Staying with (the middle/the trouble/the insect)

In environmental education, the philosophies of new materialism and posthumanism are being used to address the current ecological crisis brought about from unchecked colonialism and anthropocentrism (Clarke & Mcphie, Reference Clarke and Mcphie2020; Hohti & MacLure, Reference Hohti and MacLure2022; Jukes & Reeves, Reference Jukes and Reeves2020). Several pedagogies have been proposed as ways we can (re)think our relationship with and the agency of more-than-humans others, such as common worlds (Pacini-Ketchabaw et al. Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, Zarabadi, Ringrose, Pacini-Ket and Blaise2015; Taylor, Reference Taylor2017), place-responsive (Jukes & Reeves, Reference Jukes and Reeves2020) and assemblage pedagogies (Mannion, Reference Mannion2020). These pedagogies, often examined through post-qualitative research styles, engage with the agency of a situated, material ecology. MacLure’s approach to post-qualitative research (Reference MacLure2013) is particularly influential in how I attempt to foreground materiality and engage with unstable, ever-shifting data assemblages that decenter humans as the primary locus of concern. In this materialisation of post-qualitative research, the indeterminacy or voids of data are treated not as weaknesses that require an asterisk when they are reported, but as surprises that defy presupposition of what we think may be the results of a study. In working with more-than-human others, this dynamic theoretical assemblage allows for messy interactions in which there isn’t always a “correct” approach under the complex entanglements we (inclusive of human and more-than-humansFootnote ¹) find ourselves in. However, this is where I employ a critical perspective and take up the call from Rautio (Reference Rautio2013) “to find practices worthy of cultivation” (p. 394) in entangling with the more-than-humans in my life.

The relationship between humans and insects is multifaceted and ever-changing (Duffus et al., Reference Duffus, Christie and Morimoto2021). Humans can interact with insects as a food source or a pest, a thing of beauty or a pollinator for crops, or (most likely) some combination thereof — the dynamic between humans and insects cannot be generalised and summarised into neat categories in light of the varied, often species-specific reactions between humans and insects. Recognising these varied entanglements of our lives is especially crucial in the age of the Anthropocene, which implicates human exceptionalism, capitalism and extractivism — cultivated by a relatively small proportion of people that will not experience its most disastrous effects — in radically altering the environment (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016; Lewis & Maslin, Reference Lewis and Maslin2015; Liboiron, Reference Liboiron2021; Pacini-Ketchabaw et al., Reference Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, Zarabadi, Ringrose, Pacini-Ket and Blaise2015). Insects are affected by the Anthropocene, with reports of decreasing numbers of insects (Sánchez-Bayo & Wyckhuys, Reference Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys2021; Wagner, Reference Wagner2020) and species extinctions (Finn et al., Reference Finn, Grattarola and Pincheira-Donoso2023) that could have devastating effects on the lives of multiple species (Raven & Wagner, Reference Raven and Wagner2021). Environmental education is poised to address this by teaching students an ethic of care in a multispecies world, or as defined by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (Reference Puig de la Bellacasa2017), the “thick, impure, involvement in a world where the question of how to care needs to be posed” (p. 6). The crises of the Anthropocene will not be resolved by human removal. An ethic of care encourages humans to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway, Reference Haraway2016, p. 4) and take responsive action, even when it is imperfect. This ethic relies on engaging with boundaries, or the differentiating process through which humans and more-than-human others are constituted.

The new materialist conceptualisation of more-than-human agency provides space for queering multispecies boundaries without leaning too heavily on anthropomorphism (not that anthropomorphism should be wholly avoided or endorsed — for a more nuanced discussion on its utility, see Bennett, Reference Bennett2010, pp. 98–100). Agency is not something innate in itself, but a performance that happens relationally (Barad, Reference Barad2007; Jukes & Reeves, Reference Jukes and Reeves2020; Rautio, Reference Rautio2013; Tynan, Reference Tynan2021). This highlights the capacity of more-than-humans, such as plants, animals, dust, or other things, to be active participants in worldbuilding practices, even if they do not do so through any recognised human linguistic tradition. Following this idea, humans are no longer the sole taxonomists of boundaries between themselves and more-than-human others, as those others also have a say in how their boundary is constituted.

