Environmental Sustainability Education in the Anthropocene
Environmental Sustainability Education in the Anthropocene is a research and teaching project seeking to disrupt narrow views of thinking about environmental sustainability education by responding to the call of the Anthropocene. Exploring possibilities for 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 realization of the damaged planet we have inherited, and bestowed upon our fellow kin this project seeks to open possibilities both theoretically and philosophically for new ways of being in the world.
WHAT WE DO
The vision of the Environmental Sustainability Education in the Anthropocene Project is to nurture and support undergraduate and 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.
Who are we?
Karen Malone
Project Director, Professor, Environmental and Childhood Studies, Posthuman theorist, School of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Affiliate, National Centre for Reconciliation Practice, Swinburne University of Technology
kazmalone@gmail.com
Tracy Young
Lecturer, Sustainability and Early Childhood Education., Department of Education, School of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
tcyou1@gmail.com
Environmental Sustainability in the Anthropocene 