Forest school research has largely been conducted within well-established qualitative traditions that centre the human experience of the practice. The starting point for this seminar is that approach, however valuable, often leaves a conceptual separation between the humans present and the forest itself. In this talk Dr Joanna Hume explores what may be noticed when that separation is attended to. Drawing on new materialist and posthuman theory, including Barad's (2007) agential realism, Haraway's (2016) sympoiesis, and Tsing's (2015) arts of noticing, she proposes a paradigm that grants the forest-place itself equal research significance to the humans within it.

Presenting ethnographic forest school data, she explores what is gained and what is genuinely difficult about moving beyond human-centred research frameworks, including non-linear time and place-memory, intra-action, and the agency of trees, mud, and materials. She introduces some embodied research methods that she developed for this work, including embroidered GPS maps, and shares what she defines as the "three Fs of Forest School" to show how the elements that make up forest school may combine into something more than the sum of its parts.

The talk is based on Joanna Hume’s latest book ‘Theorising the Quiet Power of Forest School: A Posthuman Framing of Regular, Repeated, Unstructured Practice in Nature’ (Routledge, 2026).

References

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Illustrated edition). Duke University Press.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble (Experimental Futures): Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Illustrated edition). Duke University Press Books.

Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press

Meet the speaker

Joanna Hume is an Assistant Professor at Northumbria University, where her research explores early childhood and outdoor education through posthumanist and more-than-human qualitative methodologies. Her work develops new theoretical and methodological approaches to forest school ethnography, engaging with new materialist philosophy to reconsider what counts as evidence in outdoor learning research

The seminar will take place on Microsoft Teams. 

Meeting ID: 382 660 635 892 63

Passcode: Tt2z9qw2