Implied Innocence of the Anthropocene: Learning to Account for Erasures of Race, Class, and Gender in Environmental Destruction and Futures

• In Event: Learning in Tech Ecologies: Coming Clean About the Ecological Consequences of "Educational Innovation"

Abstract

If the learning sciences concerns itself with designing for all young people, then we must consider how designs for learning are shaped by and in relation to the youth they are meant to serve; we must account for their racial, cultural, and community realities and histories. Moreover, we must consider these realities and histories in relation to land if we are to take seriously the environmental impacts of our designs. Does it do any good to support the mathematics learning of, for example, young black girls while simultaneously exploiting their communities and the lands on which they live for the very materials with which we claim to educate them?

In this presentation we build on Paper 1’s examination of human exceptionalism, considering work that has critiqued the Anthropocene as a Eurocentric concept that treats the current environmental crisis solely as the result of modern extractive practices. Nxumalo (2018) argued that:
an important pitfall [of this conceptualization] is the re-inscription of a universalized human that not only reinforces anthropocentrism but also fails to account for critical raced, classed, geographic, and gendered human differentials in the causalities and ongoing effects of the Anthropocene (Collard, Dempsey, & Sundberg, 2015; p. 2).
In other words, critical erasures and oppression of marginalized populations are maintained in conversations and problem solving about environmental futures. Yusoff (2018) critiqued this erasure rendered by the Anthropocene:
To be included in the 'we' of the Anthropocene is to be silenced by a claim to universalism that fails to notice its subjugations, taking part in a planetary condition in which no part was accorded in terms of subjectivity. The supposed 'we' further legitimates and justifies the racialized inequalities that are bound up in social geologies (p. 12).

For the learning sciences, an understanding of the ecologically deleterious consequences of our work must take into consideration how histories of settler-colonialism, or what Gholson (2019) called the "settler-native-slave triad," have produced "very different relationships to the 'selfsame' land" (p. 2). We look to theories of space and place as produced through entanglements of human and non-human activity and movement (or “meshworks”; Ingold, 2007; Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 2005), but bring to the fore the histories of domination, of extraction, of land and bodies as commodity. In the design of spaces for learning, and in theories of learning in situ (Lave, 1988) and across learners' pathways (Bell, Tzou, Bricker, & Baines, 2012), how do we account for the inextricable relationships between the historical atrocities that have led to present ecological and human precarities and ongoing attempts to secure equitable and sustainable futures? How do we consider the scales of what some might call "impact"--but in this case for learners and the earth?

We ground our inquiries in extant design studies, expanding analyses to investigate how these considerations might open up findings, design principles, and generate new lines of inquiry for the field. Doing so, we think, will create different opportunities and definitions of “youth participatory action research” and “social design experiments,” for example.

Authors

• Jasmine Y. Ma, New York University

• Katie Headrick Taylor, University of Washington - Seattle