.org oriented around plant-based research. She regularly participates in co-authored publications as well as single author contributions and has built editorial relationships through books, special issues and special collections in issues. Notably the recent special issue and editorial in Plants People Planet: https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ppp3.10059 and the editorial and collection on Botanic Gardens in Environmental Education Research: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504622.2018.1477122 . Sanders brings a transdisciplinary identity to her research practice and teaching. In addition to her teaching and research work Sanders is an active reviewer of journal articles and grant applications; for example, she has reviewed early career and student submissions to the National Science Foundation, USA and the Icelandic Research Fund for Graduate Students, Iceland.
Contact: dawn.sanders@gu.se
Dr. Arjen Wals
Arjen Wals is a Professor of Transformative Learning for Socio-Ecological Sustainability at Wageningen University. He also holds the UNESCO Chair of Social Learning and Sustainable Development. Wals is also a Visiting Professor at Norwegian Life Science University in Ås where he supports the development of Whole Schools Approaches & Sustainability. His recent work focusses on transformative social learning in vital coalitions of multiple stakeholders at the interface of science and society. His teaching and research focus on designing learning processes and learning spaces that enable people to contribute meaningfully sustainability. A central question in his work is: how to create conditions that support (new) forms of learning which take full advantage of the diversity, creativity and resourcefulness that is all around us, but so far remain largely untapped in our search for a world that is more sustainable than the one currently in prospect? He writes a regular research blog that signals developments in the emerging field of sustainability education: www.transformativelearning.nl For a short introduction to his work have look at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqB4ryiS4cY
Contact: arjen.wals@wur.nl
Dr Linda Wilhelmsson
Linda Wilhelmsson serves as Senior Lecturer at Mid Sweden University’s Department of Education, where she manages Teacher Education programs for Grades K-4-6 and leads the Critical Perspectives in Educational Sciences research group (KUF). Her academic home is within the Department of Education (UTV), based at the Östersund campus where she maintains an active teaching and research presence. Her research program centers on schools’ democratic mission, exploring student influence mechanisms, eco-bildung frameworks, and critical constructive didactics. She develops theoretical and practical approaches to Wild Pedagogies while investigating the unique challenges and opportunities of small schools in sparsely populated areas. Her work bridges educational theory with practical applications for sustainability education, particularly through the lens of eco-democracy and more-than-human relationships.
Wilhelmsson’s recent publications reveal a strong focus on environmental education within the Anthropocene context, with increasing attention to decolonial perspectives and reconciliation pedagogy. Her collaborative work with international scholars demonstrates growing influence in Wild Pedagogies frameworks and eco-democratic education models that connect local school practices to global sustainability challenges.
Contact: linda.wilhelmsson@miun.se
Dr Teresa Elkin Postila
Teresa Elkin Postila serves as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education at Mid Sweden University, Östersund campus. She holds a PhD and can be reached at teresa.elkinpostila@miun.se. Her research centers on Gender and Education, Environmental Education, and Critical Pedagogy. She develops innovative methodologies like “Research prACTivisms” for knowledge production beyond traditional academia, and explores eco-democracy and more-than-human relationships in education. Analysis of her recent publications reveals a focus on interdisciplinary approaches that integrate gender, environmental sustainability, and democratic practices in educational settings. Her work challenges conventional academic boundaries and emphasizes activist-oriented research.
Contact: teresa.elkinpostila@miun.se
Environmental Sustainability Education in the Anthropocene Collective 