{"id":7453,"date":"2019-05-02T07:06:41","date_gmt":"2019-05-02T07:06:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7453"},"modified":"2019-05-02T07:06:41","modified_gmt":"2019-05-02T07:06:41","slug":"esd-lost-in-the-capitalocene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2019\/05\/02\/esd-lost-in-the-capitalocene\/","title":{"rendered":"ESD: lost in the Capitalocene"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sadly, it is too late to submit your manuscript idea or abstract for a special issue Educational Philosophy and Theory<\/em> (EPAT). \u00a0Full details here.<\/a>\u00a0 My thoughts are at the end of the editors' lengthy blurb:<\/p>\n

ESD in the \u201dCapitalocene\u201d: Caught up in an impasse between Critique and Transformation<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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Has Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) reached an impasse? \u00a0Offering an application of Baudrillard\u2019s thoughts to educational research, Paul Moran and Alex Kendall wrote in 2009 that education researchers are engaged in an act of forgery; a manufacture of presuppositions about what education is. \u00a0Moran and Kendall argue that our research approaches, produce nothing but illusions of education, not because our approaches and methodologies are somehow flawed, rather that these illusions are what education is. \u00a0Education, they claim, does not exist beyond its simulation.<\/p>\n

Perhaps more provocatively, this implies that all critique of educational practice, from the revolutionary critical theory of Marx and the Frankfurt School via Foucauldian power analyses, as well as more recent \u201dnew materialist\u201d and post-qualitative approaches and beyond \u2013are also part of the simulation of education process. \u00a0These movements constitute an \u201cimprovement agenda\u201d of education, and over and over again, more interventions are produced and critiques are repeated to foster improvements,\u00a0pursued as if they were possible<\/em>\u00a0(Moran & Kendall 2009, p. 329).<\/p>\n

We would like to take this Baudrillardian analysis of education as a springboard for thinking around ESD and capitalism. \u00a0ESD is paradoxically positioned right at the nexus of looming ecological crises (\u201dthe Anthropocene\u201d [Crutzen & Stoermer 2000]; the \u201dCapitalocene\u201d [Malm & Hornborg 2014]) while at the same time the ESD field has been severely criticised for its presumed normativity (Jickling 1994). \u00a0Quite regardless of the validity of this critique, embedded in the core idea of ESD is, arguably, a grandiose \u201dimprovement agenda\u201d \u2013 not only of education, but of the planetary condition as such. \u00a0There is an asssumption that if we can find the appropriate way of \u201ddoing\u201d ESD, a sustainable world is within reach.<\/p>\n

However, if there is nothing that may be called education \u201cthat exists independently of the methodologies, comments, curricula designs, testing regimes, forms of discrimination\u201d, as Moran and Kendall (2009, p. 333) put it, what place is there \u2013 if any \u2013 for ESD under current conditions of predatory capitalism, exploitation of natural \u201cresources\u201d, transgression of planetary boundaries, and the destructive fantasy of infinite growth? \u00a0Does ESD generate nothing but reproduction, much like capitalism itself (e.g. Hellberg & Knutsson 2018)? \u00a0Is ESD an affect-organizing \u201ccomfort-machine\u201d in the classroom (Pedersen 2019), sustaining the present order of things? \u00a0Perhaps Bruno Latour (2004) captures the point most aptly: \u201dAre we not like those mechanical toys that endlessly make the same gesture when everything else has changed around them?\u201d (p. 225) \u00a0Latour suggests, that the critic \u201cis not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the na\u00efve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather\u201d (p. 246). \u00a0Such arenas, Giroux observes, need \u201can understanding of how the political becomes pedagogical, particularly in terms of how private issues are connected to larger social conditions and collective force\u201d (Giroux 2004, p.62).<\/p>\n

Stratford (2017) has recently called for education researchers to identify and respond to the challenging philosophical issues evoked by the current ecological crises. \u00a0Our initiative is a response to Stratfords\u2019s call; however, our starting point differs from how educational philosophy can \u201cimprove education in the Anthropocene\u201d (p. 3) and is rather concerned with the \u201cimpossibility\u201d of this claim.<\/p>\n

We suggest that the idea of ESD as producing illusions of education rather than a sustainable world, does not necessarily lead to an impasse, but can, in Moran and Kendall\u2019s (2009) words, be a very useful place to begin. \u00a0We are looking for theory-, philosophy-, and empirically-driven papers that address the \u00a0\u201dimpossible\u201d position of ESD in \u201dthe Capitalocene\u201d at an urgent juncture in history.<\/p>\n

Contributions may address, for instance, the following areas of inquiry;<\/p>\n

\u2013 Has ESD reached an impasse, and if so; how can it be understood?<\/p>\n

\u2013 Are there \u201dfunctions\u201d of ESD beyond the improvement agenda, and beyond the cycle of Critique and Transformation?<\/p>\n

\u2013 Is ESD a form of simulation and, if so, what purposes might such simulation serve?<\/p>\n

\u2013 How can ESD\u00a0effectively<\/em>\u00a0interfere with capitalism, its forces and threats to life-supporting Earth systems?<\/p>\n

\u2013 In what arenas of intervention and action can ESD assemble its participants?<\/p>\n

\u2013 How can we reimagine education in extinction and post-extinction narratives?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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......................................<\/p>\n

Gosh! \u00a0This is clever stuff, at least in that navel-gazing way that academics like: but more clever-clever<\/em> than actually clever, perhaps. \u00a0Too clever by half some will no doubt say, but EPAT went for it anyway. \u00a0I do wonder what it will have to say to the schools that my grandchildren are attending \u2013 or to the thousands of young people marching in protest about the inadequacy of responses to climate change. \u00a0I imagine very little \u2013 but that's not what EPAT is for.<\/p>\n

I did think of contributing something \u2013 an epic poem perhaps; Beowulf meets Bruno<\/em> for a night out in Brighton<\/em>, maybe, but 3182 lines seemed a bit of a stretch. \u00a0Or (to make things a bit easier on myself) a sonnet whose 12 + 2 line form is perfect for a reflection on ESD (and there are rhymes a plenty). \u00a0Or a Limerick which is even shorter, but \"There once were five earnest researchers from G\u00f6teborg\" <\/em>doesn't offer much promise. \u00a0<\/em>Or maybe a Haiku, I thought (only seventeen syllables in three verses); I could surely manage that \u2013 although the risk of offending the sensibilities of the entire Japanese nation would be high. \u00a0In the end I decided to contribute something even more minimalist and took this to its logical conclusion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sadly, it is too late to submit your manuscript idea or abstract for a special issue Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT). \u00a0Full details here.\u00a0 My thoughts are at the end of the editors' lengthy blurb: ESD in the \u201dCapitalocene\u201d: Caught...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7453\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}