The Outdoor Walk workshop led by Dr. Jamie Mcphie invited participants to disrupt the binaries of indoor-outdoor, nature-culture, and explore philosophical and creative ways of thinking beyond human-centered perspectives, using an interspecies frame to reimagine relationships among humans, nonhumans, and even objects. The words "outdoor" and "walk" are intentionally crossed out to signify an idea that outdoor education can and should be taken critically — it may happen both indoors and outdoors by means of walking-thinking, or thinking-writing etc. Drawing on posthumanist ideas, multispecies ethnography, speculative fiction, and practices like therolinguistics, Jamie encouraged participants to experiment with poem writing and storytelling that give voice to trees, buildings, mushrooms, coffee cups, or phones — asking what emerges, performs, and feels possible when we refuse to privilege the human.
After introducing some key conceptual frameworks, Jamie invited the participants for a walk to challenge the I-they and nature-culture dichotomies by exploring new possibilities for relating with the world. In one of the activities, the students were asked to play with language by transforming adjectives used to describe objects into statements written from the perspective of “I." It turned out "I" is metal, cold, bumpy, plastic...
Another task was to invent an animistic name for a thing that would begin with a verb — to signify an ongoing process — as a way of replacing the static, conventional noun usually used. For instance, Maja Musialowicz proposed a beautiful substitute for “pine,” reimagining it thoughtfully as “murmuring with needles.” Celine Okata's proposal for "window" was "sorting the light and wind", and Natalia Fernanda Múnera Parra sensed the stone's animistic name as "flow of the life witnessing".
Pine is "murmuring with needles."

Maja Musialowicz

Further, the participants could explore the idea of therolinguistics—a term coined by Ursula K. Le Guin to describe the attempt to understand how animals, plants, fungi, and even inanimate things “speak,” inspiring both scientific and artistic approaches to interspecies communication. The students had the opportunity to interview both living and nonliving beings inside and outside the university. They also experimented with creating “it-narratives,” imagining themselves in the position of a thing.
Here is one example of an it-narrative, written by workshop participant Irene Agudu:

The Roof Above, the Ground Below

You raised a toast at your housewarming party,
but left the ground you built upon unpraised.
You forget that the roof that holds the world above your roof
the ground beneath your floor is me.
Every brick, every beam rests on me.
I am the foundation.
It is ironic you throw a housewarming
while I endure global warming.
I house your entire human race,
yet I can no longer trace my natural places.
I have been defaced, my beauty displaced
by concrete with endless staircases,
competing for land spaces.
Airspaces are now cyberspaces,
vanished sacred places, memories erased.
Where is the mighty Mabira forest?
The massive Amazon forest,
the once gallant dense green foliage,
canopies that could stretch into your fantasies
now casualties.
Listen!
Do you hear the cries of the Caspian Sea?
It wells up with tears in each rising tide,
trails of agony are released by thunder.
Yet the rains no longer honor the fields,
once feeding all who depended on my yields.
You keep taking without thought,
as you ravage the ecosystems that underpin your existence.
You may build countless houses,
but there is only one Mother Earth.
Jamie’s workshop served as a powerful concluding point in the series of workshops for the intern students, creating space to disrupt conventional understandings of nature and outdoor education.
Dr Jamie Mcphie is associate professor of Environmental Humanities and Social Science, course leader for the MA Outdoor and Experiential Learning degree, and the research lead for the Human-Nature Relations theme as part of the Centre for National Parks and Protected areas (CNPPA) at the University of Cumbria, UK. He enjoys walking and talking as part of a radical mobile classroom, exploring all environments as a means to generate pragmatic discussions for social and environmental equity. As a former performance artist, he has combined his interests in art and eco-philosophy to influence a more creative approach to outdoor and environmental education, research, mental health and wellbeing, therapeutic landscapes and environmental aesthetics. He is interested in writing and reading about philosophies of immanence, speculative fiction, new science of the mind/externalism, feminist new materialisms, contemporary animism, post-qualitative inquiry, posthumanism and psychogeography.
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