Changing social imaginaries, multiplicities and ‘one sole world’: reading Scandinavian environmental and sustainability education research papers with Badiou and Taylor at hand

Abstract

Badiou’s ontological work draws attention to multiplicities – the oneness of ontology, which he explains can only become ontologically differentiated into events or sites through political, artistic or amorous practices that philosophies can think and invent from. He also draws attention to the fusion of events and sites, and he explains that events (such as producing special issues of journals located in particular sites) are reflexive. He also tells us, however, that the reflexive structure of an artistic or scientific event (such as producing a special issue of a journal) is not always immediately evident. In writing this response article I work with this concept – and probe how the production of events (such as a special issue of a journal produced in a specific site) may be reflexive. This is the purpose of the article. This response article therefore probes some of the political, structural and intellectual processes that come to shape scholarship in different sites, and here I draw on the insights into social imaginaries provided by Charles Taylor to develop a perspective on the scholarship that is reflected in this journal. Through this, I seek to open the notion of multiplicities, oneness and the particularities of our social imaginaries as themes for thinking about educational scholarship events produced within and across geo‐physical, socio‐ecological and socio‐economic spaces in different parts of the world.

Keywords:

• environmental education
• education for sustainable development
• research
• reflexivity
• modernity
• ontology

Notes

1. Seeing everyone as a ‘neighbour’ allows one to develop a sense of ‘one sole world’, even if it is characterised by multiplicity and plurality.

2. Badiou is a contemporary French philosopher. His work is opening up new genealogies in the intellectual landscape which are interesting for environmental education because they provide ontological perspectives on change that are worth probing for insights into multiplicities and how we structure ontological views, develop re‐presentations, and how we deal with complexities, multiplicities and pluralism. His work theorises consistent structural change or the ‘creation of a world’ (Feltham 2007).

3. This debate is yet to be resolved, as shown by the distinctions between ecological modernisation, political ecology and some forms of sustainable development thinking (see, for example, Læss⊘e this issue), and of course Badiou’s challenge of why we are thinking of ecology in contemporary times, and how it relates to human emancipation. This discussion only really seems to circulate in the most vibrant activist networks – mostly in developed countries.

4. All of these are drawn from the articles in the collection, but not referenced individually.

5. Note the differentiation is still on the basis of the western event, and not on the multiplicity from where it emerges through differentiation practices, as explained by Badiou.