Deep Time, the Anthropocene, and Activism: Towards an alternative for "21st century skills"

• In Event: Students, Activism and Social Movements

Proposal

This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork among activist groups in India and South Africa, argues that environmental activism is a form of experiential education that can “unmask” the slow violence of environmental decay. The idea of slow violence, posited by Rob Nixon, suggests that much contemporary environmental destruction unfolds slowly, making it impossible to notice in real time and hard to perceive through human senses, and therefore a major challenge for environmental and sustainability education. The fieldwork behind this paper took place in Pashulok—a rehabilitation site for some of the 100,000 people displaced by Tehri Dam in Northern India—and Wentworth—a township in South Durban adjacent to an apartheid-era petrochemical industrial zone with some of the highest levels of industrial pollution in the world. The paper argues that these spaces are on the “frontier of the High Anthropocene” where slow violence accelerates and turns into fast violence of displacement, disability and death. Anti-dam activism in Pashulok and campaigns targeting air pollution in Wentworth enable young people to challenge this accelerating slow violence through political action, therefore demasking the ideological undercurrents fuelling environmental destruction locally (environmental racism in South Africa and high-modernist developmentalism in India) and globally (the dogma of infinite growth and associated extractivism). The paper points to several mechanisms through which such experiential education through activism differs from state-sanctioned schooling, including the opportunity for young people to view themselves as political (in an Arendtian sense) beings, the fostering of individual and collective re-imaginations of the future, and the chance to enter into dialogue with others, learning how to navigate political differences in moulding collective action. At the same time, the paper points to the activism’s limited ability to speak to a wider range of young people due to perceptions of activism being anti- development, and the economic struggles young people associate with becoming an activist. The paper notes that some of these perceptions are linked to state curricula, which suggests that government-run schooling systems can interfere with the educational potential of activism.

Author

• Peter Sutoris, University of York