Attending to more-than-human refusal

An ethic of care can be exercised through respecting the refusals of the more-than-human others in our lives. Boundaries are emergent through intra-actions between humans and more-than-humans and refuse simple biological classification as being a result of either nature or nurture, but by a fusion of both (Tuana, Reference Tuana1983). Refusal is a way for more-than-humans to performatively enact boundaries, it “is not just a no, it is a performance of that no, and thus an artistic form” (Tuck & Yang, Reference Tuck and Yang2014, p. 814). This refusal is a way more-than-humans express agency in how they are constituted. For example, some environmental education programs might foster interest in animals by allowing participants to get as close as possible to them, through petting zoos or encountering them in their “natural” habitats. Some species and individual animals have an appropriate temperament for this kind of activity and seek out, or are receptive to, intra-actions with humans, while others aren’t suited for these close encounters. Applying an ethic of care, in this example, could be critically examining what humans hope to gain or understand through these intra-actions and if there are alternate ways to achieve this understanding. Given that one way human dominion over nature can be asserted is by (un)intentionally ignoring more-than-human boundaries, how does this desire for (human) closeness affect how we approach more-than-human entanglements? What kind of environmental education is made possible by the productive constraints of respecting more-than-human boundaries? How can we practice being attentive (van Dooren et al., Reference van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster2016) to the intra-actions of more-than-humans when they are not physically present, are only speculated to be present, or are present through artifacts?

This article sprang from a chance encounter with a leafcutter bee (Megachile spp.)Footnote ² nest and our intra-actions took the form of a rhizomatic assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987), with its lack of a beginning or end and its unpredictable expansion through lines of flight. In this article, I will describe the post-qualitative approach I took to working with more-than-human agency and the relational ethics of care involved in getting close with more-than humans. I will discuss how data happened when the nest and I intra-acted — or when I made time to be attentive to the nest and the nest expressed its agency with me. Data was not limited temporally or spatially and included dreaming-with and crafting-with this nest. Performing a rhizoanalysis was appropriate for this data because of its non-linear, non-representational and non-hierarchical nature. The capacity of rhizoanalysis to disrupt hierarchies is crucial to this project, as my goal is to disturb the ideas of human dominion over nature and hyperindividualism by queering the boundary (Barad, Reference Barad2011) between myself and the leafcutter bee(’s nest).

The practices of attentiveness and restraint I am cultivating rely on a foundation of agency, of taking seriously the ways in which intra-actions constitute the boundaries between humans and more-than-humans. In my work with the leaf-cutter bee nest, I wanted to think with performativity theory (Butler, Reference Butler2009) about how precarity and performativity are intertwined in our intra-actions with more-than-humans.Footnote ³ At the time, I thought this may be a salient theoretical choice because of the precarious position solitary bees occupy due to environmentally extractive human practices (Kline & Joshi, Reference Kline and Joshi2020; Russo et al., Reference Russo, de Keyzer, Harmon-Threatt, LeCroy and MacIvor2021). I struggled with the human-centeredness of Butler’s iteration of this theoretical perspective until I stumbled across Karen Barad’s article, “Nature’s Queer Performativity” (Reference Barad2011), which takes a posthuman twist on performativity. Barad (Reference Barad2011) calls into question the way boundaries materialise through performativity, while de-centering humans:

Queering the boundaries between human and more-than-human, in my case, means I, as a human, am not attempting to assimilate into the leafcutter bee’s (nest’s) world or homogenise our experiences. It is the immanent process through which relationality and ethical obligations to these “queer critters” (Barad, Reference Barad2011, p. 126) are made apparent. These boundaries may be multiple and indeterminate because they can form and re-form during each intra-action. Moreover, boundaries can form as a result of more-than-human performance of refusal. Working in multispecies assemblages requires tools such as “the art of attentiveness” (van Dooren et al., Reference van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster2016, p.17) that involve not just noticing that a boundary has formed, but also responding to it.

