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Whereas many indigenous and non-western cultures see plants and humans as connected, western worldviews tend to disregard plants as material commodities. Plant non-thinking of this kind is increasingly being challenged in response to the environmental threats arising from human exceptionalism. This essay investigates garden narratives as a form of more-than-human life writing which depicts plant–human relations as mutually transformative and reciprocal. I argue that garden narratives pioneer such a rethinking as a win-win scenario. The positive developments garden writers document are consistent with a concept put forward in environmental psychology: transilience. Making reference to five recent western garden narratives I show how plant encounters can help us move towards an emerging environmental culture which emphasises more-than-human embeddedness and embraces symbiotic over competitive relations.

Warlpiri women, as with other groups across Indigenous Australia, sing to sustain and nurture their relationships with Country and jukurrpa (dreamings). For the custodians of these singing traditions, spiritual agency and power are consigned to songs and their singers, and performances are centred around nurturing relational links between people with Country and to other participants. Within contemporary contexts, in which Warlpiri singers are finding fewer opportunities to perform and pass on songs, new performance spaces are being created to continue to carry forward the significant cultural work of maintaining social and spiritual order through song. In this article we consider a number of performance instances of Warlpiri women's yawulyu (ceremonial songs) and discuss the inter—group dynamics and negotiations which are central to these events. We explore the ways in which Warlpiri women are continuing the cultural work of maintaining the relational aspects central to yawulyu through these performances despite shifting purposes and performance contexts. We illustrate through examples from contemporary events, how the dynamics of the particular performance instances involving ceremonial songs, dances, and other activities, direct the ways in which participants assert and reshape their intimate links to Country and to broader social networks of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing pervasiveness of digital technologies has exposed the entanglements of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with its surrounding context, from the immediate vicinity of interfaces to global issues. While often providing solutions to societal issues, interactive technologies also many times contribute to them. They impact and are impacted by the world, in a process of continuous mutual influence and co-constitution that raises important implications not only to user experience, effectiveness and efficiency, but also to ethics, social responsibility and environmental health. In this article, I draw on the new materialism notion of intra-action to propose a conceptual shift to a relational approach for HCI, which I refer to as Human-Computer Intra-Action (HCIA), capable of capturing from the outset the inherent relationships with the world that inform the design of interactive technology. To that end, I propose the notion of relationalities to reflect the synergies and antagonisms around those relationships, and discuss emerging notions of spatiality and temporality by considering the increasing hybridity of socio-technical engagements both in space (local vs. remote) and in time (immediate vs. stretched). Based on that, I propose a preliminary method for mapping intra-actions associated to interactive technologies, envisaged as a starting point to a relational take on their design process.

This response engages archipelagic thinking and etak/moving islands theories to rhetorically analyze Robert Smithson’s Floating Island (2005) in relation to other poetic and experiential artifacts. It considers how Indigenous cartographies and oceanic concepts maintain connections, movements, and relationalities that traverse waterways from peoples and places of Manna-hata and Oceania alike.

