Educational Alternatives for Non-Extractivist Futures

• In Event: Education for Societal and Holistic Transformation: Alternatives for a Just Future

Abstract

Many scholars question the extent to which education, as it stands, fully addresses the extractivist roots of the climate and ecological crisis, particularly because education itself relies on these same foundations. Transforming mainstream education in relation to climate change therefore involves excavating extractivism’s onto-epistemic foundations, along with the relations it creates, attending to alternatives to create education anew.
Activists opposing the extractive projects like pipelines are taking up social media to counter fossil fuel developments and present anti-extractive alternatives. Understanding online activism as a form of public pedagogy (Karsgaard, 2023), we can learn from activists how education might better enact the anti-extractivist transformations necessary to advance justice within the climate and ecological issues of our time.
Extractivism is a worldview as deeply ingrained in mainstream education as it is in creating climate and environmental injustice. Many education systems naturalize extractivism through petro-pedagogies (Eaton & Day, 2020) and neoliberal approaches to climate action. Such approaches do little to explore other “ways of relating to and with land/nature/one another on terms that are other than, or more-than modern” (Tilley & Parasram, 2018, p. 306), ultimately reducing future possibilities to mere modifications of current extractive relations.
Other ways of relating, however, are evident through Instagram’s anti-pipeline public pedagogy, which can be studied using large-scale visual digital methods (Rogers, 2021). This presentation draws on data from Instagram, including a set of 13,879 posts from 2014 to 2020 associated with the Trans Mountain pipeline. Intentionally designed for research, composite images (Niederer & Colombo, 2019) layer the most liked posts associated with key issue hashtags, allowing comparison across the posts emerging from Indigenous groups, mainstream environmentalists, and other concerned publics.
Various forms of creativity, subversion, and appropriation are evident as activists take up the affordances of a platform created for data extraction and sale for critique and social justice. Composite images show how anti-pipeline activists depict compounding environmental and climate impacts of the pipeline, such as harmful effects on endangered orca populations, consequences of oil spills on key watersheds, and contributions of the pipeline to greenhouse gasses, revealing how extractivism destroys more-than-human relations. Through Indigenous self-representation, activists’ visual aesthetics critique and transcend the racist representation of Indigenous peoples that justifies extractivism. Linking such imagery to the United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Peoples via the hashtag #UNDRIP, activists show how fossil fuel developments are shaped by colonial relations that persistently harm Indigenous peoples as well as the land.
Learning from Trans Mountain public pedagogy holds potential to inform formal education. Beyond addressing environmental or climate impacts, anti-extractivist approaches to education might more directly confront the failures of Western thought, engage with alternative knowledges, and ensure decision-making authority for Indigenous peoples, toward reconfiguration of political, economic, cultural, technological, and material relations. In place of extractivism, education might be grounded in relationality and kinship, whereby humans are not the center of learning and decision-making but are inherent within webs of relations among all things.

Author

• Carrie Karsgaard, Cape Breton University