This meta-analysis of multiple projects explores the processes of non-formal learning experienced by researchers, activists and artists working on community and sustainable development on the Azores islands. Their projects challenge apolitical explanations for “over-fishing” and poverty, as well as seek disruption of gender, class and other oppressive power dynamics. Through individual reflexion and spirited conversations around overlapping practices and projects, the authors unravel the learning processes they underwent while engaged in these projects. The context of learnings include a continuing 6+ year research program focused on fishing communities, related education and outreach activities; multiple research and outreach activities by UMAR-Açores (Association for Equality and Women's Rights, Azores); and documentary film making with women fishers.  Starting from different locations of meaning-making, the researchers, activists and artists explore their places of power, and processes of normalizing and problematizing practices. They analysis their experiences from Mezirow´s ideas about transformative learning (1996) but seek further perplexity (Augosto Boal, 1995), of their entangled conditions by following the “new feminism materialism” (Barad, 2007) sensible to the “cuts” produced by the acts of observing and self-conscious of the ways our presence include and exclude processes from our considerations. Their reflective practices motivated by Dewey (1938) and Schön (1983) expanded toward new transversal and reflective practices that intersect processes of social and scientific change (Taylor, 2012).  The authors present alternatives to the dualisms of expert /non-expert, teacher/learner norms, and offer a critique of international top-down goals, targets and concepts of sustainable development. As long-term residents on the islands (from 6 to 20+ years), they draw from broad experiences in order to suggest that strengthening environmentally-just and present-day realities has transformative power for “sustainable” future generations of people and other life connected to these volcanic islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

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