Rethinking the Common(s): Environmental Education Research Against Eco-Domination and Enclosure

• In Event: Roundtable Session 18
  In Roundtable Session: Rethinking/Reworking/Responding to the Common

Abstract

As mainstream educational research issues calls for educational ‘innovations’ without questioning capitalist hegemony, ecological degradation, or the logic of human supremacy, environmental education researchers are pressed to center subjectivity in struggles against enclosure and ecodomination. Contemporary educational reforms not only mistakenly presume humans as rational economic actors, but they take for granted a future in which the earth continues to sustain human life. In response to the EE SIG’s call for increased attention to ‘well-being’ and the interior dimensions of education, this paper undertakes a reconceptualization of the commons and proffers instead the common—a recently developed concept in autonomist Marxist theory—as having robust theoretical utility for efforts to cultivate subjectivities capable of undermining practices of enclosure and ecodomination.

Author

• Graham Bryan Slater, University of Utah