Rootedness and Movement: What the “New Mobilities Paradigm” Offers Place-Responsive Discourses

• In Event: Place and Sustainability Education for the Anthropocene: A Transnational Inquiry of Generative Tensions and Innovative Practices

Abstract

David Orr’s (1992) landmark publication, Ecological Literacy, made the now famous distinction between “residents” or “tourists” and actual “inhabitants” of a place—people who are connected and rooted to a home range in a deep and durable relationship. In the place-responsive environmental education literature, rootedness and intimate connection to place is frequently taken for granted as ultimate aim in itself, or as a fundamental component of ecological literacy. Through such relationships of increasing intimacy and knowledge, the argument goes, people can begin to appreciate the complexity of the socio-ecological environment, and develop place-responsive ways of caring and acting for people and place. The narrative of place-responsiveness in education is, in other words, premised in part on people being or becoming “fixed in place,” or at least developing “outsider empathy” in a way that allows for deepening place-relations within a relatively bounded ecological and cultural domain. While sympathetic with the potential for increasing ecological consciousness through the place-knowledge and care potentially gained through deep inhabitation (e.g., Wendell Berry’s corpus of work as well as much of Indigenous thought and experience), this paper explores how the global reality of “mobile lives” and the “new mobilities paradigm” (Urry, 2007; Elliot & Urry, 2010) challenge the theoretical foundations of place-responsive discourses in education.

Other scholars such as Jan Nespor (2008) and Ursula Heise (2009) have productively critiqued discourses of intimate place-knowing which have become popularized since Orr’s (1992) discussion of “good inhabitance.” While these direct critiques of place are useful for expanding and deepening a place-responsive educational paradigm, confronting an opposite paradigm—“the new mobilities paradigm”—offers a range of new insights that can help shape the trajectory, and expand the reach, of place-responsive education. In Mobile Lives, Anthony Elliot and John Urry (2010) examine the growth, range, and impact of global mobility and introduce a range of intriguing sociological terms such as: network capital, miniaturized mobilities, affect storage, portable personhood, ambient place, globals, etc. Their sociological research is not advocacy for mobility over rootedness, but rather an analysis of dramatic global changes in identity and culture as mobile living and learning, and their associated technologies, continue to expand geometrically. Elliot and Urry make numerous claims about the new mobilities paradigm and its accelerating impacts on people and culture worldwide; this paper will synthesize these claims and analyze their relevance for place-responsive environmental education. Elliot and Urry (2010) claim that their new mobilities paradigm “is perhaps one of the first examples of post-carbon social theory” (p. xi). This is because the mobile lives that so many of us take for granted—even as we long to become more rooted—are dependent upon the finite and contested carbon economy, which the authors acknowledge may be unravelling. This paper argues that place-responsive education, in order to respond realistically to the call for a post-carbon social theory, needs to confront our mobile lives head on, and hold the discourses of mobility and place with the tension of paradox.

Author

• David A. Greenwood, Lakehead University