This contribution takes as point of departure the particular response-ability allowed by the contemporary choreographic performance works of settler (Canadian) visual artist Karen Ginger Guttman, in which the visitor-beholder's body becomes involved in the choreographic 'dance'. These site-situated works echo the Rietveld's works, but Guttman's site performances take place in a residential environment, they specifically challenge guest-host-site 'íntra-actions' as coined by Karen Barad and reveal constraints that occur in the choreographic 'dance' of continuously changing relationalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue analyses how forced migrants' and non-citizens' kinning and de-kinning practices and their struggles of 'doing family' constitute navigations of citizenship. Forced migrants and non-citizens need to manoeuvre an intersecting net of different bureaucratic, political and legal, but also kin-related social and cultural regimes. In their encounters with state authorities, bureaucrats, and humanitarian workers, and through the material cultures these engender, forced migrants and non-citizens are marked and categorised – often with wide-ranging consequences for themselves and their significant others. This Special Issue traces how legal and bureaucratic inscriptions derive from, but also shape forced migrants' and non-citizens' familial status and intimate ties to fictive, legal or consanguineal kin. Centring on migration and displacement to and in Europe and the Middle East, we combine analytical debates from anthropology, gender, migration and citizenship studies. Collectively, this Special Issue suggests that the nation-state and its migration regime are experienced in relational ways, and impact on migrants' ability to care for and be in relation with significant others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional "endangered" approaches in linguistics tend to impose Western epistemologies of languages on marginalized Indigenous language communities such as the Ryukyus. Instead, by using a collaborative approach, we ask for a change of approach from research on the Ryukyus to research with/for the Ryukyus. This article is a reflective study of collaboration in particular cases. We aim to address the issues of relationality between communities and researchers—how can communities initiate work with like-minded linguists to suit their own needs? Thus, we respond to this question to open a conversation on why insider/outsider collaboration is essential. Using our experiences of carrying out our research in different parts of the Ryukyus reflectively, we aim to provide a practical guide for collaboration that is necessary for both the good of communities and the field of linguistics. Through continuous cooperation and collaboration, we can engage in active decolonization of the field of linguistics and language documentation. We suggest that decolonization cannot be achieved without collaborative and ethical research practices based on Indigenous epistemologies. We conclude the paper with ideas of research approaches based on Ryukyuan Indigenous epistemologies, which require a transformation from individual approaches to community-based-relational approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional “endangered” approaches in linguistics tend to impose Western epistemologies of languages on marginalized Indigenous language communities such as the Ryukyus. Instead, by using a collaborative approach, we ask for a change of approach from research on the Ryukyus to research with/for the Ryukyus. This article is a reflective study of collaboration in particular cases. We aim to address the issues of relationality between communities and researchers—how can communities initiate work with like-minded linguists to suit their own needs? Thus, we respond to this question to open a conversation on why insider/outsider collaboration is essential. Using our experiences of carrying out our research in different parts of the Ryukyus reflectively, we aim to provide a practical guide for collaboration that is necessary for both the good of communities and the field of linguistics. Through continuous cooperation and collaboration, we can engage in active decolonization of the field of linguistics and language documentation. We suggest that decolonization cannot be achieved without collaborative and ethical research practices based on Indigenous epistemologies. We conclude the paper with ideas of research approaches based on Ryukyuan Indigenous epistemologies, which require a transformation from individual approaches to community-based-relational approaches.

The theme of the 2018 Oceania Comparative and International Society (OCIES) conference held at Victoria University of Wellington, in Wellington, New Zealand aimed to explore, celebrate, and deepen Oceanic relationalities. This special issue of the International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives responds to this call for scholarship to examine how Comparative and International Education (CIE) can be repositioned around the notion of relationality to contribute theoretically, practically, and spiritually to education at global, regional, national, and community levels. In this Special Edition, we celebrate the work of seven new and emerging researchers from OCIES. This paper introduces us as a community of scholars, connected geographically by sea, yet it is our shared commitment to relationality that has enabled us to further the scholarship of CIE within our region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the communicative and educational practices performed by female Colombian scientists self-recognized as lesbians. The objective of this study was twofold. Firstly, it seeks to understand the ways in which non-heteronormative sexualities have the potential to re-shape the production/circulation of expert knowledge; especially that which favors androcentric values. Secondly, it seeks to problematize and re-dimension the marginal place of these communicative and educational practices in relation to the production of expert knowledge. Methodologically, the study is based on an ethnographic approach to the edu-communicative practices of eight lesbian scientists in Colombia. Theoretically, it takes the feminist discussions that have studied matters of care in techno-science as a reference point for the analysis.