Bianco (Reference Bianco2017) also grapples with this boundary blurring in their becoming-honeybee, stating that denying the reality of human-bee relations, “is to negate the anthropocentric power structure of humyn [sic] consciousness” (p. 35). Queering the boundary between myself and the bee nest makes possible a different way of experiencing and practicing ethical response-abilities. As Lloro-Bidart (Reference Lloro-Bidart2018) discusses, these affective relations are a way of extending a nuanced more-than-human ethics, exemplified in my case by refusing to exert my power as a human to categorise the leafcutter bee as wholly good (because of its pollination), nor bad (because of its destruction of plant leaves).

A method for mapping the contours of these boundaries is by getting close to our more-than-human collaborators. Closeness can be achieved through multiple means — affective and embodied alike. In an embodied, material sense, this closeness can be seen in physically approaching something or being approached by something, getting a magnified view of something, or touching another. I want to take a moment to focus on touch, since it is a common tool used in environmental education for children to develop a sense of closeness to animals, whether it’s an aquarium touch pool (Biasetti et al., Reference Biasetti, Florio, Gili and De Mori2020) or a class pet (Tammi & Hohti, Reference Tammi and Hohti2020). In the case of the class pets, Tammi and Hohti engage with the ethics of touch and how an event in which a gerbil asserts its boundary through biting can be an opportunity for learning our abilities to respond to such assertions. An unexpected negative experience has the potential to educate children about the limits of how close they can get and how to stay attentive to the behaviours of more-than-humans. In a highly entangled network of competing needs and desires, there is no guidebook for perfect ethical action. The limits of closeness are often unknown until they are transgressed. Therefore, it is vital to develop a sensibility for responding to the noninnocent actions of more-than-humans.

This article addresses closeness and refusal as ethical considerations for environmental education. In intra-acting with the nest, it expressed overwhelming affect with me that I was not permitted to transgress the nest’s boundaries to peek inside. This limit of how close we could get to each other made possible different routes of multiplicity. The leafcutter bee nest was not just an amalgamation of bougainvillea leaves stuck together — it was always multiple, becoming my model of the nest and my speculative narratives about it as part of the nest-assemblage. This was enabled by the nest unexpectedly asserting its boundary with me through its affective refusal of my entry into the nest. Rather than seeing limited proximity as prohibitive, environmental education can use this productive constraint to know-with more-than-human others in a way that disrupts the separation of nature and culture. When faced with refusal, encouraging students to seek closeness to multispecies networks in different ways — through arts-based explorations, embodiment, or speculative narrations — can provide them with an open-ended means for exploring how to engage in an ethics of care with more-than-human others.

Care-fully attending to more-than-human refusal has implications for environmental education, as this could materialise as becoming-with the more-than-human other within an immanent ontology. It is a movement away from an a priori conception of nature — nature not as something I experience as a fully-formed, pre-existing entity, but as something we (humans and more-than-humans alike) contribute to the production of. This anti-hyper-individualist move is significant because although leafcutter bees are a solitary species — meaning they don’t aggregate in large, social structures like honeybees (Apis mellifera) — this doesn’t mean they are alone, as they are always in relation to plants, other leafcutter bees, different species of bees and humans.

