Keynote: Expansive learning & possibility knowledge(s) for regenerative futures-- Heila Lotz-Sisitka

The possibility of regenerative futures is deeply intertwined with the potential of healing the Earth and her people. In many spaces around the world people are actively and creatively engaged in co-creating diverse regenerative cultures everywhere. At the heart of these movements and our abilities as humans to participate in the co-creation of regenerative futures (with the more-than-human world) lies possibility knowledge(s). Possibility knowledge(s) surfaces many philosophical and methodological debates, most notably those associated with the limits of positivism and empiricist ontologies, an over-reliance on naturalism in the sciences, and one-dimensional rationalism in the social sciences, as well as recognition of a need to remediate a colonial history of abyssal knowledge. In this presentation I will explore the concept of possibility knowledge(s) in the education and learning sciences, arguing that possibility knowledge(s) offer important interstitial or liminal spaces for transformations and transgression towards regenerative cultures. Interstital or liminal spaces for possibility knowledge(s) are ‘in-between’ and transitional, and potentially transformative and/or transgressive. Possibility knowledge involves destabilizing categorical knowledge, and a turning of categorical knowledge into possibility knowledge, which opens a platform for expansive learning, or learning ‘what is not yet there’ (cf. Engeström), including how to co-create regenerative cultures and futures under increasingly complex crisis conditions. To concretise the deliberation on possibility knowledge(s), I will share some examples of how communities in southern Africa are co-producing possibility knowledge(s) for decolonial, regenerative futures via expansive learning processes, and the significance of possibility knowledge(s) in education and learning processes oriented in such contexts.