A Dark Education: Environmental Education Research in a World of Hyperobjects

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 55
  In Roundtable Session: New Theories and Possibilities for Environmental Education Research

Abstract

Foregrounding global warming and nuclear power as case examples, we use Timothy Morton’s (2013) concept of hyperobjects to tease out the multiple implications involved in thinking about environmental education research after ‘nature’; that is, without the symbolic support of ‘nature’ that has heretofore aided in compartmentalizing ecological phenomena and awareness into cultural and natural, local and global and human and non-human categories. In relation to the many theories indexed under the rubric of new materialist, the import of Morton’s ‘dark ecology’ lies in acknowledging the uncanny, traumatic nature of thinking about environmental education research in a world of hyperobjects.

Authors

• Antti Saari, University of Tampere

• John Mullen, Eastern Michigan University