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We address the aims of this Special Issue by exploring, critiquing, and responding constructively to the emergence and potential significance of new materialist thought in environmental education research and the broader theoretical landscape in which such research is situated. We offer some productive possibilities for advancing postparadigmatic materialist theorising in environmental education research by deploying concepts selected from Deleuze and Guattari's 'box of tools' (namely, 'machinic assemblage' and 'lines of flight'), supplemented by concepts associated with SF (science/speculative fiction)--namely 'cognitive estrangement' and 'object-orientated thought experiments'--to generate new lines of flight in material-semiotic environmental education research assemblages.

This essay brings together two lines of inquiry. Firstly, I revisit research on futures in education conducted during the 1980s and re-examine some of the propositions and principles that this research generated about "the future" as an object of inquiry in education. Secondly, I argue that the language of complexity invites us to rethink education in terms of emergence, and potentially destabilises the instrumentalist rationality that "programs" educational systems to privilege orderly and predictable processes culminating in stable output, a potentiality that may be undermined by a pervasive politics of complexity reduction. I conclude by drawing upon these two lines of inquiry to outline some strategies that might resist complexity reduction and catalyse emergence in Australian educational research as preconditions for inventing possible-impossible futures. (Contains 23 endnotes.)

In this essay I suggest some ways in which science teacher educators in Western neoliberal economies might facilitate learners' development of a critical literacy concerning the social and cultural changes signified by the concept of "biopolitics." I consider how such a biopolitically inflected critical literacy might find expression in a science teacher education curriculum and suggest a number of ways of materializing such a curriculum in specific literatures, media, procedures, and assessment tasks, with particular reference to the contributions of science fiction in popular media.

This essay performs a number of our collaborative responses to thinking (differently) with Deleuze in educational philosophy and curriculum inquiry. Deleuze "and Guattari" have inspired each of us in distinctive ways. Single-authored products include a series of narrative experiments or "rhizosemiotic play" in writing educational philosophy and theory, and a doctoral thesis enacting processes of "rhizo-imaginary" "picturing" towards immanent and emergent curriculum theorising. We have also collaborated in producing some co-authored works, which has motivated us to persevere with exploring further potentials for thinking-writing together. By exploring our genealogical and generative work with Deleuzean conceptual creations in mind, we seek to move readers beyond Deleuzo-Guattarian select metaphors (e.g. nomadism, rhizome, lines of flight, smooth and striated spaces). However, we distance ourselves from the types of "use" of Deleuze that merely appropriate metaphors that were never intended as metaphors. Rather, we prefer thinking with Deleuze to produce previously unthought questions, practices and knowledge. We intend these performances to give a sense of not only the generativity that Deleuzo-Guattarian reading-thinking has opened to us but also the affirmation such performances bestow for thinking (differently) in educational philosophy and curriculum inquiry. (Contains 7 notes and 14 exhibits.)

This essay juxtaposes concepts created by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari with worlds imagined by Ursula Le Guin in a performance of "rhizosemiotic play" that explores some possible ways of generating and sustaining what William Pinar calls "complicated conversation" within the regime of signs that constitutes an increasingly internationalized curriculum field. Deleuze and Guattari analyze thinking as flows or movements across space. They argue, for example, that every mode of intellectual inquiry needs to account for the "plane of immanence" upon which it operates--the preconceptual field presupposed by the concepts that inquiry creates. Curriculum inquiry currently operates on numerous nationally distinctive planes of immanence. I argue that the internationalization of curriculum studies should not presume a singular transnational plane of immanence but, rather, envisage a process performed by curriculum scholars with the capacities and competencies to "change planes"--to move between one plane of immanence and another and/or to transform their own planes. My essay is a "narrative experiment" that takes seriously Deleuze's argument that a work of philosophy should be, in part, a kind of science fiction, and also takes inspiration from Le Guin's science fictional stories of "changing planes" to generate productive and disruptive transnational agendas in curriculum inquiry.

This essay offers a rationale for deploying ecofeminist science fiction stories as object-oriented thought experiments in science and environmental education, with particular reference to developments in genetics and evolutionary biology, and their implications for human (and more-than-human) reproduction and kinship in the period following the determination of the double helical structure of DNA by scientists affiliated with Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory in 1953, and the impact of subsequent gene-centric discourses on the biological sciences and the wider culture. The utility and defensibility of this approach is exemplified by reference to two science fiction novels by the late Naomi Mitchison that foreground and anticipate implications of genetic sciences for matters of concern to ecofeminists, including reproductive rights and responsibilities, population control, human relations with the more-than-human, and problematizing gendered (and other) binaries in everyday speech and popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes Donna Haraway's Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene as a point of departure for troubling the largely uncontested acceptance of the Anthropocene as a matter of scientific "fact." Our approach is informed by our methodological commitments to understanding writing as a mode of inquiry and our preference for diffraction (rather than reflection) in conceptualizing practices of reading and critique. The article is therefore organized around questions that Haraway's text provokes, and our responses to them. We draw on various sources, including selected science fiction (SF) texts, to trouble practices of naming geological epochs and also to trouble some of the assumptions that Haraway makes in offering "Chthulucene" as an alternative name for our present epoch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]