Por: Antje Disterheft

I learned about songlines during my PhD, when I was eager to get to know participatory methods that would take people to the “depths of things” and provide “real participation” – that’s when I came across Dragon Dreaming. Fascinated by its holistic approach and its three principles – personal empowerment, community building and service to the Earth – I took several courses to learn more about it, and thereby I also learned a bit about Aborigines’ philosophies and worldviews, an important inspiration in Dragon Dreaming.

About songlines

Margo Ngawa Neale, adjunct professor at the Australian National University’s Centre for Indigenous History and senior manager at the National Museum of Australia, describes songlines as libraries that store knowledge critical to survival: these songlines, also called dreaming tracks, are sacred routes in Aboriginal culture, passed down through generations. They represent pathways across the land, guiding people physically and spiritually along distant walks and helping them find, for example, landmarks and water sources. As Aboriginal people walk these paths, they sing the land into being, reinforcing their deep relationship with it. The songs carry vital information from ancient narratives shared among different language groups, facilitating cross-cultural understanding and a perception of the land not just as a resource but as a living entity with which humans and other-than-humans are deeply intertwined.

I was thrilled to discover an exhibition on Songlines at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris during a family trip last year. The project behind the exhibition was started by Aboriginal elders, aiming to preserve the stories of the Seven Sisters for future generations and to raise awareness of songlines more broadly. Walking through the artworks, I felt a glimpse of the cultural richness of one of the oldest Indigenous cultures—dating back approximately 60 000 years ago—and their profound connection to the more-than-human world (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Impression of the exhibition Songlines, Musée du Quai Branly Jaques Chirac, Paris (Photographs and collage by author)

The concept of songlines stayed with me and resurfaced as I explored relational approaches in sustainability research and education—a growing area of interest among scholars. I have highlighted just a few sources to introduce some key ideas being discussed in this field, and invite you to reflect on how these relational approaches might connect to the Aboriginal songlines.

Is there a relational turn in sustainability science?

This question was asked in an article by Simon West and colleagues in 2020, who emphasize relational approaches as being more holistic and dynamic analyses of human-nature connectedness. They hold the potential to open new domains and approaches for sustainability interventions that nurture relationships in place and practice. In the same year, Zack Walsh and colleagues called for action for sustainability researchers to co-develop a research agenda for advancing this relational paradigm within sustainability research, practice, and education.

Why a relational paradigm?

The emergence of a relational paradigm stems from the need to address shortcomings in previous sustainability science approaches that have mainly focused on impact reduction and resource optimisation through technology advancements as the main road to change. These approaches have fostered dualistic rather than relational understandings by addressing certain elements of the system without addressing the intrinsic relations between them. While sustainability science often emphasizes the interaction between system elements, the relational approach emphasises continually unfolding processes and relations among entities. Similar terms and concepts, such as the ecological paradigm or systems approach, metamodernism, constructive postmodernism, and new materialism, exist both within and outside sustainability-related discourses.

“Walking together in a world of many worlds”

This is the subtitle of the latest publication of West et al. (2024) who have further systematized relational approaches and mapped their overlaps and differences, organized in five intersecting areas: (i) Indigenous-kinship relationalities, (ii) systemic-analytical, (iii) posthumanist-performative, (iv) structural-metabolic, and (v) Latin American-postdevelopment (Figure 2). The authors conclude that the diversity of these relationalities “gives rise to practices of transformations as ‘walking together in a world of many worlds’ and support intercultural dialogue on sustainability transformations”.

Figure 2: Relational approaches to sustainability transformations in sustainability science (West et al. 2024, article under open access and Creative Commons CC BY license).

What about a relational turn in (higher) education?

Vivienne Bozalek, Michalinos Zembylas and Joan Tronto published an inspiring book about Posthuman and Political Care Ethics for Reconfiguring Higher Education Pedagogies that is based on relational ethics. The contributions to this book consider the various ways in which posthuman and care ethics might open more fruitful ways of reconsidering the ways in which higher education pedagogies are enacted and how they might be differently perceived in the current circumstances of educators and researchers teaching in universities.

Canadian sustainability educator Elisabeth Lange argues that relationality demands an ethical, ontological, and epistemological transformation in the ways we learn and teach. She argues that relational values, present in living systems theory and indigenous philosophies, can “reframe our understandings of transformative education, particularly toward socially just and regenerative cultures, completing the work of unfinished justice and climate movements.”

Developing “songlines” for transformative research and education?

While relational discourses may seem abstract and theoretical, they hold significant practical potential. I propose using songlines as a metaphor to open new pathways for fostering connections with places and all forms of life.

Songlines can serve as a powerful educational tool, where young people learn about geography, ecology, and culture through direct engagement with the land. In a similar way, relational sustainability in education promotes experiential learning, helping students understand the intricate relationships between natural systems, human societies, and the broader environment.

Songlines represent a form of living knowledge, passed down through generations, offering wisdom on how to care for the land. Relational sustainability also embraces multiple ways of knowing, encouraging us to draw from diverse disciplines and cultural traditions, including Indigenous wisdom, to deepen our understanding of how to coexist sustainably with the natural world.

“If you stay connected, you will stay knowledgeable.” Margo Ngawa Neale about songlines

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Antje Disterheft is an inter- and transdisciplinary researcher in the fields of sustainability transformation and education. She joined ICS as a team member of the Shared Green Deal. Central to her investigation are transformative processes that question the status quo and challenge current societal paradigms of knowledge production and learning.