Editorial: humour and environmental education

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© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

Keywords:

• Environmental education
• humour
• comedy
• emotions
• affect

Feminists, according to Sara Ahmed (2010), ‘kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism’ (582) and their interventions are often ‘read as about the unhappiness of feminists rather than about what feminists are unhappy about’ (583). The same might be said about environmental educators, who have a reputation in some quarters for being ‘killjoys’ who peddle in doom-and-gloom (Verlie 2020). While environmental educators often do raise discomforting issues in their efforts to disrupt and transform the unsustainable and inequitable status quo, are we the universally dour bunch such stereotyping suggests? The three of us would say not. Like Ahmed, we have found that, “There can be joy in killing joy” (592) and such joy can bubble up, for example, when we work with kindred spirits committed to a shared purpose or when we witness others having an “aha!” moment. Alongside the impassioned pleas and occasional harsh words, peals of laughter can be heard ringing through the conference halls, windowless rooms, Zoom meetings, and other sites where we environmental educators gather together professionally.

While scholars have been increasingly attending to the emotional and affective dimensions of environmental education, including discussing grief, loss, solastalgia, anxiety, despair, hope, love, care, and empathy (see Ojala 2022; Pihkala 2020; Russell and Oakley 2016), until this Special Issue, humour had received minimal attention in environmental education research. When we were drafting the Call for Papers, we found a paper that discussed humour as a trigger for emotional engagement in outdoor education (Hoad, Deed, and Lugg 2013) as well as brief mentions of humour in descriptions of pedagogical practices (McKenzie et al. 2010; Publicover et al. 2018; Russell 2019) and in writing on Indigenous approaches to environmental education (Cole 2012; Korteweg, Gonzalez, and Guillet 2010; Lowan-Trudeau 2019).

We also observed that there had been a flurry of research activity related to humour and climate change communication (e.g. Anderson and Becker 2018; Boykoff and Osnes 2019; Chandler, Osnes, and Boykoff 2020; Kaltenbacher and Drews 2020; Osnes, Boykoff, and Chandler 2019; Skurka, Niederdeppe, and Nabi 2019). In their review of English-language literature focused on humour in climate change communication, Miriam Kaltenbacher and Stefan Drews (2020) found that the results of the various studies differed, with some indicating that humour distracted from serious messaging and dampened credibility while others revealed increased engagement, awareness, and actual or intended behaviour change. Kaltenbacher and Drews suggested, then, that “it is currently unclear whether using humor in environmental communication is doing more harm than good” (718). Since that review, numerous papers have delved into diverse forms of climate change communication. For example, Anna Nordenstam and Wictoran (2022) analysed messaging about climate justice and gender in Swedish comics and the ways in which they act as a form of “comic activism.” Other scholars have attended to the humorous signs used by children and youth in student climate change strikes (e.g. Catanzaro and Collin 2023; Hee et al. 2022), with Matthew Hee, Anna-Sophie Jürgens, Anastasiya Fiadotava, Karina Judd and Hannah Feldman (2022) observing how students’ use of wordplay such as “fossil fools” (7) and pop cultural references such as “Leonardo DiCapro’s [sic] girlfriend deserves a future” (9) enabled students to not only engage in political discourse by critiquing politicians’ positions and inaction, but to reach their peers using “humor styles that appeal to their particular age group, such as satire and nihilism” (16) and “build communication skills that effectively capture and move audiences” (19).

It is not only climate change that has piqued researchers’ interest in humour and environmental communication. As just one example, Caty Borum Chattoo and Lindsay Green-Barber (2021) reported on a project in which investigative journalists worked with stand-up comics to develop a show about toxic environmental contamination. In post-show question-and-answer sessions, “audience members asked for additional information and endeavored to more deeply understand the complicated toxic contamination issues explored through the comedy” (210) and later reported in post-show surveys that the show helped them become better informed.

