The pre-conference is to strengthen the research network around post-approaches to education in the Nordic countries, and to allow for meetings and academic dialog between PhD/doctoral students and more senior researchers.
Dear NERA Network 22 Friend/Colleague/Community Member
It is our pleasure to invite you to the pre-conference for NERA Network 22 at the
University of Aarhus in Denmark on Tuesday March 3, 2026. We warmly welcome scholars in all stages of their career interested in feral inquiry specifically, or post-approaches in education generally, to join the pre-conference. It is completely free of charge and does not require attendance to the rest of NERA Conference.
Post approaches rethink and re-do established ideas and
methods, interrogating and even challenging conventional academic standards of quality. The 2026 Post-Approaches to Education (Network 22) pre-conference delves into the idea of ‘feral inquiry’, not only as a research practice but also as a way to reclaim autonomy and strengthen our capacity to act in the world as researchers. This year we will explore feral methods and their place in post-qualitive research, unpacking aƯordances and potentialities while also attending to the (necessary) bound(arie)s inherent in such practices.
The day will consist of a lively mix of keynote and feral activities. It is not obligatory, but you are encouraged to bring your work-in-progress in order to process quandaries / break throughs / questions / experiences / and relationalities. We envision this as a low-threshold, safe place to talk through our process and learn from each other as we re/consider our work in terms of our overarching themes of ferality and agency.
Our time together will be guided by the following questions:
- How might embracing ferality as a state of human/non-human engagement help postapproaches in research to cultivate courage, challenge assumptions and still remain responsible – even/especially when not all actors behave predictably (Tsing, et al, 2024)?
- How can professionals bravely and independently engage in relationships, challenge and exert influence, while also stepping back and allowing learners to emerge as themselves?
- How does agency manifest in educational institutions, classrooms, schools, and society?
Preliminary program
March 3rd, 2026
8:30 -Coffee
Welcome words
Keynote
Feral activities
Lunch (self-paid)
Feral Gifting (with coffee)
Feral activities
16:00 Closing
18:00 Dinner with all participants at local restaurant (self-paid)
*Minor changes in program are possible.
Keynote: Learning from horses, Entangled species and affective pedagogies
towards regenerative leadership in the patchy Anthropocene, by Dorthe Staunæs.
Description below.
Feral Gifting (see https://feralgift.site/) benefits from preparation beforehand. You can already consider how your work relates to ferality and our themes. More guidance and specific information about this activity will come in the welcoming letter to registered attendees; preliminary guidance below. Facilitated by Sage Borgmästars.
The day will also consist of a plush toy – taxidermy -workshop (arts-based methods in research) with Rachel Sinquefield-Kangas.
Recommended literature below.
The pre-conference is free of charge.
It is possible to participate even without attending the main conference.
Please register for the Pre-conference February 16th at the latest.
Registration: https://www.conferencemanager.dk/neranetwork22pre-conferenceferalinquiry
Contact and cancellations: sage.borgmastars@abo.fi
NERA 2026 Courage and Agency in Education for the Present: https://nfpf.net/courageand-agency-in-education-for-the-present/
Feral Gifting
Inspired by the idea of Feral Gifting (see https://feralgift.site/) we wish you take a moment before the pre-conference and experiment in feral ways of knowing. Go for a 30min nature walk. Use your breath to ground yourself while walking and feel how your breath connects you to the land and more than human beings around. What is feral around? What is inviting you? What surprises you? What scares you? Open your senses to the nuanced, unnoticed, or even unwanted. Use the following three prompts to think with ferility.
1. Walk until you find a place where two or more worlds meet. A crack, a border, a
fence… stay there for a while. Who or what lives in these in-between spaces? Is there an in-between space in your research? What kinds of human or nonhuman live there?
2. Follow a small moving nonhuman you can see/feel, bugs, wind, ripples of waves. Follow with your eyes or body as long as possible. What happens to your research when your attention is shifted away from you, the researcher, you as a human?
3. Find a being that is “not supposed to be there”. Spend a moment with it. What/who are treated as “the unwanted” in your research? Who decides the “wanted” knowledge.
Keynote:
Learning from horses. Entangled species and affective pedagogies towards regenerative leadership in the patchy Anthropocene.
By Dorthe Staunæs, Aarhus University, dost@edu.au.dk
In the patchy Anthropocene (Tsing et al., 2015; 2024), education may take place within multispecies worlds marked by uneven histories, indeterminacy, and more-than-human agency. This keynote explores learning from horses as a form of affective pedagogy and feral inquiry within post-qualitative educational research, foregrounding affective, genealogical, and relational becoming in the education of leaders.
Drawing on Donna Haraway’s (2008) concept of companion species and Tsing’s (2024) analytics of ferality and assemblage, the talk shift attention from leadership as an individual human attribute to education as an entangled process of becoming-with. Empirically, the keynote engages qualitative material from a leadership education program involving facilitated human–horse encounters. Methodologically, I adopt a performative, post-qualitative approach that treats these encounters as feral sites of inquiry—spaces where learning unfolds through bodily attunement, affect, and (partial) loss of control.
Informed by feminist human-animal studies (Birke 2015; Birke et al. 2024; Despret 2004; 2016; Game 2001; Karkulehto & Schuurman 2021), studies of horse-assisted leadership development (Bilginoğlu 2021; Kelly 2014; Staunæs & RaƯnsøe 2018; 2020; 2022), and a decolonial awareness of Indigenous insights (Tuck 2009) and black feminist’ insights (Gumbs 2023) into interconnected breathing these encounters are situated within a longer genealogy of horse–human relations, not to stabilize meaning but to thicken response-ability. Analytically, shared breathing practices function as a more-than-human pedagogy that connects bodies across species and time, while
simultaneously foregrounding bound(arie)s: the limits of human intention, the necessity of stepping back, and the ethical obligation to remain responsive when relations become unpredictable. By positioning education as a practice of becoming-with in more-than-human worlds, the keynote contributes to post-approaches by articulating feral inquiry as both a methodological open-ness and situated response-ability within regenerative educational practices.
I thank MA and horse-assisted coach Sølvi Degnegaard for allowing me to use our shared empirical material and Danish article from 2024 as a starting point for this keynote.
Recommended literature:
Campbell, A., Cohen, M., Farrier, S., & McCann, H. (2022). Embracing Feral Pedagogies: Queer Feminist Education through Queer Performance. Gender in an Era of Post-truth Populism: Pedagogies, Challenges and Strategies, 193-209.
Kim, H. (2024). Living as waste-bodies in a dump: feral sociality and ecofeminist
education of ecotone. Gender and Education, 36(4), 312-327.
MacDonald, F. (2024). Feral participations: exploring art and the creaturely through interspecies practice (Doctoral dissertation, University of the Arts London/University for the Creative Arts).
McDermott McNulty, M., Barros, S., & Daspit, T. (2024). “Before the After Comes the Fire”: Tarot Aesthetics as Feral Inquiry. International Review of Qualitative Research, 19408447251319421.
Tsing, A. L., Deger, J., Saxena, A. K., & Zhou, F. (2024). Field guide to the patchy
Anthropocene: The new nature. In Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene. Stanford University Press