This paper presents and discusses the conceptual propositions that have been an outcome of the recently concluded, Danish PhD project: Naturkraft – Promoting Sustainable Development through Non-Formal Educational Means (Kardyb, 2024). This PhD project has explored educational potentials in non-formal sustainability education, zooming in on a development initiative in the municipality of Ringkøbing-Skjern on the Danish Westcoast that materialized as the commercial nature-science centre, Naturkraft, in the summer of 2020. The Naturkraft-project was established with explicit intentions to promote sustainable ways of living and to encourage public reflexion on the human relationship with other-than-human life on Earth, with the immediate local surroundings as conceptually pivotal to both architectural, curatorial, and educational designs (Komitéen for etableringen af KRAFT, 2013).

The Naturkraft-case is interesting in context of recent years’ resounding calls to increased attention to sustainability across all education sectors, including in non-formal education (Reid, Dillon, Ardoin, & Ferreira, 2021). In an otherwise hesitant Danish political environment at the time (Jónsson et al., 2021), the Naturkraft project stood out as a bold and ambitious undertaking, thematizing the need for sustainable societal change and a renewed relationship to the environment, and building an imposing facility in a provincial Danish town to back up this message. Furthermore, in context of other research on non-formal sustainability education, the Naturkraft project stands out as offering a unique combination of non-formal science communication (e.g., Evans & Achiam, 2021), embodied and aesthetically focused forms of place-based education (e.g., Illeris, 2022; Lynch & Mannion, 2021), and socially critical pedagogical forms (e.g., Ellsworth, 2005).

The guiding research question for the PhD project was: How does Naturkraft enact non-formal sustainability education and how can we understand this enactment in light of challenges of the Anthropocene. From this point of departure, the PhD project has explored empirically how sustainability education is enacted in the Naturkraft project, angling in on this overarching question from four different analytical perspectives: What are the intentions, the contents and the guest- and host-roles through which Naturkraft enacts its distinct mode of sustainability education?

The investigation of the Naturkraft project draws on post-structuralist and post-humanist theory, with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004), Elizabeth Ellsworth (2005), Anna Tsing (2015, 2021), and Timothy Morton (2013, 2018) as the main inspirations. On this backdrop, the analyses draw a picture of the Naturkraft project as a composite educational entity that reflects a diverse and not necessarily compatible set of sustainability-oriented hopes and intentions through an equally multifaceted educational enactment of the Danish Westcoast. Moreover, the analyses shine light on how this educational configuration affords visitors experiences of confronting and momentarily suspending culturally instated subjectivities, while the analyses also point towards the tensions entailed in hosting such defamiliarizing encounters (Kardyb, 2024).

This paper presentation focuses on the work of theoretical development that spills from these analyses and concludes the dissertation. Here, drawing on the work of American anthropologist George Marcus (1995), I characterize the mode of sustainability education in the Naturkraft project in context of Anthropocene challenges as ‘eccentric education’. This mode of education draws its potency from contradictions and tensions internal to the specific educational assemblage and from the frictions caused in confrontations with external social conventions and expectations. It is a liminal form of education, constantly risking being devalued as either imposturous make-believe or pathological dysfunction. As such, eccentric education is precarious and dependent on social acceptance to exist. When in balance and when accepted, however, eccentric education offers ruptures to taken-for-granted views of what education and human social existence can mean. And precisely for that reason, the eccentric carries potential worth exploring in relation to sustainability education.

Methodologically, the guiding idea of enactments is developed in the project with inspiration from post-structuralist and post-humanist ideas of performativity and the assemblage (Butler, 1996; Deleuze & Guattari, 2004; Tsing, 2015). As such, enactments become the performative outcomes of the socioecological interplays and entanglements, that unfold in the Naturkraft-assemblage. What sustainability education means and involves in the Naturkaft project thus becomes an empirical question, requiring attentive research ‘from the middle’ (Mannion, 2019). In investigating the enactments of sustainability education in the Naturkraft project, I therefor conducted an ethnographic field study in and around the organisation and nature-science centre that make up the Naturkraft project. Between February 2020 and December 2021, I had two intensive periods of participant observation and interviewing with stakeholders, managers, employees, and guests to the park. I observed life in the organisation offices and, once the park opened to the public, I observed visitors’ use of the park and employees’ educational practices in the park, always insisting on also attending to non-human, material aspects and perspectives of the park life. Additionally, the analyses include a collection of documents from the Naturkraft project history. In developing the concept of eccentric education, the discussion draws on the work of anthropologist George Marcus (1995), whom describes eccentricity from an anthropological perspective, far removed from the context of sustainability education. To also get at the idea and implications of the Anthropocene in the conceptual development, the discussion relates to work performed in the Danish-American AURA project - Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (e.g., Tsing, Swanson, Gain, & Bubandt, 2017) - with added educational perspectives from recent discussions on the field of ESE (e.g., Jagodzinski, Paulsen, & Hawke, 2022; Malone, Truong, & Gray, 2017).