There is great potential in such “eco-comedy,” argues Geo Takach (2022), especially when comedy and environmentalism share two imperatives: “(a) to critique business-as-usual and (b) to set the stage for positive change” (372). Those two imperatives are also predominant in scholarship on the uses of humour in other social change movements. Humour has been part of protests and other forms of resistance in diverse political contexts, “from open democratic societies to harsh repressive regimes” (Hart 2007, 1) because of how it can speak truth to power (Bhargava and Chilana 2023; Chattoo and Feldman 2020; Obadare 2009; Sørensen 2013). According to Anna Frey (2021), “Defiant humour and laughter are dangers to the dominant order” (8). No wonder, then, that humour has “long been used to confront privilege, weaken the power of oppressors and empower resistance” (Branagan 2007, 470). Feminist activists, for example, “have long recognized and taken up laughter as political action” (Frey 2021, 7), including the Raging Grannies using “satirical song and creative performance to draw the attention of public and authorities to peace, social justice, and environmental issues” (Roy 2007, 141), the Missile Dick Chicks using humour in their anti-war “performance activism” (Kutz-Flamenbaum 2007), and the Knitting Nannas using “craftivism” to add “a creative, joyful, and calming influence” to anti-fracking protests (Larri and Newlands 2017, 40).

Humour has also been helpful for building solidarity in social justice and environmental movements and alleviating the stresses of activism that can lead to burnout (Bore et al. 2017; Branagan 2007; Curnow et al. 2021). For example, Joe Curnow, Tresanne Fernandes, Sinéad Dunphy and Lila Asher (2021) investigated how youth climate activists used “snark,” which they describe as humour “that relies on sarcasm, biting wit, irony, self-deprecation, and, often, anger” (949), to express frustrations, trouble problematic group dynamics, enhance group cohesion, and engage in collective care-work. They also observed how “snarky humour played a key role in politicizing young women climate activists [and] facilitated uptake of feminist politics by affirming and opening space for critique” (950). Such humour, they argued, can enable rich social learning, a process Curnow et al. dubbed “pedagogies of snark” (949).

Other scholars working in educational fields with close ties to social movements have also pondered humour, typically building on more general inquiries into the pedagogical potential and pitfalls of using it (e.g. Banas et al. 2011; Garner 2006; Gordon and Mayo 2014; Morreall 2014). For example, Anita Bright (2015) and Raúl Alberto Mora, Simon Weaver and Laura Mae Lindo (2015) have written about humour in social justice education generally, while Angel Hinzo and Lynn Schofield Clark (2019), Garry Jones and Colleen Gloin (2016) and Shannon Leddy (2018) have focused on Indigenous education, Cris Mayo (2008), Mairi McDermott and Kim Lenters (2021) and Jonathan Rossing (2016) on anti-racist education, Michalinos Zembylas (2018) on Holocaust education, Eleni Loizou and Simoni Symeonidou (2019) on critical disability education, and Majken Sørensen (2016) on activist education.

Using humour to tackle major societal injustices is tricky, however, and certainly can backfire by trivialising issues and reproducing rather than disrupting oppression (Chattoo and Feldman 2020; Goebel 2018; Tsakona and Popa 2011). No wonder, then, that Meyers (2000) described humour as a “double-edged sword” and a “risky rhetorical tool” (317). Part of the risk arises from the fact that what is found funny is subjective. As Jones and McGloin (2016) suggest, “humour relies on a certain level of knowledge in order to ‘get’ the joke” (534), and this knowledge may not be shared across cultures or generations. Indeed, as Rossing (2016) observes, one’s “insider/outsider status” (619) can have a profound influence on how humour is interpreted, and that can constrain its pedagogical potential. Goebel (2018) thus recommends educators choose, and teach, humorous content with care, recognising that “humor’s reliance on such things as irony, parody, and word play makes it particularly prone to wide differences in interpretation,” which can lead to the unfortunate outcome of some students taking “regressive statements” (49) literally and having their prejudices reinforced. Learners’ emotional responses to uncomfortable humour also can create challenges for teachers. For example, Jones and McGloin (2016) have observed how Indigenous anti-colonial humour can reveal White settler students’ “collusion in colonial violence. Discomfort, embarrassment, shame and guilt can often ensue, and these responses are complex for teachers and learners to negotiate” (538). They nonetheless argue that using humour is worth the risks. So, too, does Leddy (2018) who asserts that humour “has a soothing effect, especially in the face of grappling with difficult concepts and situations, and can ease the tensions that often arise in Indigenous education classrooms. Used judiciously, humour is a powerful tool for decolonization” (10).

