Environmental Sustainability Education in the Anthropocene
Environmental Sustainability Education in the Anthropocene Collective is a research and teaching seeking to disrupt narrow views of thinking about environmental sustainability education by responding to the call of the Anthropocene. Exploring possibilities for post sustainability education within the Anthropocene means to trace how humans became such a potent environmental force that a signature of all our doings, for good or ill, will be measurable in the layered rock for millions of years to come. By altering climate, landscapes, and seascapes, as well as flows of species, genes, energy, and materials, we have damaged our planet, many say beyond redemption. The impact of pollution, toxins, climate change, habitat destruction, overpopulation and human consumption means the sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history is under way, and it is thought to be more severe than previously feared. In realisation of the damaged planet we have inherited, and bestowed upon our fellow kin this collective of key figures in the field of environmental and sustainability education come together to consider new possibilities both theoretically and philosophically for being in the world.
WHAT WE DO
The purpose of the Environmental Sustainability Education in the Anthropocene Collective is to nurture and support undergraduate and high degree by research students, early career scholars and interested researchers and educators to bear witness to the Anthropocene. Through transdisciplinary research and teaching our focus is on engaging in local, place-based activities in response to the impacts of the Anthropocene. In order to witness everyday encounters and share stories that matter we engage in pedagogical practices and research which encourages walking-with and meaning making through sensorial, ecological, creative and ethical openness.
The focus of our shared work is to consider the human in relation to ecological entities (such as weather, rocks, water, sky, plants, nonhuman animals) and technological entities (such as digital, AI software and climate/geo mapping and monitoring devices), with the goal of deeply understanding what it means to be human in this epoch of the Anthropocene.
Our shared endeavour for a new imaginary, leads us to explore:
- Re-theorising sustainability education in the Anthropocene;
- Philosophical approaches to climate change and climate justice;
- Multispecies relations as responses to educational change;
- Speculative imaginaries and pedagogical openings to consider post-anthropocentric sustainable futures;
- Disrupting anthropocentrism, by applying post-anthropocentric pedagogical approaches to sustainability education;
- Rewilding environmental sustainability education with non-human others;
- Reconfiguring environmental sustainability education as cartographies of Indigenous cosmopolitics.
Collective member engage through researching and writing together, presenting at conferences and seminars, providing webinars and research masterclasses, engaging with higher degree and early career researchers and fostering others to consider new and innovative ways to consider our shared planetary futures. and supporting.
Who are we?
Collective Coordinator
Professor Karen Malone Department of Education, School of Social Sciences, Media, Film and Education, Swinburne University of Technology
kmalone@swin.edu.au
Environmental Sustainability Education in the Anthropocene Collective 