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Is outdoor and environmental education (in higher education) normal, weird, queering or…? Bagurrk, binaries and ‘saving the world’…or at least ‘making a difference’?

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Abstract

As backlash politics and practices of patriarchal, white, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic reproduction continue to keep certain people ‘in their place’, including feminists working for gender equity/women’s liberation and those that queer gender binaries and other categories in society, (virtual) social fields such as Outdoor and Environmental Education (OEE), including in Higher Education, are yet to adequately address gender equity. With a somewhat smaller target than saving the world, yet big idea remit—‘gender equity’ in/through OEE in HE (OEEiHE), interconnected to and reflective of ‘our’ current dilemmas and pandemic, I use a conceptual yarn to explore and pose a number of theoretical and issue-based challenges to OEE, beyond and within HE. Drawing on scholars in and outside the field I suggest that in order to address complex socio-ecological issues, this field needs to break its own doxa, valuing such destruction, so that previously marginalised and emerging possibilities can be enabled. Only then will OEE demonstrate an ability to embody diversity, inclusion and an ecology that is at the same time sustainable AND changing, making a difference that really counts.

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Notes

  1. The acronym WEIRD was introduced by Henrich, Heine & Noranzayan (2010). The weirdest people in the world? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2–3), 61–83 to capture a Western-scientific dominant group I suggest characterises the OEE field. I have including ‘PW’ to make explicit the otherwise hidden gendered, raced and colonizing bias of patriarchal, or male-dominated, colonizing, and in this instance white societies arguably characteristic but unnamed in the acronym WEIRD.

  2. A playful, small and purposeful challenging practice to illustrate queering as a practice- a concept introduced in the latter half of this essay. This is a challenge to normative APA practices that also acts to legitimize a useful communicative strategy within word limit constraints.

  3. Here I am using the term ‘conceptual yarn’ to indicate an anti-normative genre that acknowledge First Nations ‘yarning’ as a form of dialogue with layers of purpose and also borrowing from a colloquial phrase in Australia, of ‘having a yarn’ to signify a chat, a dialogue imbued with a sense of relationship.

  4. For example the recent March4Justice in Australia and calls for accountability in the nation’s parliamentary workplace relating to sexism, misogyny, allegations of rape and senior official cover-ups.

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lisahunter Is outdoor and environmental education (in higher education) normal, weird, queering or…? Bagurrk, binaries and ‘saving the world’…or at least ‘making a difference’?. Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education 24, 259–278 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42322-021-00085-8

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