As the eleven papers in this Special Issue illustrate, humour may also be a powerful tool for environmental education. Hailing from eight different countries, the authors’ inquiries are grounded in a range of sites of learning and focus on different comedic forms, offering a variety of perspectives on the ways humour features, or could feature, in environmental education. The papers also adopt an array of methodological approaches and theoretical frames, drawing not only on environmental education research and humour studies, but also scholarship in affect theory, anti-racist and Indigenous education, climate change communication, critical pedagogy, ecocriticism and language arts education, feminist theory, human-animal relations, media studies, new materialisms, philosophy, psychology, public pedagogy, science education, and social movement studies.

The papers

The first paper in our Special Issue, “The Generativity of Feminist and Environmental Cartoons for Environmental Education Research and Teaching” follows the career of renowned Australian cartoonist Judy Horacek and the ways in which academics, particularly environmental education scholar Annette Gough, have used her cartoons in teaching and research. Taking a duoethnographical approach informed by critical and feminist theory, Gough and Horacek discuss how and why cartoons can be helpful to environmental educators.

Eve Mayes and Evan Center also draw on feminist theory as well as affect theory, critical literacies, climate communication, and social movement studies in their paper, “Learning with Student Climate Strikers’ Humour: Towards Critical Affective Climate Justice Literacies.” Sharing photographs to illustrate their points, they explore the pedagogical potential of student strikers’ use of humour and describe how teachers could build on such student-created artefacts, which would allow them to attend to and examine students’ affective responses to climate texts. They also suggest that teachers could have students mobilise humour to make their own creative contributions to climate justice efforts.

Two other papers also investigate the possibilities associated with students moving beyond being recipients of humour to actively producing it themselves. In the first, “‘It Was Funny at First”: Exploring Tensions in Human-Animal Relations through Internet Memes with University Students,” Tuure Tammi and Pauliina Rautio explore how students questioned anthropocentrism and human supremacy through creating, sharing, and discussing memes. Noting the students’ complex emotional responses to the memes they generated, they argue that memes are not merely “innocent entertainment” but instead can offer incisive social commentary that opens space to consider humans’ relationships with other animals in nuanced and sometimes unexpected ways.

In the second, Angelo Spörk, André Martinuzzi, Florian Finder, and Heike Vogel-Pöschl assessed the impacts of having business management graduate students write and perform humourous sketches in a sustainable development course. In their paper, “When Students Write Comedy Scripts: Humor as an Experiential Learning Method in Environmental Education,” they describe how they helped students develop comedy-writing skills so that they could effectively convey their knowledge of various environmental issues in engaging ways. The authors found that using humour in this way not only enhanced students’ critical thinking and creativity but also helped them cope with the fear and anxiety that can come from delving into troubling topics.

Shifting from the sketch comedy used by Spörk and colleagues, Emma Carroll-Monteil probed the educative potential of a related form, stand-up comedy, in her paper, “Is Climate Change Education a Laughing Matter?” She conducted an online survey of 62 people from around the world who had watched a 30-minute clip from environmental economist and stand-up comedian Matt Winning’s Climate Strange act. Participants of all ages not only enjoyed watching the show but found it informative, and also reported that they felt less fearful about climate change and somewhat more hopeful after doing so.

Stand-up comedy is a staple of television as are scripted comedy shows. In the next paper, “From The Fresh Prince to The Politician: Climate Change Frames in American Scripted Television Comedy 1990–2020,” Katherine Carter uses frame analysis to trace how climate change was depicted over this 30-year period. Although not often featured in scripted comedies in the United States, when climate change did appear, the depictions were rarely positive. Indeed, poking fun at “obnoxious environmentalist” characters persisted over the three decades. Earlier in that time period, jokes about the benefits of a warming climate were common although these appear to have given way now to more nihilistic joking about the futility of climate action.