Data acts

As this was a post-qualitative inquiry, the leafcutter bee’s nest and I intra-acted in an emergent and unexpected way. Our relationship unfolded as a result of our doing research differently by work/think/playing together (Hughes et al., Reference Hughes, Bridges-Rhoads and Cleave2017). This research-play wasn’t always light and positive, but was characterised by periods of tumult and self-doubt. Although I strove to practice relationality and not extract knowledge from this bee’s nest that it was unwilling to share with me, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was practicing relationality or theorising with this nest in the “right way.” By engaging with different texts on relationality (Lloro-Bidart, Reference Lloro-Bidart2018; Tuck & Yang, Reference Tuck and Yang2014; Tynan, Reference Tynan2021), I learned how to let the agency of the leafcutter bee’s nest direct our work together and determine our relationship not rooted in categories, but in ways of being-with each other. Because of this, “data” could happen at any time, regardless of if I was trying to make data happen or not. I experienced this data assemblage like acts in a play, although these acts didn’t end in resolution, nor did they remain singular and intact. Instead, I experienced this data as a rhizome, in which the intensities of each act would simmer until lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari, Reference Deleuze and Guattari1987) ruptured the stability of the rhizome and altered relationality with the nest. Following the diffractive reading done in Murris and Bozalek (Reference Murris and Bozalek2019), I use these Deleuzian concepts alongside Baradian concepts, such as intra-action, because of their shared relational ontology. Another rhizomatic quality of this inquiry was the production of maps, which resulted from my material engagements with the nest and becoming-close to it through the labour and bougainvillea leaves of the nest. This map creation is an exercise in what Masny (Reference Masny2013) highlights a key aspect of rhizomatic work, that it “focuses on what it produces and how it functions as a way to conceptualise research-as event” (p. 345). Framing the data assemblage as acts, as in events of action, also foregrounds the idea of performativity in the mutual constitution of more-than-human and human.

Act 1: Disturbance

In Summer 2021, I thought there was a piece of debris from a monsoon in the windowsill outside. When I removed it with a skewer, the dried brown leaves gave way to the brilliant pink of bougainvilleas, inviting me to stop the task I was completing and sit with this thingFootnote ⁴ for a while (Figure 1). It provoked a memory of something I had read about the structure of leafcutter bee nests because of the way its circles of leaves were pasted together to form a long, segmented tube (Butler, Reference Butler1965; Sheffield et al., Reference Sheffield, Ratti, Packer and Griswold2011). I am a PhD student studying animal behaviour and have researched honeybees for 5 years. Along the way, I have collected some knowledge about solitary bees, or bees that do not aggregate in large, social enterprises like honeybees. I set the nest in a jar and watched as a single leafcutter bee emerged from her cell. Having learned about solitary bee nest construction, I knew that there could be other bees developing in the nest, so I waited for the others to emerge. None emerged and the nest was too fragmented to be returned to the windowsill where I found it, so it remained in the jar and joined me at my desk.

Figure 1. a) A piece of the leafcutter bee nest made of bougainvillea petals, b) the entire nest in a glass jar with a newly emerged leafcutter bee and c) the nest under my windowsill. Note the dried, brown appearance of the nest under the window contrasted with the shocking bright pink when removed.

Act 2: Construction

In October 2021, I was assigned a class activity to gather performance data on Indigenous narratives by peeking into the data. I had an initial anthropocentric desire, driven by what knowledge I wanted to extract, to peek into the bee nest I gathered that summer by dissecting it open. For clarity, peeking inside would involve me taking a small pair of scissors and cutting the nest open. This would sate my curiosity about the contents of the nest and reveal if there were any bees remaining inside that did not complete their development into adult bees. After consideration of how I could enact a more posthuman and new materialist ethic, I practiced the “art of attentiveness” (van Dooren et al., Reference van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster2016, p. 17) as I sat with this nest multiple times, each time returning in an attempt to ask its consent for me to look inside of it. I use the term “consent” here because, although it could not express in human language agreement for me to cut it open, I was attuning myself to the agency this nest had producing affects within me and the ethico-ontological consequences of proceeding with the actions I intended if the nest did not agree to them.

