Political and Religious Conservatives Enacting Speculative Science Education Toward Socioecological Care? (Poster 9)

• In Event: Speculative Science Education Toward Socioecological Care

Abstract

Objectives
While personally aligned with the aspirations of this session, (the authors) challenge normative discourse about the goals of science and environmental education, and implications for the varied political projects afoot in an American society hurtling toward climate crisis. Religious and political conservatives have conceptual schemas for how humans should relate to the environment, and these are currently excluded from most analyses of environmental and science education (Authors, 2021). Educationalists need curricular and pedagogical strategies capable of interrupting extreme projects, while also finding common ground with conservatives interested in socioecological care.

Theoretical framework
We use theories of motivated reasoning and cultural cognition (Kahan, 2013; Douglass, 1966) and the political ecology/economy of Turner & Isenberg (2018) to examine how social and political conservatives conceptualize socioecological care. We also are attuned to the political geography of proactive environmental education, as the landscape is politically variable (Laats, 2015; Authors, 2023; Colston & Ivey, 2015)

Modes of Inquiry & Research Materials
This is a conceptual discussion of current challenges facing environmental and climate change education. We must act to avoid the worst climate effects that disproportionately affect the racially and economically dispossessed (Sultana, 2022). We use primary theoretical works concerning motivated reasoning, political economy, and class analyses of climate impacts to examine normative assumptions of socioecological education projects.

Conclusions
Ecofascists and subgroups of religious believers care deeply about the environment and the “more-than-human” and are already engaged in moral/political/educational projects in their communities. They are advancing other social projects too, usually around certain kinds of human and ecological hierarchies (Laats, 2015; Author, 2012). Such projects are vested with imagination and emotion—both key features of conservative and reactionary politics (Robin, 2018).
What does it mean then to “enact speculative science education toward socioecological care”? We agree that we desire a world with collective thriving, but according to whom? Who’s in, who’s out when it comes to the “collective”?
Like it or not, educationalists need an inconvenient education justice project to engage those already in hierarchical social and ecological projects that move them toward more socially just futures (Authors, 2021). This work points toward the need for intentional geographic heterogeneity in science and environmental education. This is inconvenient but unavoidable given the stark reality of revanchist Federal politics of the United States.
This work involves deradicalization (Miller-Idriss, 2020) and building a “constructive politics” (Taiwo, 2022) to reanimate the original intent of intersectional identity politics (Taylor, 2017), especially the role of multiracial class politics in overcoming conditions of ecological and economic unsustainability (Huber, 2022). Without far more people doing this work, we fear even more partisan sorting and division at a time when the climate adaptation cannot withstand it. We map out preferable and actionable educational pathways in the full paper.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the work
Action toward socioecological care in a broad, scalable framework requires much more cross-partisan and cross-cultural action. Our work adds to the small but growing literature toward those ends.

Authors

• David E. Long, Morehead State University

• Joseph A. Henderson, University of Vermont