Obal Philosophy and Proverbial Wisdom from the Global South as Alternative Visions of Sustainability and Repair in Higher Education

• In Event: Contextualising and reframing sustainability in higher education

Proposal

Epistemic injustice, racism, material imbalances between Global North and South are shaping the knowledge production processes and have been well documented in higher education research. In postcolonial contexts, the dominant developmentalist paradigms are recreating colonial narratives of linear progress and modernity. Such discourses frame local populations and knowledges as backward and lacking ‘research capacity’ and definitions of sustainable living, hence in need of being ‘developed’ by international Global North donors, and higher education experts. We argue that such one way and simplistic narratives of the sustainability capacity building neglect and, hence, contribute to the erasure of local knowledges on sustainable living that have been present in the Global South contexts for centuries.
In Central Asian higher education, the themes of sustainable pedagogies are under-researched, despite the region being impacted by the climate change. Massive floods that relocated 100,000 people in March 2024, revealed a lack of preparedness for such disasters. Higher education institutions play a key role in teaching and research on the themes of sustainability (Carpentier & Unterhalter, 2022; McCowan, 2023). However, when such teaching neglects local knowledges, it may well be not reaching the local populations effectively, and in pedagogical terms is not culturally sensitive.
Building on the emerging work of Anuar and Mun (2024), the authors are proposing a novel approach to repair such historical and ongoing injustices by (re)conceptualising, researching and teaching sustainability based on the traditional proverbs and philosophies from the steppe and marine cultures of the present-day Central Asia and Malaysia. We provide an analysis of the Kazakh sustainability philosophy obal, and proverbs along the social, economic and environmental nexuses, building on a textual review of more than three dozen proverbs in Kazakh and Malay languages.
The thematic analysis of the proverbs revealed that steppe populations in Kazakhstan over the centuries prioritised careful usage of the natural resources: water and land. Contrary to the popular belief, predominantly popularised by the Russian imperial colonisers and later Soviet Union colonisers that local nomadic groups moved from one pasture to another without the regard for the taking care of the land, on the opposite, there were many diverse nomadic groups who did change pastures based on the season, and those who cultivated the land. Both groups have environmental awareness and knowledge. Furthermore, we argue that this knowledge, preserved in proverbs, is relevant for climate pedagogies in higher education, as it is deeply rooted in cultural sensitivities and might be effective in motivating the Central Asian communities to rethink their relationship with nature based on a local epistemic tradition. The Central Asian case is compared to a Malaysian postcolonial one.
We argue that the rich proverbial epistemic materials from both Kazakhstan and Malaysia and obal philosophy specifically point to alternative ways of sustainable living and economic thinking to unsettle and repair the mainstream sustainability practices in times of extractivist racial capitalism. This paper invites the higher education community to reimagine the visions of sustainability across research, teaching and leadership nexuses in higher education in dialogue with Southern knowledges.

Authors

• Olga Mun, Oxford University

• Gulzhanat Gafu, Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education

• Aizuddin Mohamed Anuar, Keele University