Postdigital Eco-Pedagogies: Past, Present, Future

• In Event: Postdigital Eco-Pedagogies Continued

Abstract

As we write these words in July 2021, we cannot but notice significant changes in our thinking and feeling over the past year and a half. During our first lockdowns in Spring 2020, the pandemic seemed like a terrible event that we needed to get over with. Yet our bad feelings had been strongly alleviated by a tremendous sense of local and global solidarity, and the crisis felt like a unique historical opportunity for desperately needed changes in global capitalism (Jandrić 2020a, 2020b; Mañero 2020). As we approach the end of the year, many of these solidarity projects continue—and have been intensified in the USA in light of the uprisings against racism and police terror—yet many people are just exhausted. Beginning with our ambiguous and precarious situation, what we need to run to now is the development of more sustainable and just ways of being. This is a global cognitive and affective project, which stretches beyond environment and indeed education. We need critique and criticism as well as courage, creativity, imagination, hope, and organization. We need new goals and new practical measures towards reaching these goals. We need new utopias, new pedagogical and political programs, designs, and experiments that fit our pandemic age of the (post-)Anthropocene.
This paper charts some genealogies, challenges, and directions for experimenting with the utopic postdigital ecopedagogies demanded by our present (post)pandemic reality. These are messianic—rather than prophetic—utopias that exist not as proclamations or programmes for a distant future but as potentialities immanent in the irreducible excess of the present. While their roots most clearly emanate from the Freirean-inspired ecopedagogy movement, we conceptualize ecopedagogies instead as educational forms that emerge from, negotiate, debate, produce, resist, and/or overcome the shifting and expansive postdigital ecosystems from and to which we write and think. These are expansive ecosystems of humans, postdigital machines, nonhuman animals, minerals, objects, and more; ecosystems that are overdetermined by new forms of ontological hierarchies and capitalism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism. By charting some of the potential lineages, directions, contradictions, and challenges—and by proposing potential lines of educational praxis—we lay a basis for reinvigorated fields of inquiry that moves beyond the existing postdigital literature on the current pandemic.

References
Jandrić, P. (2020a). Postdigital research in the time of Covid-19. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(2), 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00113-8.
Jandrić, P. (2020b). The postdigital challenge of pandemic education. Journal of Contemporary Educational Studies, 71(4).
Mañero, J. (2020). Postdigital brave New World and its educational implications. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(3), 670–674. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00129-0.

Authors

• Petar Jandric, Polytechnic of Zagreb

• Derek R. Ford, DePauw University