Unsettling Environmentalism: Epistemological Shifts in the Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign

• In Event: 25.059 - Desettling Evidences of Learning in This "Post-Truth" Era Through Informal Learning Environment Research

Abstract

Objectives
In studies of political development, epistemological shifts have often gone unrecognized as a significant indicator of learning and also as an engine of learning. In our work, we theorize epistemological shifts as a learning accomplishment. Using the North American environmentalist movement as a context, we examine how activists’ epistemologies shifted to acknowledge and (sometimes) accommodate Indigenous ways of knowing and being within their repertoires of practice. We trace the political development of youth climate activists over the course of two years in order to theorize the practices, identities, and political concepts that made these shifts possible and productive for some climate activists and argue that epistemological transformations must be central to any analysis of political learning.

Perspective(s)
Black feminist thought, Indigenous scholarship, feminist standpoint theory, and critical whiteness studies have long argued for attention to ways of knowing as a fundamental way of shifting power relations (Collins, 1986; Harding, 1991; Little Bear, 2000; Moreton-Robinson, 2004; Roediger, 1999). The learning sciences are beginning to grapple with questions of ways of knowing and being and their relationship to sociohistoric relations of power (Esmonde & Booker, 2016). Our work draws on these bodies of work to examine the epistemological transformations that are made possible through engagement in environmentalist spaces and their consequences.

Methods & Data Sources
Our research site, Fossil Free UofT, was a student-run campaign aiming to convince the University of Toronto to divest from fossil fuels. Between 2014 and 2016, Fossil Free UofT met weekly to plan events and coordinate strategy. Meetings lasted two to three hours, with facilitation responsibilities rotating between members. The group included undergraduate, masters, and PhD students. Through analysis of over 7000 minutes of multi camera video data and Stimulated Recall Interviews, we analyzed how some participants came to understand themselves as radical activists, and trace how they engaged Indigenous and feminist epistemologies and challenged dominant epistemologies in their work.

Results
Epistemological shifts were one of the key markers of politicization, and significantly enabled deeper forms of politicization, We argue that for some participants in Fossil Free UofT, epistemological shifts transformed their relationship to the environmental movement. By undermining the perceived universality of Eurowestern knowledge systems, this consciousness forced participants to grapple with awareness of Whiteness and settler coloniality. This included questioning epistemological orientations to dualism, objectivity, neutrality, “science”, time, and other coordinating ideologies of Eurowestern thought. The epistemological shifts drove new directions of identity development, and those new identities iteratively shaped the epistemological foundations of the community.

Significance
This analysis brings epistemological shifts to the forefront of studies of political development. For the learning sciences, it expands the current conversation, bringing longitudinal data on how activists’ epistemologies shifted to identify and challenge dominant epistemologies of Whiteness and settler colonialism. This helps us to unsettle the universality of Eurowestern ways of knowing, and think about how other ways of knowing and being can enable new forms of learning and identity development.

Author

• Joe Curnow, University of Manitoba