Global Sense of Place? A Cultural Turn for Place and Sustainability Education

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

Abstract

Several tensions are evident in the theoretical perspectives for case study research with schools and kindergartens in three localities in Norway. Landscape and place are seen as two key concepts for a holistic and multi-disciplinary approach. Landscapes and places are seen as available to us to as something naturalised, sociologized and deconstructed at the same time (Latour, 1993; Castree; 2005; Wylie 2007). Both are core concepts within human geography gaining more interest outside the discipline and with relevance for education research because of the need to develop context-sensitive analyses. But the concepts are simultaneously complex and full of tensions. I will address one of these relating to place, which concerns the relationship between the socio-cultural and the spatial, in light of a heightened sensitivity to the intersections of local and global processes (Birkeland, 2005).

The socio-spatial often refers to an interconnected and global world. People, objects and ideas rapidly move, and refuse to stay in place, like the global, interconnected network of moving subjects, objects and ideas (Elliot and Urry, 2010). Globalisation concerns the spatiality of contemporary social organisation, about meanings of place and space associated with intensified world-level forces (Amin, 2001). But, how is it possible to talk about a ”global sense of place”, as Dorren Massey (1994) argues for, when the debates on globalisation reflect a geometric ontology that stresses detachment and the view from above and the outside (Ingold 1993; 2000)? As Tim Ingold shows, the global ontology is indifferent to context. The global perspective offers a view of life and life processes where the world is an object, a thing to contemplate detached from lived experience, simply because it is only a model of the world and not the world itself.

This paper will shed light on the potential for creating global senses of place from below, from a context-sensitive perspective, by introducing and developing “culture” as a fourth, and necessary, pillar of sustainability and sustainable development (Birkeland 2008; Birkeland and Soini, 2010). I adopt Ingrid Lehman Stefanovic´s definition of sustainability, which refers not to a fixed state of affairs, but to a continuing process of change that imply authentic, positive or healthy self-development (Stefanovic, 2000). From this, my paper will develop a “cultural turn” for place and sustainability education: working with local communities´ core values, intercultural dialogue, governance of cultural policies, creativity and education, diversity etc. These values are related to communities’ ability to sustain both their natural and cultural environments. A more culture- or context-specific understanding of sustainability itself is important because complex understandings of culture are omitted from definitions of sustainability in current practices for EfSD.

Author

• Inger Birkeland, Telemark University College