Life history methods are gaining popularity in Development research, linked to attempts to capture narratives marginalised by dominant accounts of Development. In this paper, we reflect on using life history methods with NGO activists in India. We explore how this approach led us to develop particular understandings of the participants as ‘vulnerable’, and the implications of this for the research process and the knowledges it produced. We explore how activists’ individual biographies were interwoven with institutional narratives, complicating but also enriching our understanding of activists’ experiences of Development. Secondly, we analyse the relationality of our subjects’ vulnerability and our own positionality as global North Development scholars. We reflect on how our engagement with Development actors we consider as vulnerable takes place through and against the relational histories and presents that brought us together. We explore the implications of this for the ways the research created both discursive and physical spaces for meeting and talking, and what this means for our approach to vulnerability. This requires an uncomfortable acknowledgement that Development research may reproduce vulnerabilities, even as it seeks to challenge them. The paper contributes to broader theorising of vulnerability, recognising vulnerability as embedded in the relationalities of the research moment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the symposium regarding the concept of food security (FS). Topics discussed include the food insecurity midst increasing global populations which drives food production at rapid rate, the reason for flourishing of local and alternative food networks (AFNs) worldwide which is food security, and 2007-2008 food crisis. Also mentioned are food discourse, food provisioning, and food sovereignty.

This article analyzes the communicative and educational practices performed by female Colombian scientists self-recognized as lesbians. The objective of this study was twofold. Firstly, it seeks to understand the ways in which non-heteronormative sexualities have the potential to re-shape the production/circulation of expert knowledge; especially that which favors andro-centric values. Secondly, it seeks to problematize and re-dimension the marginal place of these communicative and educational practices in relation to the production of expert knowledge. Methodologically, the study is based on an ethnographic approach to the edu-communicative practices of eight lesbian scientists in Colombia. Theoretically, it takes the feminist discussions that have studied matters of care in techno-science as a reference point for the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Social participation in later life has been studied as part of discourses around ‘active ageing’ but the promotion of participation in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods meets with particular challenges. In this paper I argue that in order to effectively promote social participation in later life researchers and practitioners require an understanding of life-long relational practices which are embedded in social norms and places as they intersect with identities such as gender, class and age. The intersectional life course analysis traces complex relationalities between people and place across the life course of two women living in disadvantaged urban areas. It shows the effects of societal and structural changes on individuals’ opportunities for social participation as well as demonstrating how age-related relational practices may lead to spatial segregation of older people in society. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article queries the pervasiveness of binary thinking in contemporary identity studies. Reviewing the genealogy of binary alterity beginning with the synergies between the European Enlightenment and colonialism, I note the binary logics that remained embedded within the apparently disparate schools of structuralist and poststructuralist theory. Even the social constructionism of post-colonial scholarship became transmuted through a celebration of radical relativism into a legitimation of continued racialised or culturalised inequalities. To counter this position, I build on but also critique efforts to theorisations of relationalities. A reconstituted identity studies requires the theorisation of unequal globe-spanning imperial power and its contestations through domains of mutual practice. If we set aside an assumption of binaries of difference, such domains of relationship can be found as people meet in terms of their commonalities of experience and aspirations for equality, justice and respect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Advance care planning is premised on concepts of individual autonomy and self-determination. The standardisation of this individualist approach to decision-making erases the diverse cultural sensibilities and vocabularies that shape trajectories of care. In attempting to redress this exclusion, this paper foregrounds previously overlooked vernaculars and practices for understanding how care for the aged and those approaching the end of life is understood and enacted in Australia's culturally diverse society. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and participant-observation with ageing Chinese migrants and their families in Adelaide, South Australia, it examines the multiple enactments of 'face' in end-of-life care. In so doing, the paper extends Goffman's theorisation of 'face', opening up the 'front' of the bounded individual to reveal how persons are mutually implicated in relational contexts. Attending to cultural contours of face and their intersections with filial piety, this paper unsettles the imperative of self-determination in advance care planning and reveals how intergenerational shifts from older to younger generations can reorient care at the end of life. • Face provides a critical context for understanding aged and end-of-life care in Chinese families. • Face and filial piety are enacted differently in different contexts. • Diverse cultural vocabularies and practices are needed in care settings. • Care at the end-of-life is always relational and nuanced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]