Activism, slow violence and schooling for sustainable development: Countering de-politicisation of education among the ‘marginalised’

• In Event: Critical encounters with environmentalism

Proposal

This paper reflects on the theoretical and methodological implications of a multi-sited ethnographic study of education for sustainable development (ESD) conducted in 2016-17 in public primary schools in Pashulok, Uttarakhand, India and South Durban Industrial Basin, South Africa. Both of these communities have experienced on-going environmental threats—Pashulok is home to several thousands of the approximately 100,000 people displaced by the construction of the nearby Tehri Dam (Newton, 2008), while the South Durban Industrial Basin has suffered decades of excessive water, air and soil pollution caused by local heavy industry (Barnett & Scott, 2007). Both sites have been historically endangered by what Rob Nixon has called the “slow violence”—“a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space” (Nixon, 2011, p. 2), and both communities embody collective memories and narratives of such violence. They have also witnessed long-standing grassroots environmental justice movements that have politicised local populations. Utilising phenomenological interviewing, field observation, participatory ethnographic filmmaking and other visual-anthropologic methods, the study examines the interface of the political and cultural tensions as well as activist movements associated with these narratives and education in these areas. In so doing, it challenges the notion of the ‘Global North’ as the usher of environmentalism and sustainability, putting into spotlight the ‘marginal’ public schools and grassroots movements of the ‘Global South.’ I argue these are precisely the modalities of education that ought to be placed at the centre of development imagination of those concerned about educating future generations towards sustainability. Rather than seeing these, and similar, communities as spaces for ‘intervention’ by outside agents, their resilience and adaptation can serve as a source of inspiration for sustainability education elsewhere, including in the ‘Global North,’ which is responsible for much of the planetary-scale environmental degradation. What can we learn from the interactions between local political forces, wider national educational agendas and the largely depoliticised school curricula? How do parents, principals, teachers and learners navigate the rifts between their lived experience and government curricula in India and South Africa? What understandings of ‘sustainable development’ emerge in such sites of paradigmatic hybridity?
Findings of the study suggest that while both sites are marked by resilience to environmental threats in which education, both formal and informal, becomes an agent of ‘politicising’ the environment, several factors hamper this process. Cultural and political forces that direct the aspirations of young people in both sites towards environmentally and socially destructive models of development, as well as the presence of ‘fast’ violence (gang warfare, drug addictions, domestic abuse) on a large scale in the South African site, put constrains on inter-generational transmission of knowledge about environmental justice, as well as the agency of young people in re-imagining future worlds. Both of these factors can be traced to the developmental predicaments of India and South Africa which have their origins in histories of colonialism, exploitation and social stratification—the very factors that have contributed to the dominance of the ‘Global North’ in the production and dissemination of knowledge about environmentalism and sustainability. Yet, the articulations of these concepts in these sites, rooted in resilience to first-hand exposure to environmental threats, make it possible to challenge this dominance.

Author

• Peter Sutoris, University of Cambridge