Educational Research in the Anthropocene

Author Professor Karen Malone

What kinds of worlds is educational research helping to create? What kinds of worlds might we need to learn to live within?

We are living in the Anthropocene – a time of overlapping crises, climate instability, technological acceleration, social inequity, war insecurity, and these are not external to education. They are already shaping the present and the planetary future how children live, learn, feel, and imagine.  The 2021 UNESCO report Reimagining our Futures Together sums it up this way:

“At present the ways we organize education across the world do not do enough to ensure just and peaceful societies, a healthy planet, and shared progress that benefits all. In fact, some of our difficulties stem from how we educate. A new social contract for education needs to allow us to think differently about learning and the relationships between students, teachers, knowledge, and the world” (UNESCO 2021, p.3).

In this session drawing on the UNESCO futures of education framework and the current context of the Anthropocene I want us to consider together how research is being reconfigured and is playing a key role in reshaping an emerging education future.

1. What is Education For?

We are at a moment where one of the most fundamental questions is being reopened—what is education actually for? For much of the 20th century, education was framed around economic productivity, human capital, and future preparation. But that framing is increasingly unstable. UNESCO Reimagining Our Futures Together 2021 calls for a new social contract for education:

“Education is a key enabler of all other human rights… yet we need to transform it to repair injustices while transforming the future.”(UNESCO 2021, p. 1).

So this framing of education as preparing children for the workforce, for productivity, for the future is no longer sufficient. Put simply education is no longer about preparation for uncertainty- it is about participation in uncertainty. Itis about reimagining worlds in the present.

As Affrica Taylor reminds us: “Children are not outside environmental problems; they are already implicated within them” (Taylor, 2013, Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood, p. 5). This challenges the idea of the child as future citizen. Instead, children and young people are sensing, responding, living and learning about a world by being in the world.

The key shift in Education I am identifying here and is evident in all global documents on education for the future generation is no longer about future readiness, it is about living well now within uncertainty. The research questions this raises for education is: How do children experience, sense, and live in the Anthropocene?

2. What is Education in the Anthropocene?

If education is, as Klafki (1995) observed, always about enabling learners to address the key problems of the age, then the Anthropocene represents the most pressing horizon for pedagogical reflection. Education must equip future generations not only with technical skills but with the ethical, cultural, and ecological capacities required to navigate a world in crisis. The 2021 UNESCO report states,

“Curricula must enable re-learning how we are interconnected with a living, damaged planet and unlearning the human arrogance that has resulted in massive biodiversity loss, the destruction of entire ecosystems, and irreversible climate change.” (p.66).

Which brings me to the second major shift is that education is now unfolding within a significant ecological crisis. The current crisis intensifies the need for a shift in educational thinking. Democratic erosion, colonial violence, and ecological crisis all rely on logics of separation. As Bruno Latour (2018) has argued, the modern project has been built on the illusion that humans stand apart from the Earth. This illusion is no longer sustainable.

Arturo Escobar (2018) calls for an opening to consider a ‘pluriverse’, a world where many worlds fit, challenging the dominance of singular, extractive ways of being. The view of a pluriverse is of a radical ontological and political proposition that challenges the assumption of a single, universal reality governed by Western modernity. Rather than one dominant worldview, the pluriverse recognises multiple ways of knowing, being, and relating, many of which have been marginalised or suppressed through colonial and capitalist expansion.  Pluriverse foregrounds autonomy, relationality, and coexistence, allowing for multiple forms of life to persist without being absorbed into extractive, homogenising systems.

Bayo Akomolafe’s (https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/) provocation to “make sanctuary” in “scorched earth times” unsettles the familiar impulse toward research knowledge that will help us repair and control the Earth, as solution-driven responses to ecological crisis. Rather than positioning the human as a sovereign agent tasked with fixing a damaged world, Akomolafe invites a decentring—a turning toward relational entanglement, vulnerability, and co-becoming. Sanctuary, in this framing, is not a place of refuge but a practice for staying with it. It is an ethical and ontological reorientation that asks us to dwell within the frictions, ambiguities, and unfinishedness of our times. If we ask what kind of education system responds to the Anthropocene, the answer would be certainly not the one we inherited. Yet we start by dwelling in the in-between – of what was and want is becoming. 

3. What Counts as Knowledge in the Anthropocene?

In contemporary times we are seeing a profound shift in what counts as knowledge. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes: “Science can give us knowing, but it cannot give us caring” (Kimmerer, 2013, p. 300). Education systems have privileged abstract knowledge and measurable outcomes to the exclusion of sensory knowing, relational knowing, Indigenous knowledge systems. We are coming to realise we need new forms of knowledge production. Hybrid knowing through academic, creative, scientific, Indigenous, human, transhumanism, technological and organic.  What is being challenged here is not just what we know—but how knowledge is produced.

Education has historically privileged cognitive over sensory knowing; human over more-than-human perspectives; Western epistemologies over Indigenous and place-based knowledges. And in doing so, it has often abstracted learning from lived experience, separated knowledge from place and positioned learners as detached observers rather than participants.  What we are now seeing is an expansion toward plural and relational epistemologies.

“Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) recognised the body as the primary site of knowing, proposing that perception itself is always entangled in a field of sensations. Yet within the Western academy, such embodied relationality has often been side-lined in favour of cognition and abstraction” (Malone, et. al. 2026).

Knowledge is being rethought as embodied (felt through the body); affective (emerging through emotion and atmosphere; relational (arising through connections with others human and more-than-human); and situated (grounded in place, culture, and context).  

We are being exposed to hybrid and entangled knowing. Rather than replacing one system with another, we are moving toward hybrid forms of knowledge production. Knowledge becomes something that is co-composed through academic theory, scientific inquiry, Indigenous knowledge, creative and artistic practice, embodied experiential encounters, technological systems and more-than-human agencies. This is not about a coming together in a neat or harmonious sense but about an entangled, messy, complicated knowing. Different knowledge systems do not simply sit alongside one another they interfere, overlap, challenge, and reshape each other. In a recent chapter on education in the Anthropocene I wrote:

“Thinking with theories as convergences of the new and post humanities invites us not only to reconfigure the child and the child as educative subject but also to reconfigure what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge matters. They demand an ethical reorientation to more-than-human life as a co-learner and co-agent in pedagogical encounters” (Malone 2026)

4. Who is the Learner? Who is the teacher?

In these times we are also seeing a rethinking of the learner and the teacher. Who is the learner? Who is the teacher? A learner who is no longer an individual, but as a relational body is entangled in complex worlds. Both teacher and learner, are human and non-human. As Karen Barad states: “Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.” (Barad, 2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway, p. 33). Learning is increasingly understood as embodied and affective. As Erin Manning suggests:

“The body is not a thing but a process of becoming.” (Manning, 2014, p. 14)

The learner is not an isolated child but a node in a web of relations. Place matters deeply. We are the place- it isnt a context for our lives but we co-create the world in our being in it. Caring of the planet is more than climate education, it is about shifting from awareness to ethical relational responsibility.

As Deborah Bird Rose writes: “Ethics is a call to respond… in a world of connections.” (Rose, 2011, p. 19).

My teacher is not only, no longer a knowing human, it is the world, a whale, water, wind and AI.

5.  How are technologies reshaping education?

Which leads us to consider we cannot ignore the role of technology particularly AI and dataification. Digital systems are not neutral tools; they actively shape knowledge, learning, and power. As Neil Selwyn (Monash Uni) argues: “Digital technologies are never simply technical—they are always social, political and cultural.” (Selwyn, 2022, Education and Technology, p. 6). The question is not just how we use technology often – but how it is reconfiguring what is means to be human, our relationship with the Earth and the purpose of education. UNESCO futures of education programs situates AI within a broader “planetary futures” agenda, where education is tasked with reconfiguring relationships between humans, technologies, and the Earth. AI is not treated as a neutral tool but as a transformative force that reshapes knowledge, agency, and what it means to be human, demanding new ethical, ecological, and relational orientations in education.

“Our ways of living have drifted out of balance with the planet, with the abundance of life it supports, threatening our current and future well-being and our continued existence. Our uncritical embrace of technology too often pushes us dangerously apart, truncates conversation and unravels mutual understanding, despite a potential to accomplish the opposite” (UNESCO 2021, p.9)

We are entering a moment where the boundaries of the human itself are being rethought. Transhuman and posthuman perspectives invite us to consider cognition as extended beyond the brain, intelligence as distributed across human and nonhuman systems and learning as something that co-exists across biological and technological assemblages.  The question reemerges as:  What does it mean to be human in an age of intelligent machines? And how should education respond to this? This is not simply about enhancement or efficiency it is about redefining subjectivity, embodiment, and agency.

So, the question is not whether technology belongs in education. It already does. It already is. The questions might be: What kinds of educational futures are being produced through these technologies?  Who benefits—and who is excluded?  What happens to care, relation, and embodiment in increasingly digital environments? Technology is not simply changing how we teach. It is reshaping what it means to know, what it means to learn and ultimately, what it means to be human. And this requires not just technical responses but deep ethical and philosophical engagement.

“To change course and imagine alternative futures, we urgently need to rebalance our relationships with each other, with the living planet, and with technology. We must relearn our interdependencies and our human place and agency in a more-than-human world” (UNESCO 2021, p. 9).

6. How does this impact research?

We are in period of great upheaval and uncertainty where western education systems are under significant pressure. While there is also a strong push toward “evidence-based” education, often privileging methods like RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials) this adds to and creates tensions around what is working and what is failing. As Gert Biesta argues: “The question of ‘what works’ is not sufficient for educational practice.” (Biesta, 2007, p. 5) Because education is not just technical, it is ethical and relational.

In response research itself is changing, it is becoming emergent, relational, situated, fluid.  As Betty St Pierre states: “We are no longer interested in method as a set of rules” (Elizabeth St. Pierre 2011).

