This article contributes to Wild Pedagogies by foregrounding love as an emergent, affective practice that takes shape through embodied, affective encounters with the more-than-human (Whatmore, 2006) and material world. Engaging post-qualitative sensibilities, it approaches walking and writing not as fixed methods, but as entangled, responsive practices that invite ethical attunement to the unfolding rhythms of the living world. While Wild Pedagogies emphasise relationality, they have yet to fully account for affect as a pedagogical force. Addressing this gap, the article traces how love moves through diverse encounters, shaping perception, responsibility, and responsiveness. Love is conceptualised through three interwoven affective pathways: shimmering rupture (moments that unsettle habitual perception), relational resonance (the affective flow that binds beings in co-becoming), and cyclical attunement (the rhythmic deepening of ethical engagement). These pathways reframe love as a material practice of staying-with (Haraway, 2016)—a commitment to returning, noticing, and responding to the world’s ongoing entanglements.

This paper examines the fissures within recent decolonial debates, arguing for the privileging of alternative narratives from formerly colonized groups and a shift away from centring colonialism. It calls for the recognition of decolonial struggles whose histories run deep and the need to link the struggles with indigeneity, its poetics of relations, and connectedness. Therefore, decoloniality requires thinking and doing and paying attention to social and economic well-being of hitherto marginalized indigenous communities, while giving due recognition to their poetics of relationality, reciprocity, and conviviality. Drawing on the example of #RhodesMust Fall movement in South Africa, it raises difficult questions around ownership, agency, while pointing to cracks that this contemporary movement surfaced, in spite of its claim to decoloniality.