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This article investigates the European policy context of soils and carbon farming where care for soils is promoted alongside climate neutrality and economic growth goals. Through a close reading of four policy documents, we outline three discourses to explore what is done in the name of care, and what care is acceptable and promoted. We speak back to these discourses through Whyte's (2021) conceptualization of epistemologies of crisis, where we see a concern or care for nature, where nature is not in fact the subject of concern. Instead, to care for nature is about caring for humans and human futures. A focus on care reveals important information about the challenges of translating response-able care for soils into formal decision-making systems, and we propose that concepts of care ethics that align with feminist and indigenous conceptions can inform different priorities and methods in the project to care for soils. We argue for the necessity to unsettle ways of engaging with the world that work from epistemologies of crisis which hinder diverse and relational care and lead to colonized futures.

This paper investigates how futures thinking and relational thinking may expand practices and strategies in agriculture that aim for sustainability. Using carbon farming as a case where relational thinking is brought into conversation with futures thinking, we explore how imaginaries of sustainability transformations can be further expanded to include ways of knowing, being, and doing that imagine more radical, relational, and ethical futures. Based on the analysis of a diverse empirical material including European Union reports, focus group discussions, and workshops with carbon farming stakeholders in Sweden using the futures method Causal Layered Analysis, this paper offers a critical relational lens for approaching and evaluating strategies and practices that aim for sustainability transformations in agricultural systems.

This article works with the idea that radical solutions in agri-food systems require multiple ways of knowing soils beyond the dominant scientific practices. Using a relational lens that invites us to think with soils, this article lifts our gaze to human-soil relationships in creating post-growth food systems. In the context of a grassroots initiative in Sweden that advances regenerative carbon farming as a transformational pathway to food systems within planetary boundaries, poetic inquiry is used to bring the often-unheard perspectives of "knowing soils" to the fore; how we know about soils matters.

Higher education has been criticised for its instrumental character, which constrains possibilities for meaningful change towards sustainability. Drawing on the concept of radical futurity, we develop a conception of education that we call "emergentist education". We integrate literature from futures studies, education for sustainable development, philosophy of education, and bring into dialogue experiences from three futures-facing educational contexts at a Swedish university. We identify three key areas to conceive of emergentist education and its value in practice: disciplinary and institutional norms, convening around anticipatory emotions, and deepening the paradox of sustainability as emergent through radical futurity. We apply a diffractive analysis through these key areas to demonstrate how a reorientation of education as emergentist might allow students and teachers to contest visions of futures. This work helps in approaching the liberation of education to allow young people to come together whole-heartedly around what matters to them.

Active Student Participation imagines learning as a shared venture between educators and students. It invites students to support, empower, and challenge each other’s learning, as well as helping them to be co-creators in planning, facilitating, and evaluating courses within higher education.

This companion aims to inspire those who want to approach new ways of learning in order to create a better course, as well as those who are out to challenge conventional forms of teaching and learning norms. It summarises a range of experiences in Swedish higher education and provides concrete examples of how students and educators can learn together. By reading this companion, you will meet a variety of voices and perspectives - from students and educators - both via text and through links to a rich collection of media.

Together, these voices tell us about a significant shift in roles within higher education that creates teaching and learning spaces with the opportunity to do things differently. In essence, Active Student Participation is about transformative learning, succinctly exemplified by one of the student contributors to this companion: “To experience any other form of education now would feel like nothing less than a fundamental step into the past.”

The ‘Continuous Development of Active Student Participation’ at Uppsala University is a co-led project between students and academic developers. The group has forged a new kind of student–faculty partnership within academic development. Teaming academic developers with students to work together on improving higher education pedagogy is a critical aspect in this work as both perspectives are valuable and necessary in creating a learning practice that is valid for students and teachers alike. There is significant potential for this model to be implemented by universities elsewhere.