Borders have deep symbolic, cultural, historical, and religious meanings, and can therefore become mobilized for various political endeavors. Using a critical educational ethnographic approach, my dissertation examines educators’ memories of bordering practices and experiences to rethink national borders and identities in Armenian education. I argue that teachers have the potential to act as key change agents in transforming the Armenia-Azerbaijan and Armenia-Turkey conflicts of the Caucasus region through their distinctive influence both on curriculum and pedagogy, and by creating supportive learning environments in classrooms. This dissertation suggests that borders are central to the defining of identity – as studied among Armenians – and that border thinking has the potential to expand pedagogical practices to not only inform/(re)define identity, but also to sustain peace and make room for an alternative way of being that refutes the dichotomies of colonialism and imperialism, and other prevalent isms. Specifically, my research focuses on the ways in which the idea and reality of “the border” – as well as teachers’ memories of the “border” – shape classroom practices, textbook content, and pedagogical theory in post-conflict Armenia. This research analyzes the capacity and potential of educators to contribute to more peaceful relationships and makes clear the constraints of schools in fulfilling this role. My dissertation contributes to the current scholarship of border studies, post-Soviet transformations, and education in conflict territories by expanding the scope of pedagogical practices necessary for peaceful coexistence. Fieldwork for this study was conducted in Armenia between June 2019 and March 2020 with a one-month site visit in Turkey. This study includes textbook analyses, interviews with teachers, fieldwork observations, as well as document and visual analyses.

This dissertation deals with the confluence of neoliberal and dominant Western social pressures in tension with researchers and educators striving toward a more sustainable world in light of the Anthropocene. Although scientists see the Anthropocene as a problem of human activity and environmental degradation, many social scientists and humanities researchers also see it as a problem with entrenched ways of thought. Current ways of thought complicit in the making of the Anthropocene include centering all thought, control, and agency in the radically individual human, centering science as the only legitimate access to knowledge, and presenting that knowledge as apolitical absolute truth. I engage in research creation activated by the minor gestures of human/nature entanglement in the Anthropocene and the promise of place in environmental and sustainability education. As such, I embark on the invention of a new ecology of practices that takes the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead as their guiding foundation. As part of this invention circumventing normative neoliberal and Western logics, I take Ajo, Arizona and the surrounding Sonoran Desert as a partner in more-than-human process inquiry. I live in Ajo and explore the Sonoran Desert for four months of data generation employing basic techniques of ethnography divorced from their neopositivist founding theories. Bodies generated from my entanglement with Ajo and the desert participate in inventing Remixing Data Experiences (RDE), a novel data engagement technique. Through RDE, my more-than-human partners and I create ideas by engaging in arts-based techniques that form multimedia art-workings. The ideas generated include Oasis, Decline, Celebrate, Precarity, and Directions. I respond to each idea through anarchival written texts in a variety of genres including ethnographic memoir, short fiction, essay, ballad, and talk poem. I put these ideas into conversation with current methodological and education literature to illustrate that aesthetic-based inquiry contributes new ways forward in the Anthropocene. These new ways include rhythms of certainty and uncertainty in knowledge creation, participating in reciprocal affective capabilities of bodies in joyful knowing, developing modest abstractions that frequently engage concrete experience, and inclusion of aesthetic experiences in learning and inquiry.