The paper offers three examples of passionate immersion with strange objects and working with peculiar multispecies assemblages, such as the assemblage of a dove called Romeo and the technology to humidify a greenhouse called ‘Princess’, or the experiment of orienteering in forests for years, accounting for slips, scratches and tumbles as being taught by the forest — and prioritising these over the more commonplace educational narratives. The paper is structured in a nonconventional way in that most space is reserved for reports from these ongoing inquiries. The authors will each discuss how they situate themselves in relation to strangeness in research and how they proceed methodologically, locating their approaches as postqualitative. The questions each example addresses are: What is a strange object? How do we come across them? What do we begin to do/produce with them? The additive orientation described in the research stories is proposed to be an important constituent for new survival knowledge especially relevant for environmental education, addressing environmental problems as wicked, and demanding approaches that reach beyond methodological divides.

This paper explores the potential for a mode of postqualitative inquiry as generative knowledge-affect by looking towards the practice-led in-progress intermedial project, We Found A Body. The project functions as a form of urban play in a way that decentres and reconstructs participants so that their bodies, their technology and the environment they ‘play’ in become intertwined. I use a posthumanist queer reading of performativity (Barad, 2003, 2011) coupled with an affect-focused study of world-making (Harris & Jones, 2019) alongside a politics of affect to analyse how We Found a Body, in its potential for intraaction of human, technology, narrative and environment, can reconfigure and intertwine bodies and matter in a dynamic and embodied way. I argue that creative intermedial practice can produce counternarratives where new modes of belonging within space and time exist, and where extended ways of being human are at play (Myers, 2020). This is a space where the artwork acts as a performative call to action where iterative materialisation creates an intrabody of the human and more-than-human and opens up future methods within postqualitative inquiry.

This article discusses closed-loop systems, namely Cradle to Cradle and circular economy, in the context of sustainable education. These circular models, at least ideally, promise absolute decoupling of resource consumption from the economy. This article presents student assignments applying these models to Hennes & Mauritz, a clothing retail company, and insect food producer, Protix.

While the discussion of circular economy revolves around the economic benefits of closed-loop systems, it rarely addresses posthumanism. Posthumanism is related to postqualitative theory, inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that nature has become intertwined with technology and culture. In the cases discussed, combining both techno- and organic materials produces ‘monstrous hybrids’. It appears that fully circular solutions are rare as absolute decoupling is limited by thermodynamic (im)possibilities. This realization still has to be developed in environmental education. Within this posthumanist inquiry, the larger lesson from the case studies is the necessity of teaching about degrowth in production, consumption and corporate strategy. In pedagogical terms, this article aims to generate a more critical discussion within the environmental education community about how postqualitative inquiry can provide different and distinct perspectives from qualitative inquiry in the context of the circular economy.