In Laikipia North in Kenya, young men from a pastoralist community earn their daily bread through digging sand out of dry riverbeds and loading it on to large lorries. The vehicles ferry the sand southwards to big cities, where it becomes an element in the production of concrete used in the booming Kenyan building and construction industry. The young men loading sand are part of processes, which transform materials and landscape as well as their own bodies, and which interact with ideas and practices of various environmental educational activities implemented in the area. With point of departure in an empirical exploration of these complex entanglements, in this presentation I discuss how phenomenological and new (or renewed, cf. Coole & Frost 2010:4) materialist perspectives may contribute to our understanding of the relationships between embodied experiences, environmental materials, and educational ideas and practices. The presentation will consist of two parts. First, drawing on the late work of Merleau-Ponty (1968), Ingold (2000, 2011), and Coole & Frost (2010), I discuss how phenomenological and new materialist lines of thought (may) inspire each other theoretically. Second, based on an analytical focus on transitions, movements and processes of bodies, materials and landscapes, I explore how the theoretical work discussed may contribute to empirically grounded analysis of environmental education activities and their consequences. Through this discussion, I aim to shed light on how discursive and practical aspects of environmental education are brought into interaction with matter. The presentation is based on an ethnographic study of relations between young people’s education experiences and environmental agency, carried out in Kenya in 2012 and 2014 (six months of field work).

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