This symposium is constructed as an integrated work involving all the “papers”, which focus on research about people and places that celebrate relations with the ocean, teaching inside and outside from weird positions, in threatened habitats, and via playing with our food. We will interweave the research narratives of the symposium “papers” in an interactive exploration of wicked in education and research. Going on a walking tour, we will breach walls and the “audience” will join us as spect-actors (Boal, 1993). We will go on a wicked tour of research and academic practices, engaging with the ideas of wicked while being wicked ourselves and inviting others to be wicked with us.

Rittel and Webber (1973) identified problems in social planning as wicked because they are complex and ambiguous; stakeholders do not agree on the exact nature of the problem which keeps changing as solutions are tried, and the enormity and interdisciplinary nature of the situation means that attempted “solutions” have serious consequences as well. This concept has been used extensively in economics, environment and politics, and strategies to tackle these problems (Roberts, 2000) are often bound to problematic concepts including authority (experts), and competition (Innes & Booher, 2016). But life is wicked; are not these characteristics definitive for life? Furthermore, a key understanding of this symposium is that when individuals and societies embody attributes which those in power consider ambiguous and uncontrollable such as living in tune with changing seasons, dynamic ecosystems and celebrating animism, they have almost always threatened ruling power. We seek to use wickedness as transformation for sustainability of humane places and ways of learning and being.

We need to think about the multidimensionality and interrelatedness of the research process, asking what the process builds on (other scholars; our experiences, concepts, and beliefs; trust in colleagues to share ideas; openness to new ideas), what does it exclude (other voices, languages, concepts, life worlds) and how can the difference be productive and generative for our academic and activist work. However, we are embedded and grew up within these same systems we critique. Metrics of impact and university performance regulations pressure us to gloss over cracks to present ourselves as “good” researchers who serve up crack-free knowledge.  Embracing creative practices (Harris, Hunter, & Hall, 2015; Onsès, 2015), troubles the concepts of sustainability and education, as well as research practices (Nolan, 2014). Understanding how well our own espoused theories are manifest in practice requires exploration of our internal adoption of epistemological perspectives or paradigms (Guba & Lincoln, 2008). Transparency (Robertson, Martin & Singer, 2003) requires a clear understanding of external pressures that create powerful and controlling but often invisible norms such as “faculty productivity” (Slaughter, 2001).

Based on both Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and Rancière (1991) postulate of equal intelligence, Boal’s aesthetic space embraces solidarity. We arein sync with the diverse economies approach of Gibson-Graham (2008), namely a “performative ontological project” designed not only to co-produce knowledge, but also to actively contribute to “novel economic performances” and to possible alternative worlds, “in which we enact and construct rather than resist (or succumb to) economic realities” (p. 615). “You don’t think your way into a different way of acting; you act your way into a different way of thinking’” (quoted in Bookchin et al, 2013, p.4).

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