Enfranchisement and Transformative Socio-Environmental Change in Subjugated and Threatened Global, Cross-Border, and Local Circumstances

• In Event: Systemic Socio-Environmental Change From the Local to the Planetary: Comparatively Analyzing Needs and Leveraging Possibilities

Abstract

Our worlds involve shuttling back and forth between localities or the layers of global, local and regional with which we interface. As research on trans-languaging portray or cross-border engagements indicate, we position ourselves or management of our identities based upon the licence that we are given or our loyalties to or sophistication criss-crossing people, systems, places and cultural practices within communities and across communities with which interface. The stakes involved are immense as these engagements may serve to affirm and build upon a kind of cultural currency. Alternatively, the loss of cultural capital may be dismissive nullifying cultural ways of knowing.

To explore these suggestions, the paper explores some of conundrums and dynamics at play and their intersections with socio-environmental justice in education. The present paper attempts to examine efforts to leverage transformative change in different circumstances in hopes of unearth important ingredients that might serve as a means of emulating the efforts of different groups. Transformative change is rarely straightforward and endeavours to do so require careful contemplation and meaningful engagements with stakeholders including participatory forms of decision-making and approaches to moving forward that are respectful of the communities involved. Transformative change is political at various levels—within and across communities and various subgroups and individuals with the communities, various agencies that serve the communities as well as the institutions that govern the agencies.

Take, if you will, efforts at transformative change for Indigenous communities. In various communities there have been countless efforts to remove the yolk of colonialization and instead breathe life into schools by moving away from standardized and culturally estranged education to culturally responsive and sustainable education. In some Indigenous communities, we have seen the development of Indigenous ways of knowing as core educational developments (e.g., New Zealand Kaupapa Māori theory; see Smith, 1990; www.rangahau.co.nz/research-idea/27/).

In Australia, however, it remains a struggle. Most recently, it has manifested itself in various forms of activism to recent efforts around the “Uluru Declaration of the Heart” that seeks formal recognition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and their ways of knowing (see: http://nationalunitygovernment.org/content/uluru-statement-heart). And, it is apparent in communities striving for a political foothold as they represent the community interests including the land in ongoing economic and educational matters. Australia’s Indigenous communities struggle to be heard and to have their rights respected by the colonizing government. They have sought reconciliation but also leverage through constitutional change, through court cases challenging erroneous constructions of others (e.g., Mabo). Because Aboriginal sovereignty over their own affairs is rare, other forms of leverage have become a focus. A reading of these circumstances has some Aboriginal communities seeking other forms of positioning to the same ends such as cooperation and contractual agreements that elevate the possibility of community development by and for communities. For example, some Aboriginal communities, in hopes of attaining a degree of sovereignty and self-governance, have engaged in forms of contractual relationships with the federal and state governments.

Author

• Robert J. Tierney, The University of British Columbia, The University of Sydney, Beijing Normal University