Presumed Pathological? Questioning Premises of Nature Education as a "Win-Win" for Immigrant Health and Integration

• In Event: The Cultural Politics of Health/Pathology in STEM Education Reforms Past and Present

Abstract

Two issues are constantly debated in Europe in crisis terminology: climate change and immigration. Two practical questions that derive from these are how to live sustainably and how to integrate people classified as ‘recently arrived’ or ‘immigrants.’ In Sweden and the Nordic countries, there is a growing interest in merging these two issues by organizing nature education and outdoor recreation activities for recently arrived immigrants to support their social integration. These nature-based initiatives are considered a “win-win,” as they promise to advance multiple goals. Those aims include broadening exposure to natural places while increasing access to the health benefits of outdoor recreation for targeted groups, and also educating these groups about sustainability, Swedish laws, and codes of conduct for normative participation in nature-based activities (e.g., not disturbing animals, not destroying nature, and cleanliness).

Theoretically, this paper draws on studies of how ‘Others’ are gazed upon by Western-centered knowledge production (e.g., Mohanty, 1984), and how educational reforms for equity tend to construct ‘the Other’ by targeting ‘lacks’ or ‘needs’ that people in certain groups are assumed to have (e.g., Popkewitz, 2017). Contributing to a growing literature on how health-oriented STEM education reforms also run the risk of pathologizing racialized groups (e.g., Philip et al., 2017), I question the premises of the “win-win” by analyzing organized nature activities for their embedded epistemological and political assumptions about health, and for how difference is made in relation to specific cultural norms in Swedish nature.

I view this idea of ‘integration through activities in nature’ as a discourse that relies on particular assumptions to appear as common sense. The analytic concern is directed to what Stoler (2009) calls epistemic anxieties of what is not or cannot be known about ‘the kinds’ of people targeted for investigation, administration, and education. Or, what is it that nature is presumed to do to promote social integration? Health provides a moral injunction for these activities, as they explicitly target health disparities and promote health equity. These concerns also form the foundation for the influx of funding from agencies such as the European Social Fund, as well as national and regional authorities. Here, the assumption that ‘being in nature is to be/become healthy’ is often juxtaposed with invocations of immigrants as physically and psychologically unhealthy and who would otherwise ‘sit inside all day.’ To trace these discourses as they circulate across sites, the analysis draws on ethnographic fieldnotes from activities for immigrants in nature, interviews with activity leaders, texts from and about these organized activities, and related research studies.

Rather than presenting a holistic account of this discourse, the analysis examines how epistemic anxieties about health, nature, and integration construct assumed differences, and how this opens possibilities to question the premises of this “win-win.” At stake in these well-intended informal education reforms for integration is how difference is produced and regulated in relation to ideals of a nationalized nature, and how political problems become medicalized and individualized through education.

Author

• Camilla Safrankova, Malmö University