Diffracting Childhood Memories, Place and Local Grassroots Mo(v)ements: Towards a Relational Environmental Education

Abstract This paper employs autoethnography and poetic inquiry to examine how childhood experiences along the west coast of India were entangled with early understandings of environmental education. Drawing on memories of growing up in a rural region, it traces everyday intra-actions with land, sea, plants and community practices to illustrate how environmental awareness emerges through relational, place-based learning/unlearning rather than through universalized frameworks. By weaving poetic inquiry and becoming-with literature, the article disrupts linear and Western epistemologies of research and learning. The article unfolds through two interwoven processes: first, a reflexive re-turn to childhood memories through poems that foreground relational encounters with landscapes and more-than-human beings; and second, becoming-with literature by attending to scholarship on local grassroots mo(v)ements in the Vasai–Virar region. Drawing on Barad’s (2006) notion of diffraction, the paper attends to how experiences, memories and texts intra-act to produce complex, entangled sticky webs of relations. This article argues that environmental education can benefit from recognizing situated, relational and place-based ways of knowing. In doing so, it contributes to conversations on decolonizing research practices and (re)thinking how environmental education is understood, narrated and enacted within educational contexts.