Interactive digital games are another example of a media form that sometimes contains humorous elements. One such game, and the ways in which it has been used pedagogically, is the focus of John Cook, Ullrich Ecker, Melanie Trecek-King, Gunnar Schade, Karen Jeffers-Tracy, Jasper Fessmann, Sojung Claire Kim, David Kinkead, Margaret Orr, Emily Vraga, Kurt Roberts and Jay McDowell’s paper, “The Cranky Uncle Game: Combining Humor and Gamification to Build Student Resilience Against Climate Misinformation.” Adapted from Cook’s Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change cartoon book, the game is designed to provide “active inoculation” against misinformation about climate change. In this exploratory study of three settings where the game was used (an undergraduate biology course for non-majors, an undergraduate climate-science course, and a town sustainability committee contest), the authors identified ways in which the game worked very well but also noted issues that need to be addressed in future versions to maximise the game’s potential.

As noted in the Cranky Uncle paper, game developers often update their creations in response to feedback, just as most educators seek to continuously improve their practices. In the next paper, “Humor and Humility for Inclusive Nature Education,” Juan Miguel Arias shares findings from his year-long ethnographic study, focusing on how a group of mostly white educators working for a non-profit residential outdoor education program that serves mostly low-income students of colour honed their uses of humour. Arias found that the educators used humour in a variety of ways to create provisional safe learning spaces that enabled engagement with novelty and discomfort.

Similarly concerned with creating inclusive learning spaces, Shannon Leddy reflects on her own pedagogical uses of humour in her essay, “I Am Not a Camper: Confessions of an Indigenous Urban Environmental Educator.” As a Métis person who has taught in both university and school settings, she takes inspiration from Indigenous scholars and uses storytelling to highlight the importance of relational approaches in education. Sharing vignettes from her experiences using community mapping, art-making, and video creation with students, she sheds light on the potential of humour for delving into difficult knowledge and for facilitating learning on and with the land.

The final two papers in the Special Issue take a different tack to ponder humour and environmental education, one focused on absurdism and the other on irony. In “'A Good Hell’”: Absurdist Insights for Environmental Education and Research,” Greg Lowan-Trudeau relays how absurdism has provided him with some personal solace when dealing with the challenges of living and working in the petro-province of Alberta, Canada. Noting that absurdism is not only about being silly and satirical but also about grappling with existential questions, he provides examples of absurdist literature, theatre, and activism focused on sociopolitical and environmental dynamics to identify various avenues absurdism could open for environmental education.

Stefan Bengtsson and Jonas Lysgaard pursue a related line of inquiry in their paper, “Irony and Environmental Education: On the Ultimate Question of Environmental Education, the Universe and Everything.” They discuss how irony need not be merely a humorous way of pointing out the absurdities of contemporary times, but also can help tease out and trouble the field’s ontological and epistemological assumptions about knowledge, teaching, and learning. Drawing on an array of Western pop culture artefacts such as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, films such as Pink Panther, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Arrival, an Alanis Morrisette song, a Calvin and Hobbes comic, and a meme about the potato/non-potato binary, Bengtsson and Lysgaard playfully explore what an ironic approach could offer environmental education.

Closing reflections

As editors, the three of us are pleased that this Special Issue contains a good variety of papers, reflecting a range of theoretical and methodological influences. Many of the topics discussed in environmental education, such as those that feature in this issue like climate change, human/animal relations, and social inequities, necessitate multi- or interdisciplinary inquiries and pedagogies. Delving into humour led authors to push beyond the boundaries of their own disciplines (e.g. business management, communication, education, psychology) and, for some, to form creative collaborations that took them not only into new academic fields but also outside their professions to work with actors, cartoonists, comedians, and game developers. We are curious about the intricacies, potential, and challenges of such collaborations and how a focus on humour can not only spark but sustain such work.

