Social media and the aesthetic public pedagogy of wildfires

• In Event: Education for Planetary Futures (Part 1): Decolonial Portals, Marginalized Scholarship, and More-than-human Methodologies

Proposal

With climate change warming temperatures and drying the land, wildfires are increasing across the western forests of North America, throughout Europe, and across the Australian bush. Smoke seeps into schools, creating fiery atmos-fears (Verlie & Blom, 2021) that infuse learning, even where climate realities remain largely unacknowledged in formal curriculum and schooling.

While schools largely carry on business as usual, learners turn to social media, co-sensing with technology and making sense of fires as a lived experience of climate crisis. Across visual media platforms such as Instagram, they share and consume devastating images of torched communities, forests alight, and billowing smoke, as algorithms and media metrics contribute to images’ virality and reach. On the one hand, mediatized wildfire images arguably possess a “burning aesthetics” characterized by a “denialist visual epistemology” that erases structural analysis of the causes and necessary responses of climate-induced wildfires (Demos, 2019). On the other, a proliferation of wildfire artwork and theorizing (e.g. Abbot & Toohey-Wise, 2020, 2021) points to the mounting presence of wildfires in public imagination in relation to colonial land management and extractive forestry practices, as the coloniality of climate change (Sultana, 2022) becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

Social media is therefore a complex and contradictory space of aesthetic public pedagogy (Karsgaard, 2023), created through the entanglement of human and non-human agents, which can provide insight into climate justice education through the arts. Using post-digital, arts-based methods, this paper thinks with large-scale Instagrammed visual expression surrounding #bcfires from British Columbia, Canada. This paper experiments with critical geography’s practice of “hybrid drawings” (Cooper, 2022), which involves layering various digital and analog media, lesson plans, policies, photographs, maps, and curriculum to draw attention to “multiple, capacious, and intertwined social, epistemological, and political worlds” (Cooper, 2022, p. 99). Hybrid drawings reveal the political aesthetics (Ashcroft, 2017; Pauwels, 2018; Rancière, 2013) of public expression surrounding wildfires, dialoguing online and offline sense-making to contribute visions for aesthetic, affective, and political climate justice education through the arts.

Author

• Carrie Karsgaard, Cape Breton University