This article reveals the changes that have taken place in the under-researched Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) discourse in China over the past three decades and presents new findings. The authors conducted discourse analysis to examine the changes of ESD discourse in official policy documents and compared them with the concept of ESD as it appears in the UNESCO framework. Findings suggest that ESD in China has been redefined by domestic discourse and interests. The concept of ‘Ecological Civilisation’ replaces the identity and function of ESD as it appears in China’s education policies, while ESD primarily targets the environmental sector. This redefining of ESD weakens the interconnection between ESD and sustainable development (SD) that exists within the UNESCO framework and presents an unstable approach to ESD in China. This research contributes to ESD development in China and updates its potential education challenges considering China’s 2030 Agenda.

The authors present climate change and antibiotic resistance as emergent biosocial phenomena—ongoing products of massively multiple interactions among human lifestyles and broader life processes. They argue that response to climate change and antibiotic resistance is often framed by two varieties of biosocial imagination. Anthropocentric imaginations privilege the question of human distinctiveness. Anthropomorphic imaginations privilege the question of whether biosocial processes can be modeled in terms of centers of moral and causal responsibility. Together, these frame the matter of response in terms of deliberate human action. The authors argue that, considered as emergent biosocial phenomena, climate change and antibiotic resistance “diffract” deliberate human action and thus limit the value of this frame by rendering the human/nonhuman and intended/nonintended distinctions that are crucial to its practical operation locally irrelevant. Alternative biosocial imaginations currently developing around climate change and antibiotic resistance that allow for “diffraction” and therefore frame response differently are considered.

Innovation in the life sciences calls for reflection on how sociologies separate and relate life processes and social processes. To this end we introduce the concept of the ‘biosocial event’. Some life processes and social processes have more mutual relevance than others. Some of these relationships are more negotiable than others. We show that levels of relevance and negotiability are not static but can change within existing relationships. Such changes, or biosocial events, lie at the heart of much unplanned biosocial novelty and much deliberate innovation. We illustrate and explore the concept through two examples – meningitis infection and epidemic, and the use of sonic ‘teen deterrents’ in urban settings. We then consider its value in developing sociological practice oriented to critically constructive engagement with innovation in the life sciences.

Listening, as a general psychological capacity, is a key aspect of perception, communication and experience. However, listening researchers frequently characterize it as a neglected, misunderstood and ill-defined phenomenon. This is a significant problem because questions of listening pervade social inequalities and injustices, as this paper demonstrates in the context of UK child protection practices. Exploring concepts of listening within and beyond psychology, the paper illustrates how a lack of overall theorization can contribute to inequality and injustice within applied listening practices. To address this, the paper theorizes listening in the spirit of Whiteheadian process ontology, drawing on the work of Nancy and Bonnet. Based on this, it develops the concept of ‘Cultures of Listening’ (CoL), which provides a tool for the critical analysis of troubled listening practices, indicating how they can be challenged and transformed. Within CoL, listening is not a mere aspect of auditory perception or communication, but each instant of listening is considered as shaped by and expressing political, social and experiential circumstances, that is, cultures. The paper demonstrates the theoretical, critical and applied value of CoL by offering a detailed analysis of the role of listening within troubled UK child protection practices.

Children’s sexting is presented as an emergent outcome of technology-based innovation in children’s peer-to-peer relations. We argue that it calls for creative responses that draw on adults’ and children’s understandings and views and on exchanges of these. We describe, and make the case for, intergenerational co-learning as a practice that could foster such creativity, as a pathway for children’s participation in the debate, and as a means by which media regulators, children’s service providers, and social media companies can consider and address their capabilities and responsibilities.

All bodies—child, animal, plant—are bodies sustained by life processes. Human as well as animal and plant bodies coexist with a multiplicity of microbial life. As symbiotic partners, human bodies are ecosystems of microbial life in a microbial world. In this way, microbes cannot simply be seen as disease-causing and human bodies as hosts of human-only life. Simplistic notions of the child as a unitary and social subject and the image of the agentic child are both questioned by this view. What if we considered for childhood studies the body’s microbial constitution in a bacterial world? How would everyday life unfold as a more-than-human sociality in which children act, think, and feel on a daily basis? In this conversation article, seven multidisciplinary scholars address the following questions by grounding their responses in their respective fields, in childhood, and in their research interests: How do microbes and childhood matter in your research? Consider how the understanding of microbes as foundational for life influences your field of research. How does your research seek to engage the biosocial imagination and the challenge of integrating biological and social understandings of the child in fruitful and robust ways? How do considerations of microbes and childhood bring together multidisciplinary engagements?