Can Eight Billion Learn Together? Education for Real Utopias and the Coordination Problem

• In Event: Towards Undisciplining: Temporality, Objects, and Method in Education Research

Abstract

Objectives and Purpose: This proposal explores the following questions: if ‘we’—the reader and I—agree that the ecological crisis is real, are there tools we already possess which can be used to mitigate these outcomes while still being critical and cautious of them? In this paper I want to particularly focus on aspects of design, communication, and coordination. Without endorsing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), I treat them as a provisional starting point to interrogate their design and explore possibilities for critical repurposing or ultimately moving beyond. While my research involves some historical analysis—particularly of past efforts at communication and coordination—it does so to identify enduring limitations and inform the design of more resilient, future-oriented systems.
Perspective(s) or Theoretical Framework: I draw on Sylvia Wynter’s (1992) notion of “moves beyond reason”—where ‘reason’ is understood as a set of supraordinate goals and subgoals that determines what is perceived or not perceived, and shapes human behavior—and Erik Olin Wright’s vision of real utopias (Hahnel & Wright, 2016)—institutional designs that are viable, sustainable, and transformative. I ask: how can dispersed ‘moves beyond reason’ coordinate to generate something viable, sustainable, and scalable? I draw on the concept of ‘hybrid forums’ (Callon et al., 2009) to ask: what if communication and coordination are not preceded by learning, but are themselves educational, that produce new knowledge and social configurations?
Modes of Inquiry & Sources: I undiscipline myself by refusing to accept the SDG apparatus’ goals as either sufficient or neutral, and by moving beyond critiques that stop at deconstruction. Instead, I use the SDGs as a heuristic—a symbolic infrastructure that might be repurposed, dismantled, or reimagined to support new forms of ecological communication and learning. Critical scholarship often proposes alternative ethics (Bylund et al., 2022) or counter-hegemonic critiques (Kopnina, 2020), but rarely asks how eight billion people might coordinate such responses to a global ecological crisis. While SDGs are meant to enable coordination, they operate mainly through intermediary institutions—states, UN bodies, and NGOs—that limit broader participation. I explore whether SDG icons, symbols, and language might instead serve as a communication protocol linking diverse local efforts and whether they are adequate to move beyond the two axes of power in modernity: vertical sovereign and horizontal disciplinary (Foucault, 1995).
Substantiated Conclusion: At this point in my investigation, I treat the SDGs not as a solution but as a potentially generative entry point—a shared symbolic architecture that may, in fact, be shown to be inadequate or in need of radical transformation.
Significance: My interest in this line of inquiry began with reading Otto Neurath and Marie Reidemeister’s ISOTYPE (1936), a symbolic system designed to facilitate communication across expert and non-expert audiences. I also draw on research on network architecture, particularly mesh networks (Hasan et al., 2013; Solomon, 2020), where users constitute the infrastructure, enabling decentralized communication without intermediaries like ISPs or cloud servers. In the context of the SDGs, this suggests using them to facilitate coordination without relying on the UN, member-states, or other central authorities.

Author

• Debopam Sen, University of Wisconsin - Madison