An onto-epistemological orientation grounded in that understands worlds as co-constituted habitats of relations, obligations, and material-semiotic exchanges, where living and learning take shape through patterns of interdependence across human and more‑than‑human milieus.
Ecology begins from the Greek oikos, the dwelling and its upkeep, and extends it into a worldly practice of composing livable conditions. In a postqualitative, posthumanist, and new materialist register, ecology names not only biological interrelations, but a material-discursive mesh where bodies , infrastructures, affects, tools, and concepts intra-act to sustain or degrade habitats of possibility. It resists framing environments as scenic backdrops or bounded systems and treats environments as continuously made and remade through distributed agencies. Drawing on work by Haraway, ecological thinking is a matter of situated care, composting inheritances, and making oddkin—forming alliances that maintain conditions for multispecies flourishing. With Bennett, it foregrounds vibrant materialities that exert force in pedagogies and publics. With Massumi and affect theory, it attends to preconscious intensities that tune collective capacities, moods, and the tempos of action. With Deleuze & Guattari, it tracks transversal connections that cut across strata—territorializing habits and deterritorializing currents—and it treats learning as an ecology of practices that coevolve with their apparatuses. In this field, an ecology is not a container but a choreography of relations through which bodies and meanings take shape.
Posthuman ecologies emphasize that inquiry, ethics, and politics are inseparable from environmental composition. Barad’s agential realism makes ecology an onto-epistemic commitment: apparatuses do not observe from afar, they participate in materializing worlds; agential cuts enact what counts as entity, boundary, and effect. Posthuman glossaries underscore this shift as a collective movement across environmental humanities, feminist science studies, and Critical Theory and Science and Technology Studies (STS), foregrounding emergent ecologies, rights of nature, humus economicus, hydrofeminism, and syndemics as ways to map co-implicated crises and capacities. To think ecologically in this frame is to take responsibility for the maintenance and transformation of the relational conditions—energetic, affective, infrastructural, legal, algorithmic—through which life and learning become possible.
Ecology reframes research design as habitat-making. Postqualitative inquiry composes apparatuses that cultivate specific relational fields—fieldwork, interfaces, archives, classrooms—then traces how these fields afford or inhibit capacities. Analysis shifts from coding discrete units to following flows, thresholds, and gradients: how affects circulate, how materials recruit attention and effort, how policies sediment into practice, how technologies modulate perception and pace. Methods become ecological craft: attuning to intensities, staging diffractive encounters, situating commitments, and iteratively reconfiguring the apparatus to support ethical relation. Ethics emerges as an ecological practice of maintenance and repair—supporting resilience without erasing difference, amplifying minor currents that open futures, and accounting for exclusions produced by our cuts.
Ecology clarifies that AI‑entangled writing classrooms are habitats composed of policies, platforms, prompts, rubrics, feedback rituals, device ecologies, bandwidth, and tacit norms, each exerting force on composing. Instructors’ lived experience becomes ecological sensing: bodily fatigue from screen work, heightened alertness during model output review, the atmospheres of suspicion or curiosity circulating after policy shifts, the way interface latency or autocomplete rhythm shapes pacing and attention. Authorship and creativity appear as emergent properties of a pedagogical ecology: assignment language, genre exemplars, acceptable reuse norms, prompt engineering practices, and feedback infrastructures co‑produce what becomes legible as original, derivative, collaborative, or reflective. Ecological analysis helps rework the habitat rather than policing individuals: redesigning prompts to recruit situated sources, composing with version histories and traceable revisions, scaffolding multimodal drafting ecosystems, and setting up “nutrient cycles” for ideas—peer exchanges, repository seeding, and reflective annotations that metabolize model outputs into learning.
Distributed agency becomes visible when LLM affordances, LMS settings, citation detectors, time constraints, and studio arrangements intra‑act with students’ and instructors’ capacities. Adjusting the ecology—tempo of workshops, visibility of drafting traces, communal glossaries, artifact portfolios—shifts the behaviors of the whole milieu. Ecological attunement supports care-centered governance: rather than punitive framings of “misuse,” the habitat foregrounds accountability practices that keep composing relations healthy—transparent provenance, situated contextualization, collaborative protocols, and consentful data use.
Ecological attunement can privilege minor lines and counter‑currents: small, situated arrangements that open different futures within dominant milieus. This minoritarian ecology stays close to the ground—listening for quiet compositional practices, improvised supports, side‑channels, and resistant uses of tools that expand capacities under constraint. It tracks how a single prompt tweak reduces anxiety, how a shared annotation ritual builds trust, how a student’s local archive resists platform defaulting, how slow reading times recuperate attention from auto-complete. Minor ecological design composes with the partial, the situated, and the fragile to cultivate resilience and creativity where major infrastructures otherwise constrain possibilities.