Environmental Education and the Politics of Research

• In Event: Environmental Education as Site of Critical Inquiry

Abstract

This presentation explores environmental education as a site for reconstructing critical research in this present moment of overlapping pandemics (Ladson-Billings, 2021), what Bruno Latour (2017, 2018) names the New Climate Regime. Following the work of Law and Lien (2018), understanding practices, including those in the Modern West, as capable of generating “natures in multiple and divergent forms” (p. 131). The curricular practices of environmental education are framed by Oregon’s various Outdoor School programs as capable of cultivating heterogeneous ontologies (Charbonnier et al., 2017) and contaminated diversity (Tsing, 2015). Environmental education, often located at the margins of more formalized institutions of teaching and learning, provides opportunities to describe and theorize differences that might make a difference for specific collectives comprised of humans and more-than-human others.

The notion that heterogeneous practices are capable of cultivating different and more equitable consequences in the present and future raises an important question: by what means do researchers describe and represent heterogeneous ontologies when the concepts and analytical frameworks of Modernity threaten their erasure? As Blaser and de la Cadena (2018) argue, “the knowledge practices we (modern scholars) have at our disposal are, in turn, conditioned to reinstate themselves. A consequence of this feature is that it may perform epistemic and ontological invalidations” (p. 6). Resisting the possibility of these invalidations is a necessary part of reconfiguring critical ethnographic research in the New Climate Regime.

Drawing from ongoing ethnographic research (Author, forthcoming 2021) exploring the curricular practices and policies of Oregon’s Outdoor School programs, responding to the question raised above requires reconsidering the concept of politics informing praxes of critical research. Traditions of critical inquiry are often guided by a tacit political question: how do individuals and groups appear to act against their true interests, and how might research aid in the task of revealing interests so politics can proceed? This question rests on a concept of freedom attached to the concept of Enlightenment and notions of rational and agential action (Biesta, 2008; Author, 2020). Against this problematic assumption, how might critical research proceed without presupposing a deficient population in need of epistemic correction?

In Down to Earth, Latour suggests politics in the New Climate Regime must cultivate novel political attractors, capable of convening collectives without reference to problematic ideals like progress and global prosperity (2017). Accordingly, the political questions facing us in the New Climate Regime no longer relate to objective interests and aims determined in advance, but rather how to develop political attractors capable of convening collectives differently. This offers a new mode of normativity and materiality to critical research: pointing to political attractors capable of nourishing the relations needed for life to thrive in the ruins of capitalism (Tsing, 2015). Here, politics is oriented by aims of interdependence, rather than individual freedom, prompting a reevaluation of emancipatory education and research alike. And, because this reconceptualization of politics requires reimagining how humans relate to the more-than-human world, environmental education has an important role to play.

Author

• Tristan G. Gleason, California State Polytechnic University - Humboldt