Nature as Curriculum: Education and the Earth System in the Anthropocene
Join the Centre for World Environmental History for this research workshop, where we will explore how natural environments and environmentalism can be reimagined as problems for education (Schools and Universities) amidst the radical uncertainties of the Anthropocene. We will ask how we think through existing disciplinary currents such as environmental history, political ecology and environmental anthropology when a shifted Earth System rather than sustainable development has become the dominant concern. Lastly, we will question whether education should respond to climate change as a challenge aimed at achieving technical stewardship or as a problem of troubled politics in an unequal world.
In a recent monograph, Educating for the Anthropocene (2022), Peter Sutoris insightfully discusses a range of conceptual tensions and perspectival complications that trouble the project of ‘environmental and sustainability education’[ESE]. In particular, how the pursuit of education within a depoliticized, bureaucratized and instrumentalized context can end up firming up the ongoing pursuit for endless economic growth rather than questioning the latter. In contrast, Sutoris urges for a ‘wholesale reimagining of the future’ in which education not only envisages alternative futures but must aim for us to ‘realize our agency as political beings.'
This workshop brings together several academics, activists, school teachers, councillors and environmentalists and hopes not only further to deepen our understanding of challenges for education in the Anthropocene but also to set the grounds for enabling a dialogue between such different voices and ways of thinking in these uncertain and unprecedented times.
All are welcome. To give us an idea of numbers, RSVP by emailing environmentalhistory@sussex.ac.uk.
* This is a hybrid workshop, please write to us at environmentalhistory@sussex.ac.uk for a Zoom link and we will email you the link closer to the date.