Alongside organising the MUST Festival this Spring, MUST researchers have participated in many international events and conferences. In March 2025, Maria Saari joined the MOTH Festival of Ideas in New York, which brought together diverse voices to explore interdisciplinary perspectives for Earthly Flourishing. Read Maria’s reflections on the festival and multispecies justice-oriented education.

On 12-14th March 2025, researchers, artists, and practitioners from diverse disciplines, around the world, gathered at the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Festival of Ideas: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Earthly Flourishing at New York University School of Law. The festival was organized by the MOTH Program, an interdisciplinary initiative advancing the protection of the more-than-human world at the intersections of ecological sciences, Indigenous knowledge and the arts.

Over the course of three days, the MOTH festival provided a unique setting for closed-door interdisciplinary academic roundtable discussions, followed by poetry readings, performances, concerts, film screenings, and book launches open to the public. The richness of the conversations and the feel of community was well summed up by MOTH Founding Director César Rodríguez-Garavito in his closing words of the festival echoing the feedback received during the festival: “everyone felt like they belong.”

And, I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment. I was fortunate to gain the opportunity to present our research work at MUST at one of the four interdisciplinary thematic groups in the festival. In the group I was part of, we heard rich contributions from a variety of perspectives including a question ‘Could Glacier be a President?’ posed by Iceland’s first Rights of Nature Movement Snæfellsjökull for President, and an arts-informed exploration of interspecies communication by Keith Williams. These contributions were accompanied by Susie Talbot’s in-depth presentation on Earth Law (Anima Mundi Law Initiative) and Yusuf Samsudin’s thought-provoking session on conservation and human-animal conflict/coexistence. I was deeply grateful to contribute to this group’s discussions by sharing and discussing the work we do in MUST project’s WP2: Unlearning with Other Species, which I co-lead.

Together, the various presentations offered a valuable space for thought-provoking critical constructive discussions, a space where communities of practice can truly be built. I left the festival full of gratitude for the new connections made, discussions held, and the new, expanded insights it gave for the work that we are carrying out in MUST.

What might educational spaces of multispecies justice-oriented education look like?

In my presentation Multispecies Justice and Spaces of Peaceability in Education I talked about challenging hierarchical anthropocentrism in education, the ways in which schooling is connected to broader systems of violence against Earth others and how we might cultivate spaces of peaceability in and through education (Saari, 2025). In the discussions, we explored how education can be more attentive and responsive to the socioecological challenges we face and how we might cultivate educational spaces that support earthly flourishing.

In WP2 we have been co-creating these spaces with teachers and students through our pilot workshops we concluded in primary school in Finland and a high school in Portugal this spring, as well as through our work in pre-service teacher education at the University of Oulu. What might spaces of multispecies justice-oriented education look like, you might wonder? In our school workshops, we explored this question through methods such as storytelling, photo-elicitation, and arts-based approaches, and by collaborating with animal sanctuaries. We drew inspiration from a range of educational frameworks, including ecojustice education, humane education, and critical animal pedagogies.

Some of the many questions we have explored together with students include what it means to be protected, who has the right to make such decisions and what protected space might look like for different beings. We had the opportunity to visit animal sanctuaries in Finland and Portugal, which showed us how encounters with different animals and hearing their stories can impact and challenge the ways we see the world. We explored what we can learn from other animals, and how we might transform practices and systems to be more just for all affected. We are now busy compiling our methods, themes and inquisitive prompts into accessible open-access material that will be available later this year. Building and sustaining communities of practice for earthly flourishing is a priority in the MUST project and we are grateful to the schools, sanctuaries, teachers and students who worked with us this spring.

Working towards earthly flourishing in Finland

This spring, our MUST workpackage 2 has also worked in close collaboration with MUST’s Work Package 6 to explore the feasibility of multispecies governance transitions in Finland using the Delphi survey method. The MOTH festival provided an excellent platform to present our ongoing work with MUST WP6. We engaged in discussions about the opportunities and challenges of achieving just multispecies governance in Finland, emphasizing the crucial role of education and educational policy in advancing multispecies justice. This aligns with Rodríguez-Garavito’s (2024) advocacy in their book, ”More Than Human Rights policy and legal ecosystem.” We look forward to sharing our Delphi survey findings later in the autumn.

We are always happy to connect and grow the movement working towards earthly flourishing. If you would like to hear more about our work, have any questions or just want to say hello or tell us about your own work on cultivating earthly flourishing, contact Maria at maria.saari@oulu.fi.

Text and photo: Maria Saari

References:

Saari, M. H. (2025). Crafting palettes of potential for a multispecies justice-oriented education. Environmental Education Research, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2025.2475150

Rodríguez-Garavito, C. (2024). More-Than-Human Rights: Law, Science, and Storytelling Beyond Anthropocentrism. In C. Rodríguez-Garavito (ed.) More Than Human Rights: An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing. New York University, 21-47.