The papers focus on a number of different sites of learning and there was some geographic diversity as well, with authors coming from eight different countries (Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Aside from Leddy’s paper that was deeply grounded in Indigenous traditions, however, this Special Issue has a very Western feel. Further, with no papers from Africa, Asia, or Central and South America, we recognize that we are offering a limited perspective on humour and environmental education. And that matters, especially since what is found funny is historically, culturally, and contextually specific (Jiang, Li, and Hou 2019; Schermer et al. 2019). As one example, in a recent literature review Tonglin Jiang, Hao Li and Yubou Hou (2019) argued that “Westerners and Easterners’ views toward humor fundamentally differ from each other" (2), with those in the West tending to see humour in a more positive light. They also suggest there are differences in preferred humour styles, with those in the East tending "to use less aggressive but more affiliative humor than Westerners” (3). Humour research in general has been dominated by studies conducted in WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic) countries with convenience samples of post-secondary students from the global North, which has been highly problematic for the field given some scholars have overgeneralised from these findings, “resulting in many misconceptions regarding cultural universals and variation” (Bryant and Bainbridge 2022, 8).

We also need to attend to which environmental educators have the luxury of being found funny. Since we know that course evaluations by university students are often influenced by gender, racial, and other biases (see Heffernan 2022), it does not take much of a leap to imagine that certain environmental educators may find it riskier to use humour in some contexts. Thus we concur with Caty Borum Chattoo and Lauren Feldman (2020) who argue, “Interrogating comedy’s power dynamics and understanding who is telling the story – from what vantage point and identity and experience” (191) is vital. There is ample evidence of how sexism, racism, and other biases influence how funny comedians are perceived to be (Chattoo and Feldman 2020), and that dynamic might also be at play in environmental education. Who is more likely to be seen as funny and who is more likely to be seen as a killjoy?

These are important questions to ask, especially with the rise of “edutainment” in environmental education (Lloro 2021; Topp, Thai, and Hryciw 2019), where capitalist pursuits of profit can lead to the oppression of both humans and non-humans thereby offering a disturbing hidden curriculum (Lloro 2021). Still, as the papers in this Special Issue illustrate, humour does have the potential to support animal, climate, environmental, and social justice. While not a magic potion since it “cannot, on its own, produce sweeping change at the society level," as Chattoo and Feldman (2020) assert, “it can galvanize attention, spark conversation, change how some people think and feel about social issues and groups, and foment activism” (38).

Humour also can help people cope with stress and trauma, which Hee et al. (2022) argue “can help not only to deal with feelings of despair and pessimism in the face of environmental crisis and urgency, but also to regulate these negative emotions so as not to become overwhelmed or rendered inactive” (4). While Lowan-Trudeau’s paper mentions how absurdism provided him with some solace, no other papers in the Special Issue delved into the ways in which humour might be used by environmental educators as a form of self-care. Teresa Lloro-Bidart and Keri Semenko (2017) note that environmental education scholarship has paid little attention to self-care, including how it can be a political act when it accounts for wider systemic factors that impinge on our work. We would like to know more, for example, about whether and how environmental educators use humour to cope with environmental and climate grief, address compassion fatigue, or relieve the pressures that come from the emotionally fraught labour in which we engage.

This section lists just a few of the questions we continue to have about humour and environmental education, and the authors of the papers also identify other gaps and future research needs. We do hope that this Special Issue sparks further research and conversations. Not least because we concur with Takach (2022), who writes,

eco-comedy is not an end in itself, merely a means to one. It does not blunt our planetary blitzkrieg. And it certainly doesn’t sugarcoat it. But it does offer new ways of seeing—new possibilities—as alternatives to the discursive fog polluting the public sphere. It both plays on and calls on our collective creativity, irreverence, mutuality, and perhaps the most primal quality demanded by our pivotal, cognitively dissonant, environmental moment: hope. (373)

Constance Russell Faculty of Education, Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada [email protected] Chandler Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, United StatesJustin Dillon IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education & Society, University College London, London, UK
Received 11 January 2023; Accepted 17 February 2023

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Constance Russell

Constance Russell is Professor and University Research Chair in Environmental Education in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University. Email: [email protected]

Patrick Chandler

Patrick Chandler is Education and Outreach Associate with the Cooperative Institute on Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, focused on teaching climate across the curriculum. Email: [email protected]

Justin Dillon

Justin Dillon is Professor of Science and Environmental Education in IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, University College London. Email: [email protected]