Curriculum Beyond Apocalypse

• In Event: De-signing Science Education in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore public pedagogies of the anthropocene through contextualizing readings of diverse apocalyptic narratives. It examines the ways that crisis functions in narrative as a fulcrum to accomplish certain visions of the future.
I use public pedagogy as a framing theory; that is media (films, novels, etc.) are educative in a broad sense (Giroux, 2003). Second I read my sample texts through Sasha Lilley et al.’s volume Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth (2012) which challenges the productivity of disaster as an organizing imaginary in the pursuit of justice. Finally, I draw on Sylvia Wynter (McKittrick, 2015; Wynter, 2003) who analyses the historical logics of who counts as human and who does not.

My primary approach to these texts involves analyzing the contextualizing mythologies that make these objects readable (Barthes, 1982). Additionally, I use Donna Haraway’s methodology of diffraction (1997) and her practice of cross reading popular and scientific texts (1991, 1994). I focus on four texts: one representing hegemonic neoliberal visions of the world, two providing alternative—socialist in an atheoretical sense—visions of the world, and one that provides a matrix of possible climate futures. I start with Christopher Nolan’s film Intersetellar (2014) which captures the vision of the liberal establishment’s vision of climate catastrophe. I demonstrate that Interstellar addresses the crisis through what Greg Grandin calls a “frontier mythology” (2019). Second, I analyze Kim Stanley Robinson and Stephen Martiniere’s New York 2140 (2017). This novel examines living in New York City after it has become an intertidal zone, when climate change has become quotidian. I discuss how the book is primarily an attempt to think beyond financialized capitalism. I also examine Kate Arnoff’s (2018) short story about life under the proposed New Green Deal (NGD). I explore how this utopia fails as a fantasization of hope, pleasure, and conviviality. I demonstrate how this vision within the neoliberal imaginary that it is trying to transcend. Finally, I cross read all these texts with Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann’s article and book Climate Leviathan (2013, 2018). They offer four possible governmental configurations in the wake of climate change, from fractious fascist nation states to global communist governmentalities. Climate Leviathan helps identify the protagonists and antagonists in the other narratives I examine.

The paper concludes by looking at the failure of imagination in these stories. I explore how each text uncreatively looks backwards to imagine the future that it hopes will transcend the present’s miseries and the need to generate more inspiring and creative future-narratives.

The anthropocene is not just a technical problem. It is a problem of feelings, fantasization, and imagination. This paper is trying to suggest or locate the work needed to in fact survive what is to come, by mapping what we have failed to reckon with in our current popular and academic myths.

Author

• Matthew Weinstein, University of Washington - Tacoma