The idea of ‘eccentric education’, as it is developed in context of the PhD project Naturkraft – Promoting Sustainable Development through Non-Formal Educational Means (Kardyb, 2024), offers ways to conceptualise and comprehend forms of sustainability education that are in many respects peripheral to established and conventional ideas and enactments of education: From the perspective of individual participants, eccentric education involves a destabilizing, rather than affirmative, play on cultural norms and agreed-upon truths, thereby offering an educational space for social experimentation and, ultimately, change. In the case of Naturkraft, these effects emerge from participants’ embodied and narrative-based encounters with the immediate, yet heavily artificialized local natural environment on the Danish Westcoast. Simultaneously, from a societal perspective, eccentric educational enactments are uncanny reflexions of how we, as Danes or inhabitants of ‘modernized’ Global Northern culture (Tsing, 2021), impose our norms and world-views on our surroundings – socially as well as in ecomaterial registers. Or phrased in context of discussions about the Anthropocene: We inscribe our world-views on the planet. Eccentric forms of education expose the reluctance and difficulty with which we face up to the unintentional and inconvenient consequences of these, mostly everyday, acts. Furthermore, in context of sustainability education research, the idea of eccentric education might offer a way to conceptualize the ambitious yet liminal position of much sustainability education practice under currently dominating political world-views, and it could offer a conceptual frame in which to further explore and develop curiously critical approaches to sustainability education in the Anthropocene.

Butler, J. (1996). Gender as performance. In P. Osborne (Ed.), A critical sense : interviews with intellectuals. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic. Ellsworth, E. (2005). Places of Learning. Media, architecture, pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge. Evans, H. J., & Achiam, M. (2021). Sustainability in out-of-school science education: identifying the unique potentials. Environmental Education Research. doi:10.1080/13504622.2021.1893662 Illeris, H. (2022). Lying on the Ground: Aesthetic Learning Processes in the Anthropocene. In J. Jagodzinski, M. Paulsen, & S. M. Hawke (Eds.), Pedagogy in the Anthropocene : re-wilding education for a new earth. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Jagodzinski, J., Paulsen, M., & Hawke, S. M. (2022). Pedagogy in the Anthropocene : re-wilding education for a new earth. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Jónsson, Ó. P., Gudmunsson, B., Øyehaug, A. B., Didham, R. J., Wolff, L. A., Bengtsson, S. L., & Lysgaard, J. (2021). Mapping Education for Sustainability in the Nordic Countries (9289369531). Retrieved from Kardyb, D. F. S. (2024). Eccentric Enactments. Naturkraft as Non-Formal Sustainability Education in the Anthropocene. Aarhus University, Komitéen for etableringen af KRAFT. (2013). KRAFT. Explore the Powers of Nature. Lynch, J., & Mannion, G. (2021). Place-responsive Pedagogies in the Anthropocene: attuning with the more-than-human. Environmental Education Research, 27(6), 864-878. doi:10.1080/13504622.2020.1867710 Malone, K., Truong, S., & Gray, T. (2017). Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times (1st ed. 2017. ed.). Singapore: Springer Singapore. Mannion, G. (2019). Re-assembling environmental and sustainability education: orientations from new materialism. Environmental Education Research, 1-20. doi:10.1080/13504622.2018.1536926 Marcus, G. E. (1995). On eccentricity. In D. Battaglia (Ed.), Rhetorics of self-making (Reprint 2019 ed.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morton, T. (2018). Being Ecological. UK: Penguin Random House. Reid, A., Dillon, J., Ardoin, N., & Ferreira, J.-A. (2021). Scientists' warnings and the need to reimagine, recreate, and restore environmental education. Environmental Education Research, 27(6), 783-795. doi:10.1080/13504622.2021.1937577 Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Tsing, A. L. (2021). On Anthropogenic Landscapes (Unintentional Design in the Anthropocene). In N. N. Disnovation.org (Ed.), A Bestiary of the Anthropocene (pp. 201-213): Onomatopee. Tsing, A. L., Swanson, H., Gain, E., & Bubandt, N. (Eds.). (2017). Arts of living on a damaged planet. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.