I felt an overwhelming affect that I was not granted permission to look inside of it in this way. Taking my cue from how the practice of respect was developed in the 4 R’s of Indigenous Story Work (Archibald & Parent, Reference Archibald and Parent2019, pp. 5–7), I respected the autonomy of the nest by deeply listening to it and not disturbing it any more than I already had by removing it from its place of residence. (Additionally, the idea of reciprocity that Archibald and Parent describe acted as a motivator for me to share the story of this leafcutter bee’s nest and my continued intra-actions with it.) Tuck and Yang (Reference Tuck and Yang2014) have written about pedagogies of refusal — how the refusal to be object/subject-ified “turns the gaze back upon power” (p. 817) that acts as the knowledge-creator. Refusal changed my relationality with the nest in several ways: 1) by accepting the refusal of the nest to become a research subject, it became my research collaborator — one that expressed equal agency over the research process as myself and 2) refusal prompted me to think with the nest for how else I could peek inside of a nest and resulted in my creation of a model (Figure 2). The role of affect in refusal opens possibilities for more-than-humans that are not present or are only speculated to be present to express agency over the research process. It led the nest and I to co-create performance-theory-art, through which I embodied the bee in her process of building a nest. I gathered my materials — an empty toilet paper tube, scissors, pink tissue paper and glue — and set about creating my model.

Figure 2. a) and b) Various angles of the nest model (toilet paper roll, tissue paper and glue).

Because I was not able to become close to the bee nest in the way I originally intended, I became close to the bee through the labour of creating these nests. The embodied process of delicately cutting out circles of paper and pasting them in place was a way for me to intimately get to know the way a leafcutter bee constructs her nest.

Act 3: Leaves

The next act of my assemblage saw a flurry of thoroughly embodied rhizoanalytic activity (Sellers, Reference Sellers2015). A provocation to analyse my data with the nest saw me climbing into planters, collecting bougainvillea leaves fresh from the plant and rotting on the ground and tracing these materials was a different way for me to know with the leafcutter bee (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Bougainvillea flowers, fresh and decomposing, collected during class and the knife on my carabiner I used to slice a small branch of fresh flowers from the bush.

I found myself drawn not to the nest as a whole, pre-existing entity in itself, but as a collection of pieces which needed to be processed by the bee. I honed in on the materiality of the leaves for creating the nest — the substrate that the leafcutter bee intra-acted with to build the place to lay her eggs. Becoming attentive (Barad, Reference Barad2011; van Dooren et al., Reference van Dooren, Kirksey and Münster2016) to the bougainvillea leaves in this way was another rhizomatic entry point for me to think with leafcutter bees. The contrast of crumbling, dry leaves with the soft, supple texture of fresh leaves attuned me to the way these bees intra-act with the leaves as a building material. Time’s impact could be seen on these leaves, with the older leaves becoming dried out and a less vibrant pink. The ability of the leafcutter bee to build her nest relies on the bougainvillea plant staying alive and maintaining a supply of flexible leaves, since the brittle leaves that had fallen off the plant are unsuitable for creating the cylindrical shape of the nest. The cycles of life and rot, homebuilding and familial care and pink as a vital, serious colour all became points of relationality that unexpectedly emerged from our intra-actions in this rhizoanalysis.

Whereas in Act 2, I became close to the bee’s nest through understanding the labour that goes into building the nest, closeness was developed in Act 3 through an intra-action with the leaves that make up the nest. This was a way of my becoming attentive to another species in our multispecies assemblage: the bougainvillea. The leaves perform the role of a structure protecting leafcutter bee eggs because of their intra-action with the leafcutter bee. However, not all leaves on this plant were equally represented in the nest. The bougainvillea has two types of leaves: the flexible pink leaves surrounding the small white flowers and the large, tougher green leaves. There is a selective relationship happening between the bee and the bougainvillea that determines which leaves will perform the role of the nest.