https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7733-666X
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Abstract
This experimental writing piece by the Earth Unbound Collective explores the ethical, political and pedagogical challenges in addressing climate change, activism and justice. The provocation Earth Unbound: the struggle to breathe and the creative thoughts that follow are inspired by the contagious energy of what Donna Haraway (Citation2016) calls response-ability or the ability to respond. This energy ripples through monthly reading groups and workshops organised by this interdisciplinary collective that emerged organically in January 2020.
Acknowledgement
Special thanks to Professor Fazal Rizvi and Professor Michael A Peters for their support and encouragement. We thank reviewers Sharon Stein and Chloe Lucas for their generosity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 I am attempting, with this contribution, to juxtapose a self-deprecatory vignette narrating my past teaching practices with an account of contemporary student climate justice activism(s). The point of this opening vignette (perhaps) is to highlight that my past pedagogical practices, and the educational systems, structures and curricula within which I have been a complicit participant, are woefully inadequate in contemporary epistemic-material-affective ecologies that are simultaneously post-truth, posthuman and polarised, and fuelled by the continuities of colonialism and fossil-fuelled industrial capitalism. The reader might speculate on possible futures for climate justice education and climate justice critical literacies, as well as the possible (welcome) collapse of the industrial colonial educational system.
2 I am not sure if these students found these pedagogical experiences to ‘feel empowering’ (cf. Ellsworth, Citation1989). In this documentary, Gore appears to believe in the power of hearing the facts to persuade humans to act to change the direction of history on earth. Thinking post-Trump, post-truth and post-human, this belief in the power of human rationality is nostalgic at best.
3 The conditions of recognition of students’ ‘voices’ and ‘agency’ are gendered, classed, and racialised. The principals/ ‘Headmasters’ who came out in explicit support of their students (as reported in the media) were from elite independent boys’ schools – describing their striking students as ‘smart’, skilled in ‘critical thinking’, ‘passionate’ and future ‘leaders.’ In other media reports, striking students were described as ‘wagging’ school, ‘truants’ and ‘pawns’.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Michele Lobo
Dr. Michele Lobo is a geographer who explores race, encounter, co-belonging and ecological justice in the Anthropocene. She serves as Editor, Social & Cultural Geography, Reviews Editor, Postcolonial Studies and Council Member, Institute of Australian Geographers. Her recent publications include ‘Affective ecologies: braiding urban worlds in Darwin, Australia’, Geoforum (2019) vol. 106, pp. 393-401.
Laura Bedford
Dr. Laura Bedford is a Lecturer in Criminology and member of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. Her areas of interest include green criminology, state-corporate crime, political ecology, activism and resistance, and policing.
Robin Ann Bellingham
Dr. Robin Ann Bellingham is a Senior Lecturer in Education, Pedagogy and Curriculum at Deakin University in Melbourne. In her research and teaching she is interested in how education and methodologies can respond to pressing problems of modernity such as educational and political disempowerment and disengagement, the ongoing effects of colonization, and ecological crisis.
Kim Davies
Dr. Kim Davies is a critical scholar and early career researcher working with creative methodologies at the intersections of sociology/cultural studies and education. Currently Kim is researching ecologies of disablement and theorising human-induced climate change as ecological, multi-species impairment. Kim is currently a Lecturer in the School of Education at Deakin University.
Anna Halafoff
Dr. Anna Halafoff is an Associate Professor in Sociology, and a member of the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University. She is the author of The Multifaith Movement: Global Risks and Cosmopolitan Solutions, and co-author (with Andrew Singleton, Mary Lou Rasmussen, and Gary Bouma) of Freedoms, Faiths and Futures: Teenage Australians on Religion, Sexuality and Diversity.
Eve Mayes
Dr. Eve Mayes is a Senior Lecturer (Pedagogy and Curriculum) and Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2020-2021) at Deakin University. Her current work is concerned with school students’ participation in the transnational School Strike for Climate movement, as well as with changing experiences of education in de-/re-industrialising contexts.
Bronwyn Sutton
Bronwyn Sutton is a PhD student at Deakin University. Her research explores processes and affects of professional and practice transformation with educators whose work involves leading communities towards environmental sustainability and action on climate change. Bronwyn’s transdisciplinary practice, research and teaching experiences cover public pedagogies, learning for sustainability, climate change education and activism, environmental psychology, leadership, communications and community engagement.
Aileen Marwung Walsh
Aileen Marwung Walsh is a Noongar Anangu woman from Western Australia and a doctoral candidate at The Australian National University. Her research examines the Aboriginal ontology of caring for country and critically examines colonising cultures that have failed to perform such caring practices. She builds on previous research into colonial language ideologies, understood as continuous cultural contexts traceable to the Greek Empire.
Sharon Stein
Dr. Sharon Stein is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research seeks to denaturalize the colonial past and present of higher education, and invite deepened engagements with the challenges, complexities, and possibilities of imagining decolonial futures.
Chloe Lucas
Dr. Chloe Lucas is a human geographer at the University of Tasmania. Her career focus is to enable constructive dialogue about climate change in a polarised society. Her research with people who are unconcerned about climate change suggests that engaging with empathy and reflexivity may yield coalitions for action across difference.