Ylirisku, Reorienting Environmental Art Education

There is a diverse tradition in art education for advancing environmental, ecological and sustainability-related topics. But are the existing conceptualisations and approaches to environmental art education sufficient in this time of ecological crises? This dissertation examines the theoretical-philosophical groundings of environmental art education and discusses the limitations that arise from its ties to Western dualistic thinking that maintain the separateness of human and nature, and furthermore, reasserts human exceptionalism. Conventional conceptions of human-nature relations are disturbed in the research drawing on posthumanist theories. An experiment mobilised through orienteering in the Finnish forests activates imaginings towards a posthumanist environmental art education. The research by Henrika Ylirisku proposes generative potentials in art educational strategies for queering normative human-nature relations and acknowledging more-than-human agencies. It further encourages future environmental art education to focus on complex material and multispecies entanglements and attend to their ethics and politics.