Journeying with Affective Embodied Empathy for an Ethical Understanding of Environmental Education

The climate emergency necessitates addressing the ethical implications of the Anthropocene, emphasising the complex interplay between humans and the more-than-human. Traditionally, environmental education has focused on human perspectives, limiting a comprehensive understanding of these issues. Recent research advocates for a broader perspective, integrating human and more-than-human empathy to better grasp the Anthropocene’s challenges. This study redefines empathy as an affective, embodied phenomenon transcending human-centric views, focusing on the relational connections within shared environments. It proposes a new materialist framework, highlighting how empathy emerges through intra-actions, where affective forces shape relational dynamics and foster kinship and mutual care from sensory experiences. Methodologically, diffractive musing is used to explore affective, embodied empathy in a Norwegian Folke School. This lens facilitates attentiveness to the intra-actions between humans and the more-than-human, and as a reader, you are invited to join me on my journey to understand how subjectivity, agency, power relations, and understandings of time, space, and matter evolve. By taking part, I argue that you will appreciate the need to slow down, heighten sensory awareness, and focus on absences and placemaking to nurture affective, embodied empathy. By framing empathy as affective and embodied, the study contributes to posthuman/new materialist environmental education knowledge. It offers a new theorisation of empathy, positioning it as a transformative force capable of cultivating compassion and ethical responsibility towards the more-than-human world, ultimately driving positive social and environmental change.