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Waste Stories
Summary
This presentation describes how speculative assemblage methods were used in the Waste Stories project to build distributed learning networks connecting students in Scotland to explore marine litter as a sustainability challenge. Animated waste 'imaginaries' created by further education students revealed key dynamics in emergent understandings of marine litter's local and global dimensions, demonstrating how content-focused networked learning can illuminate complex environmental problems.
This presentation demonstrates how speculative assemblage methods can be put into both research and pedagogical practice to build connections between networked learning and learning for sustainability. We give a rationale for a focus on waste, and marine litter in particular, as an important sustainability and environmental challenge that can be productively explored through learning networks. We then describe the framework that underpins the Waste Stories project, which combines speculative and assemblage methods to create distributed learning networks aimed at reconfiguring relationships of waste and value. We then describe an example of a networked assemblage of waste imaginaries generated by students in a Further Education context in Scotland. These animated imaginaries reveal important dynamics characterising emergent understandings of marine litter in the local and global environment. They also illustrate how retaining a focus on content and context can help networked approaches to learning avoid overly focusing on connectedness.