Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times

ISBN-13: 9789811025488 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 326 str.

Karen Malone; Son Truong; Tonia Gray

Opis

This book reflects the considerable appeal of the Anthropocene and the way it stimulates new discussions and ideas for reimagining sustainability and its place in education in these precarious times. The authors explore these new imaginings for sustainability using varying theoretical perspectives in order to consider innovative ways of engaging with concepts that are now influencing the field of sustainability and education. Through their theoretical analysis, research and field work, the authors explore novel approaches to designing sustainability and sustainability education. These approaches, although diverse in focus, all highlight the complex interdependencies of the human and more-than-human world, and by unpacking binaries such as human/nature, nature/culture, subject/object and de-centring the human expose the complexities of an entangled human-nature relation that are shaping our understanding of sustainability. These messy relations challenge the well-versed mantras of anthropocentric exceptionalism in sustainability and sustainability education and offer new questions rather than answers for researchers, educators, and practitioners to explore. As working with new theoretical lenses is not always easy, this book also highlights the authors' methods for approaching these ideas and imaginings.

Spis treści

Section 1 Responding to the Anthropocene.- Chapter 1 Sustainability, Education, and Anthropocentric Precarity.- Chapter 2 The Anthropocene's Call to Educational Research.- Chapter 3 Alternative Paradigms for Sustainability: Decentring the Human without becoming Posthuman.- Chapter 4 Cosmopolitics of Place: Towards Urban Multispecies Living in Precarious Times.- Section 2 Re-configuring and Re-worlding.- Chapter 5 Romancing or Re-configuring nature? Towards Common Worlding Pedagogies.- Chapter 6 A Precarious Body.- Chapter 7 Bodyplacetime: Painting and Blogging 'Dirty, Mess' Humannatured Becomings.- Chapter 8 Tracing Notions of Sustainability in Urban Childhoods.- Chapter 9 Beyond Sustainability: New Visions of Human Econnection in Early Childhood Education.- Chapter 10 Transnational Knowledge Exchange: Connecting Knowledge Traditions for Sustainability of the Planet.- Section 3 Re-reading and Grappling.- Chapter 11 Ecological Posthumanist Theorising: Grappling with Child-Dog-Bodies.- Chapter 12 Connections, Compassion, and Co-Healing: The Ecology of Relationships.- Chapter 13 Exploring 'Thing-Power' and the 'Spectre of Fear' on Schooling Subjectivities: A Critical Posthuman Analysis of LGBT Silencing.- Chapter 14 Re-thinking Human-Plant Relations by Theorising Using Concepts of Biophilia and Animism in Workplaces.- Chapter 15 Deep Mapping Towards and Intercultural Sustainability Discourse.- Section 4 Re-presenting and re-presencing.- Chapter 16 Expanding Curriculum Pathways between Education for Sustainability (EfS) and Health and Physical Education (HPE).- Chapter 17 Watery Configurations of Animals, Children, Pedagogies, and Politics in a Suburban Wetland.- Chapter 18 The Ecological Curriculum: Teaching, Learning, Understanding.- Chapter 19 Nurturing Female Outdoor Educators: A Call for Increased Diversity in Outdoor Education in Precarious Times.- Chapter 20 Caretakers and Undertakers: How can Education Support Humanity to Build a Sustainable Future?.- Chapter 21 Educating Beyond the Cultural and the Natural: (Re)Framing the Limits of the Possible in Environmental Education.

O autorze

Professor Karen Malone is a Professor of Sustainability at Western Sydney University’s Centre for Educational Research. She has been sustainability thematic leader since the inception of theme leaders in CER over two years ago.  She is an international expert on sustainable cities, children’s environments, human rights, environmental education, education for sustainable development, and the sociology of childhood. She has predominantly conducted her research utilising socially critical and human geography theory, but in more recent times has been exploring posthumanism as a theoretical approach for framing her research.  

Dr Son Truong is a lecturer in the School of Education and a member of Western Sydney University’s Sustainability Research Team at the Centre for Educational Research. He has extensive experience working with young people in diverse educational settings in majority and minority world contexts. His teaching and research converge around contemporary issues of wellbeing, outdoor learning and environmental education. He has presented and published in the area of children’s wellbeing, children’s environments, participatory methodologies and international education.

Associate Professor Tonia Gray is a specialist in secondary education at Western Sydney University’s School of Education and a senior researcher at the Centre for Educational Research. Tonia has been an active member of the sustainability thematic strand since the group was formed at the CER over two years ago.  As a leading expert in outdoor and experiential education, she has written widely on the topic.

Blurb

This book reflects the considerable appeal of the Anthropocene and the way it stimulates new discussions and ideas for reimagining sustainability and its place in education in these precarious times. The authors explore these new imaginings for sustainability using varying theoretical perspectives in order to consider innovative ways of engaging with concepts that are now influencing the field of sustainability and education. Through their theoretical analysis, research and field work, the authors explore novel approaches to designing sustainability and sustainability education.  These approaches, although diverse in focus, all highlight the complex interdependencies of the human and more-than-human world, and by unpacking binaries such as human/nature, nature/culture, subject/object and de-centring the human expose the complexities of an entangled human-nature relation that are shaping our understanding of sustainability. These messy relations challenge the well-versed mantras of anthropocentric exceptionalism in sustainability and sustainability education and offer new questions rather than answers for researchers, educators, and practitioners to explore. As working with new theoretical lenses is not always easy, this book also highlights the authors’ methods for approaching these ideas and imaginings.

“The book definitely makes an original contribution to the field. Most of the published work related to sustainability in science education does not draw on posthumanism, new materialism or feminist philosophies. I think this book is unique in its use of these theoretical constructs to make sense of sustainability practices in a range of diverse contexts. I think there is an urgent need for this book in the academic community and beyond."

 

Deborah Tippins, University of Georgia, College of Education