Planetary Literacies for the Anthropocene

• In Event: Global Critical Literacies as the Key to Equitable Education: A Transnational Analysis

Abstract

Objectives & Perspectives
Globally, new theories and practices are emerging which have important implications for planetary literacies as a form of critical literacy. In our paper we develop this concept further as an urgent response to concerns about climate change, species loss, environmental destruction and global warming.
We draw on the concept of ‘the Anthropocene’, the proposed new geological age, prompted by human induced changes to the Earth’s biosphere (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000). ‘The Anthropocene’ has acted as a provocation to more sustainably connect nature and culture, economy and ecology, and the natural and human sciences. Many contemporary philosophers have contributed to theorizing new planetary literacies for the Anthropocene. They focus on human entanglement in the fate of the planet, seek to de-centre the human being, and are generally referred to as ‘posthumanists’ or ‘new materialists’. These approaches seek ways to re-think the human subject as co-constituted with the more-than-human-world (Barad, 2007, 2012, 2017). Attending to posthuman theories and how they interact with understandings of language, literacy and cultural diversity offers a catalyst for extending current understandings and applications of critical literacy in education.

Modes of Inquiry & Data
Through an example from teacher education in South Africa, we suggest that our concept of planetary literacies aims to incorporate new political and ontological understandings of subjectivity and relationality; human and more-than-human bodies lack independent self-contained existence and are always already in relation across time, space and matter (Barad, 2007). The ontological turn is a return to Indigenous onto-epistemologies and makes us think differently about what it means to know and how to teach. In sympoietic pedagogies, knowing is a direct material and moving engagement with/in the world as a worlding process. Sympoiesis is a word appropriate “to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company” (Haraway, 2016, p.58).
In our vignette, the company includes nonhuman bodies, such as sand, glass, paper, atmosphere, curriculum, rape, murders, and an impending exam. Supported by an assemblage of photographs of one student’s work for her final childhood studies exam, we show the students’ interest in the concept ‘tidying up’, productively taking the concept generated inside the university classroom, to a picture book, then outside to the beach and then back inside the classroom again. One student made an intricate connection with the materiality of sand as always already entangled with local histories of violence and environmental damage.

Insights & Scholarly Significance
As an approach to teaching and researching planetary literacies, critical posthumanism was proposed as a different relational ontology—an ontological return to African Indigenous scholarship and ways of living—that reconfigures subjectivity and brings into existence the notions of sympoietic teacher education as generative in the Anthropocene. The widely advocated Ubuntu ecosophy is a distinctive Indigenous contribution from South Africa (Le Grange, 2012). We propose that in pushing the boundaries, critical literacies could significantly include new posthuman, new materialist and Indigenous approaches in teacher education, to address climate change and environmental destruction.

Authors

• Karin Saskia Murris, University of Oulu

• Margaret Jean Somerville, Western Sydney University