We are navigating tensions and challenges in our research becoming such as: Measurement vs Meaning; Speed vs Slowness; Evidence vs Relations. Postqualitative research emerges as an unfolding for asking different questions and doing research differently.  It invites us to ask not only what research is becoming—but what it is no longer. What are we no longer? Let us consider some provocations of the no longer:

What if we are no longer detached observers, standing outside the world we study?

What if we are no longer extracting data, as if it could be collected and owned?

What if we are no longer seeking neat answers, stable findings, or universal truths?

What if we are no longer controlling research with predefined designs and protocols?

After considering who we are no longer as researchers, I ask next what we are becoming?

We are becoming participants in the worlds we study

We are becoming entangled within the phenomena we research

We are becoming responsive to what emerges, rather than imposing structure upon it

We are becoming ethical and relational seeking news for seeing and knowing

New processes emerge to support what we are becoming such as diffractive methods which allows us to map not what is, but what could be, what is emerging, methods which follow changes, document differences, silences, emergence. As Donna Haraway writes: “Diffraction is a mapping of interference” (1992). This is not about reflecting reality but tracing how ideas, bodies, materials intersect and what happens when they do.

We are seeing a strong move beyond human-centred research. Multispecies and material methods become popular in order to start to map that which has been hidden and silenced. As Jane Bennett writes: “The capacity of things… to act as quasi agents or forces is a vital materiality” (2010, p. viii).  This invites us to consider how plants, animals, materials participate in learning, knowledge producers. Agency, voice and subjectivities start interacting as complex human and more than human relations. As Anna Tsing writes: “Human nature is an interspecies relationship” (2015, p. 144).

Creative methods allow us to engage with complexity, to experiment, discover, be curious in how we explore encounters and how we share what we are learning. “Arts-based practices open up new ways of seeing” (Leavy, 2015).

Slowing down considering research as a process not a product or an outcome becomes our mantra.  As Isabelle Stengers says: “Slow science is about creating the time to think” (Stengers 2018).

Walking and sensorial methods supports us to slow down and lingering in the not-yet-resolved, the hidden, it’s a going on together.

“Slowing down is not about getting answers, it is about questioning our questions. It is about staying in the places that are haunted” (Akomolafe 2021) – Online post- Slower Urgency August 3, 2021.

7. Where is all this heading?

Planetary coexistence / Expanded ethics/ Research as world-making

Donna Haraway writes: “It matters what worlds we world worlds with”(2016, p. 35) it matters what questions we ask, what the stories we tell.  Education research is no longer about finding answers. We are already undone by the world. Research and meaning making is about how to live well in the uncertainty of a damaged, lively world. As Anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) reminds us,

“We are contaminated by our encounters; they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds – and new directions – may emerge. One value of keeping precarity in mind is that it makes us remember that changing with circumstances is the stuff of survival” (p. 27).

A central message to you as researchers. Tsing’s notion of contamination disrupts the humanist fantasy of autonomy. Rather than bounded individuals, life emerges through encounter, disturbance, and transformation. Contamination can be generative as well as destructive either way it is always making opening new directions for world-making.  We know learning to adapt is survival.

This post is a summary of presentation at the STEERHUB, School of Social Science, Media, Film and Education Research Masterclasses on 9th April 2026. A recording of the presentation is available at the following VIMEO link https://vimeo.com/1181446034

Key References

Akomolafe, B. (2019). Making Sanctuary: Hope, Companionship, Race and Emergence in the Anthropocene. Keynote Speech, ‘Seeking Connections Across Generations’ for Spiritual Directors International at the Seattle Marriott Bellevue.

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Duke University Press.

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter. Duke University Press.

Biesta, G. (2007). Why “what works” won’t work. Educational Theory, 57(1), 1–22.

Clark, A. (2010). Transforming children’s spaces. Routledge.

Dahlberg, G., Moss, P., & Pence, A. (2007). Beyond quality in early childhood education and care. Routledge.

Haraway, D. (1992). The promises of monsters. In L. Grossberg et al. (Eds.), Cultural studies. Routledge.

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Duke University Press.

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass. Milkweed Editions.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From the achievement gap to the education debt. Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3–12.

Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Harvard University Press.

Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art. Guilford Press.

Malone, K. (2026 in production) Eco-Bildung within New and Post Humanities, in Bhowmik, C. and Popa, N. (eds) Bildung and the Anthropocene. Springer.

Malone, K. et. al (2026) Earthly Methodologies as Unfolding Childhoods, Springer.

Manning, E. (2014). Always more than one. Duke University Press.

OECD. (2025). Trends Shaping Education . OECD Publishing.

Selwyn, N. (2022) (3ed Education and Technology: Key Issues and Debates. Bloomsbury.

Stengers, I. (2018). Another science is possible. Polity Press.

St. Pierre, E. A. (2011). Post qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 17(7), 611–619.

Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Routledge.

Tsing, A. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world. Princeton University Press.

UNESCO. (2021). Reimagining our futures together. UNESCO.