Dark pedagogy – speculative realism and environmental and sustainability education

Abstract

This article draws on the emerging speculative realist philosophical movement in order to develop new understandings of the issues and content of education that needs framing and reframing within environmental and sustainability education (ESE) research. We argue for the potential of using speculative realist concepts such as correlationism, hyperobjects, the strange stranger, undermining, overmining and duomining in order to develop a dark pedagogy that could draw on insights from speculative realism and object-oriented ontology in particular in order to develop further key concepts and discussions within ESE. Based on inspiration from speculative realism, our conception of a dark pedagogy could strive to: develop an understanding of the hyperobjects and the strangeness of objects of education at the center of ESE. Our conception of dark pedagogy insists on the inherent withdrawnness of the objects at play in ESE, and envisions to develop a sensibility towards eco-, geo-, infra- and chrono-factors in ESE and make explicit the potential educational implications of speculative realisms.

Keywords:

• Environmental and sustainability education
• dark pedagogy
• speculative realism
• object oriented ontology
• hyperobjects

Acknowledgements

This paper is part of a greater project focusing on linking speculative realism and pedagogical and educational research under the header of Dark Pedagogy. The project has many mothers and fathers. One of them, Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen, is not credited as an author of this paper, but is substantial to the development of the thoughts behind Dark Pedagogy and also directly involved in other publications within the project (Lysgaard, Bengtsson, and Laugesen 2019).