Finding Ceremony Beyond the Ruins of Sustainable Development

• In Event: Has ‘sustainable development’ had its day? Interrogating and reframing the global education agenda

Proposal

In this conceptual paper, the author first turns to a recent visit to Western Kenya where they stumbled across a series of abandoned structures, ghosts of completed United States Agency for International Development (USAID) projects. The unsettling nature of the ruins gave rise to the question: What other worlds might emerge within the afterlives of SDG2030? Working within neoliberal and more recent nationalistic agendas, Sustainable Development policies and programs are resulting in both metaphorical and material ruins. Turning to the current conditions of unmet SDGs, the paper examines how the logics of Sustainability remain intimately tied to the aesthetic binary of Development/Underdevelopment and the reification of Western relations through the more recent iteration of Sustainability.

The paper argues that the overrepresented economic representation of the human can be identified through the stories that prop up the Sustainable Development discourse, for example within the mythologies of endless economic growth, preservation and purity of untouched Nature, and the provision of the Western model of education through formal schooling as the best method to Sustainably Develop out of extractive and dispossessive global relations. Furthermore, the logics of Western education continues to rely on the adoption of the Darwinian naturalized selection/deselection of the human in terms of artificially constructed forms of scarcity, represented in education vis-à-vis approaches to grading, evaluation, and funding which encompass an unfolding, expansion, and advancement through so-called developmental stages. Thinking from the ruins, the paper suggests that interrupting and dislodging such dominant notions of education is a project that requires reckoning with coded practices and uncovering different forms of relationality (Wynter, 2015).

Moving toward possibilities for breaking from the current monohumanist human genre, Wynter and McKittrick (2015) suggest new forms of living must be storied into being through different cultural rhythms–repeated and patterned over time. Such deeds have largely been rendered opaque, criminal, or demonic within the Modern worldview. To conclude, this paper returns to lessons within past historical ruptures, elucidating how global relations can be rearticulated and repaired, beyond alternatives, toward what can be called new or different genres of the human. Complicating the Western aesthetic of Sustainability and Development, their ruins uncover traces of different ways to see and interact with the world. The act of noticing other worlds hints at moving toward what Wynter terms ceremonies to be found—intentional patterned rewiring of the senses recentering those humans who have been ontologically negated.

Author

• Benjamin D Scherrer, Lehman College, CUNY