Where is the Love in Environmental Education Research? A Diffractive Analysis of Steiner, Ecosomaesthetics and Biophilia

In environmental education research (EER), love is revered as a way to heal or mend the human relationship with nature. However, this interpretation of love rests in a humanist paradigm that considers nonhuman nature as external to the human being. To this end, love has generally been considered as an outward emotion, towards nature, and is less considered an inner movement, towards the human as nature. We were interested in exploring this conceptualisation of nature and love of/as nature and question: Is there potential to locate the concept of love in EER through different theoretical positions to explore the possibilities for its (re)conceptualisation? We aim to stretch academic thinking to (re)consider love through identifying where our own research in environmental education has involved love through the intersection of our journeys at the Australian Association of Environmental Education Research Symposium workshop. In response to the context of this workshop, which explored the concept of diffraction as described by Barad, we have chosen to adopt a diffractive analysis as the methodology to analyse our theoretical perspectives of love in EER. We explore the word love in this article using diffraction to understand the relationality of human and nonhuman nature through our research interests in Steiner, ecosomaesthetics and biophilia. This process cracked our theoretical silos to more openly consider: Where is the love in EER?