This symposium is an open-ended, experimental continuation of the work of the REAL Research Collective (RRC). RRC is an international grouping of researchers from (so far) Europe, southern Africa and north America. RRC was inaugurated in 2014 at ECER in Porto, Portugal for the purpose of exploring the Real in its material, symbolic, phenomenological, discursive, magic, religious, embodied , etc., presence in the world and how dealing or not dealing with this, the Real, affects research and researchers in education and sustainable development. The ambition of the symposium is to bring together presenting and non-presenting ESE researchers from across the field with a special interest in questions related to different notions of materialism and realism. It aims to build upon the discussions of the double symposium “ESE between discourse and Materiality” held at ECER in 2015 and envisions to explore how conceptions of materialism and realism are influencing ESE research and practice.  The overall focus of the symposium will be on how emerging traumatic conceptions of the real, as they can be found in among others accelerationism (Mackay & Avanessian, 2014), speculative realism (Meillasoux, 2007; Bryant, 2013), transcendental nihilism (Brassier, 2007), ethics (Baumann 1995) may contribute to a reconception of the relationship between education and environment. 

The selection of presenters and the theoretical perspectives put forward as part of the symposium is envisioned to be eclectic and unorthodox as it is the ambition to engage in an unhampered exploration of potentialities for rethinking and realigning research on and practices related to ESE. Unorthodoxy and eclecticism as guiding principles of the symposium are envisioned to contribute to an engagement of the presenters with the dogmatic and thereby inhibitive effects of axiomatic approaches to understand the nature of education and meaning making. Hence, the symposium aims at engaging with the ESD/ESE research field at large, that is its characteristic multidisciplinary and internal socio-historic diversity, in order to probe where the blind spots and potential new openings and challenges exist. 

Against this background, the papers to be presented share a keen interest in how current ESE research and practice is limited, facilitated, catalyzed by the fickle questions related to notions of the Real. Concretely the papers raise questions such as: How do questions of climate change and environmental denialism influence practices and research and how we as a research field deal with concepts of denialism and the multifaceted explanations underlying denial of what many considers Real tangible changes to our environment and climate?  How do non-human actants (including animals, plant, soil, land as well as machines and tools) form specific ESE practices in southern Africa? How do we as individual researchers deal with the often contractionary, moral and other, demands and desires embedded in life as an ESE-researcher, and what this could mean for a post-humanist understanding of ESE policy?

Bauman, Zygmunt (1995) Postmodern Etik. Göteborg: Daidalos. Brassier, Ray (2007) Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Bryant, Levi (2013) “Politics and Speculative Realism”. Speculations IV. New York: Punctum Books. Mackay Robin & Armen Avanessian (2014) The Accelerationist Reader. Merve. Meillassoux, Quentin (2007) After Finitude. Continuum.