Sociologies and Ecopedagogies for Activism Against Environmental Wicked Problems: Countering Neoliberalization and Apoliticization of Higher Education

• In Event: Activism, social movements and Higher Education: changing attitudes, dynamics and expectations

Proposal

Neoliberal trends and influences that de-radicalize higher education into false apolitical spaces negates the roles of HE within public spheres and teaches through hidden curricula that deprioritizes and delegitimizes activism against hegemony grounded upon injustices, violence, and unsustainability. Such spaces are “false” because apolitical (higher) education spaces are impossible, as well as non-transformative (Freire, 1970, 1998). This paper unpacks how neoliberal globalization has lead HE to frequently over prioritize STEM and technocratic vocationalization of teaching, mono-disciplinarity, and teaching through epistemologies of the North (founded in coloniality, patriarchy, and capitalism (Santos, 2018)). In turn, such politics of HE inhibits students’ praxis towards solving our world’s wicked problems that affect all of Earth (i.e., all of Nature).
In this paper, I focus on HE’s roles in solving our planet’s wicked problems that intensifies socio-environmental injustices and planetary unsustainability. I argue that teaching diverse sociologies with ecopedagogical teaching and research is essential for environmental activism to emerge from HE teaching. Ecopedagogies are grounded in the work of Freire to unpack the inseparable but systematically hidden connections between social and environmental violence, and critically determining who benefits and who suffers from humans’ acts of environmental violence (who includes all of Nature, beyond humans) (Gadotti, 2008; Gutiérrez & Prado, 1989; Misiaszek, 2012, 2020a). This includes teaching students to critically read the politics of environmental violence (i.e., ecopedagogical literacy) and why these lessons are too-frequently (mis/un)taught (Misiaszek, 2020b). The paper will argue that HE’s roles and responsibilities of students’ environmental praxis, including activism is being neglected by shallow environmental teaching (i.e., opposite of ecopedagogical teaching), and systematically deprioritizing sociology and absences of sociologies (e.g., sociologies grounded in epistemologies of the South (see Santos, 2018)). Deprioritizing and delegitimizing sociology in HE through neoliberal globalization of HE diminishes societies’ ability to tame (super) wicked problems by removing a discipline that is essential to untangle the inherent messiness between acts of social and environmental injustice. Global attacks on the discipline have also included perverting sociology, as well as environmental teaching, into neoliberal, (neo)colonial tools that at best ignore and at worst justify hegemony, socio-historical oppressions (e.g., racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity), injustices, inequalities, universal commodification, planetary unsustainability, and anthropocentricism. Achieving the inherent roles of HE in the public spheres to counter these negative aspects require, as this paper will argue, transdisciplinary teaching and research approaches grounded in sociology, especially through emergences of sociologies (a la Santos). These roles themselves -- bettering the world and sustaining Earth by actively addressing wicked problems -- are challenged by neoliberal politics, which further calls for the need of utilizing sociologies to radically (de/re)constructing HE. The focuses on HE’s roles within the largest public sphere, the planetary sphere which comprises all of Nature (including humans), towards achieving the utopic goal of globally all-inclusive socio-environmental justice and planetary sustainability. The need to (re)entrench sociologies within HE towards this overarching ecopedagogical goal (Misiaszek, 2020a) is unpacked to counter the politics of attacking sociologies and teaching to ecopedagogically read humans’ anti-environmental acts as political acts needing active resistance.

Author

• Greg William Misiaszek, Beijing Normal University