Conference Program

Educational practices aimed at “bringing nature into the classroom” - such as school farms, plant or animal adoption programs, and environmental education initiatives - have become increasingly common. While intended to connect students with nature, these practices mediate and radically simplify its complexity. Nature is miniaturized and staged through isolated elements - a plant, a chick, a small controlled ecosystem - detached from the multispecies ecological networks to which they belong. This produces a pedagogical uncanny: removed from context and transformed into an educational object, nature appears simultaneously familiar and artificial. Its dimension is domesticated, and narratively stabilized, producing a reassuring, moralized image of the environment. Yet this very artificialization generates an effect analogous to Masahiro Mori’s “uncanny valley”: like artificial entities that resemble, but do not fully replicate, living beings, these pedagogical forms of nature provoke unease by imitating life without conveying its relational complexity. Through a feminist and multispecies lens, particularly drawing on Donna Haraway, these practices can be interpreted as devices of epistemic domestication. Contrary to Haraway’s vision of the world as a network of situated, non-hierarchical multispecies relations, such pedagogies risk reproducing an anthropocentric and simplified view of ecology. They may be read as forms of ecological simulation, akin to the “most photographed barn” in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, where the barn becomes a hypermediated simulacrum of nature. Similarly, pedagogical nature emerges as a hyperreal, mediated version of the living: familiar yet unsettling, domesticated yet revealing contemporary tensions between ecological experience, cultural mediation, and simulacra.