Sustainability In Precarity: Reframing Environmental Education As Collective Struggles

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am - Gold 4
  In Roundtable Session: Transforming Systems: Reclaiming Knowledge and Practice for Collective Well-Being

Abstract

This paper proposes reframing environmental education by centering precarity as a political condition deepening injustices in vulnerable communities. Drawing on Butler’s notion of precarity and Braidotti’s approach on cartographies, we present two collaborative ethnographic case studies from Brazil and Catalonia, Spain. Besides, through participatory research with youth in vulnerable communities, we explore how embodied, relational, and situated experiences unveil systemic inequalities, resistance, and alternative knowledge production. Findings show how students critically engage with socio-environmental challenges through affective and lived maps, linking biographic experiences with broader power relations, making collective struggles visible on the current sociopolitical cartography. We argue for an education across sustainability and suggest bio-cartographies as pedagogical tool for collective inquiry and transformation towards socially and environmentally just futures.

Authors

• Eliana Mercedes Bussi, University of Girona

• Monica Lemos, Colégio Rio Branco

• Alfredo Jornet Gil, Universitat de Girona