We acknowledge and pay respect to the people of the Yugambeh Nation on whose Land we work, meet and study. We recognise the significant role the past and future Elders play in the life of the University and the region. We are mindful that within and without the buildings, the Land always was and always will be Aboriginal Land.1

This paper introduces staying-with the traces of inter/intra-subjective experience, with and within place, in mapping-making philosophy in environmental education. Through a conceptualisation of philosophy as concepts or knots in an infinite composition of knowledge, rather than separate knowledges, we use staying-with the traces2 as method, whereby our embodied patterns of human and more than human relationality across place and time may engage with philosophy. This grounding of philosophy foregrounds the diverse onto-epistemologies of posthumanism and indigenist3 ways of knowing, acknowledging tensions and searching for the possibilities of connectivity between them. Through an embodied arts-based walking practice, our approach challenges the perpetuation of reductionist perspectives, including nature/culture binaries, within environmental education. We stay with the traces of bird, meeting, tree, watery and concrete in mutual inseparable relation and becoming.

Drawing on a posthuman lens we walk — with Deborah Bird Rose and her conceptual framing of shimmer. We explore shimmering as incorporating a sensorial richness, as beauty and grandeur, as constantly in flux, moving between past, future and back again. Shimmering has potentiality in a posthuman context in its encompassing of spiritual and ancestral energies and illumination of the human (settler) story of exceptionalism. By theorising shimmer with this posthuman lens, we acknowledge and honour the eco-ethico consciousness raised by Australian ecophilosophers and ecofeminists such as Deborah Bird Rose and Val Plumwood, and the social ecologists who have continued to walk with them. In order to disrupt anthropocentricism and present a moral wake-up call that glows from dull to brilliance in these precarious times, we bring to environmental education the potential of holding the shimmering past tracings of theory along with us on our journeys.

The assemblage of water/watery/watering is a lively cartography of how water may be accounted for when theorising with and through environmental education research. Challenging the universalising claims of Western technoscience and the colonial logic of extraction, the article develops an alternative theoretical mapping of environmental education through engagements with Ingold’s (2007, 2012, 2015) concepts of lines, knots, and knotting. For this article and for the Special Issue in which it is housed, the concepts of such knottings are defined as an assemblage of haecceities, lived events that are looped, tethered and entangled as material and conceptual agencies that inhere within situated encounters. Thus, this article grapples with the need to account for water differently in contemporary posthuman ecologies. To overcome anthropocentric and mastery-oriented approaches, various other ways to account for water in science or environmental education will continue to come to the surface, bubbling and rushing like a waterfall as they have done in this work. Some of these will include thinking with water, which will be central to a theoretical mapping of water that seeks embrace sticky knots. The article explores a (re)turn to artful practices and encounters as spaces in which posthumanist concepts for environmental education might be cultivated.

Drawing on posthumanist and new materialism theorising, we take the concept of resonance for an a/r/tographic ‘walk’ to know, be and do differently, to challenge human-centric separatist ways that have resulted in our current socioecological crises. Beginning with Ingold’s knotty thinking, we identify the notion of resonance as a node for exploring and thinking about interactions in the world. Guided by Barad’s proposition of entangling ethico-onto-epistemic ways, our a/r/tographic thought experiments find resonances that echo through bodies, through connections as nature, through deep-time and modern spaces to notice and attend to intraactions within the ecological collective. Through art-full, thought-full scholartistic enquiry, we explore diffractive encounters to consider resonance as a conceptual tool for tuning into and harmonising with the entanglements of body–mind–space–time–matter. We pose this exploration of resonance as the start of a knotty theory conversation for shifting into a new ‘common world’ knowing, being and doing.