{"id":7088,"date":"2017-11-08T08:42:55","date_gmt":"2017-11-08T08:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7088"},"modified":"2017-11-08T08:42:55","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T08:42:55","slug":"beyond-stewardship-a-troubled-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2017\/11\/08\/beyond-stewardship-a-troubled-text\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond stewardship \u2013 a troubled text"},"content":{"rendered":"

I've been reading (with some difficulty)\u00a0Beyond stewardship: common world pedagogies for the\u00a0Anthropocene<\/em> by\u00a0Affrica Taylor (Faculty of Education, Science, Technology and Mathematics, University of Canberra) who \"infuses her geographies of childhood, common world pedagogies, and multispecies ethnographic research\u00a0with feminist, queer and decolonising environmental humanities perspectives\". (sic<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Here's the Abstract:<\/p>\n

Interdisciplinary Anthropocene debates are prompting calls for a paradigm\u00a0shift in thinking about what it means to be human and about our place\u00a0and agency in the world. Within environmental education, sustainability\u00a0remains centre stage and oddly disconnected from these Anthropocene\u00a0debates. Framed by humanist principles, most sustainability education\u00a0promotes humans as the primary change agents and environmental\u00a0stewards. Although well-meaning, stewardship pedagogies do not provide\u00a0the paradigm shift that is needed to respond to the implications of the\u00a0Anthropocene. Anthropocene-attuned \u2018common worlds\u2019 pedagogies move\u00a0beyond the limits of humanist stewardship framings. Based upon a more-than-human relational ontology, common world pedagogies reposition\u00a0childhood and learning within inextricably entangled life-worlds, and seek\u00a0to learn from what is already going on in these worlds. This article illustrates\u00a0how a common worlds approach to learning \u2018with\u2019 nonhuman others rather\u00a0than \u2018about\u2019 them and \u2018on their behalf\u2019 offers an alternative to stewardship\u00a0pedagogies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And here's the last paragraph:<\/p>\n

Instead of seeking to become better humans by continuing to believe that we are destined to act\u00a0(alone) on behalf of the world, the common worlds response to the Anthropocene is quite simply to\u00a0keep working at ways of become more worldly through focusing upon our entangled relations with\u00a0the more-than-human world. This is a much more modest response than the ultimately human-centric\u00a0impulse to break away and \u2018save\u2019 the world. It is a collective or commoning response that refuses human\u00a0exceptionalism. It is a low-key, ordinary, everyday kind of response that values and trusts the generative\u00a0and recuperative powers of small and seemingly insignificant wordly relations infinitely more than it\u00a0does the heroic tropes of human rescue and salvation narratives. These are the kinds of non-divisive\u00a0relations that many young children already have with the world. They are full of small achievements. \u00a0We can learn with them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These two extracts give you a reasonably clear flavour of what's of concern here, and there is undoubtedly something in this sort of stuff, given how troubled our relations are with other species. \u00a0However, it\u2019s a pity that the main body of the jargon-riddled paper has been written in such a way as to obscure meaning. \u00a0It\u2019s written in this way, of course, to ensure that fellow writers see Taylor as part of the enlightened 'post-' crowd. \u00a0It\u2019s really just early 21st century capitalism at work in academia: creating new products; establishing new markets; advertising;\u00a0seeking investment; overthrowing old products; creating wealth.<\/p>\n

As a recovering academic, I can't afford to spend much time on this sort of stuff, but I'll give one example of the problem with what's in the paper. \u00a0Take this extract about children encountering kangaroos on campus (my emphasis<\/strong><\/em>):<\/p>\n

\"Clearly stimulated by their increasing familiarity and affection for the kangaroos and their close-up\u00a0observations of these wild animals\u2019 embodied modes of being, the children were increasingly curious\u00a0about what it would be like to live in a kangaroo\u2019s body, to listen attentively with large swiveling ears,\u00a0to be tucked up like a joey in a furry pouch, to rest upright upon an enormous tail. They frequently<\/strong>\u00a0expressed a sense of kinship with the joeys.\u00a0<\/strong>On a regular basis the children <\/em>spontaneously became<\/strong>\u00a0kangaroos,\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>simulating the kangaroo mannerisms and movements that they had observed so many\u00a0times in their up-close, face-to-face meetings (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw\u00a02016a). They were, in effect,\u00a0performing the kind of learning with that proceeds from the unfolding of real-life, inter-subjective,\u00a0inter-species ontological relations, and which is all about actively seeking the kinds of cross-species\u00a0identifications and inter-subjective \u2018becomings with\u2019 that the divisive humanist learning project, with\u00a0its structuring subject-object knowledge relations, cannot envision ...\"<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, they didn\u2019t become kangaroos\u00a0(spontaneously or otherwise). \u00a0They might have pretended to, but that\u2019s another matter. \u00a0Incidentally, why does this sense of kinship\u00a0never seems to extend to rats, cobras, lice, the ebola virus, or TB bacillus?<\/p>\n

It's a tiresome piece, and if you want to read about such ideas, I'd say start with Being a Beast<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0by Charles Foster (Profile Books). \u00a0Better still, perhaps, watch the first episode of Brass Eye<\/strong>,<\/em><\/a> from 1979. \u00a0Then there are these recent books:<\/p>\n