Experimental Education Infrastructures: Centering Climate Justice

• In Event: Experimental Infrastructures: Material Insufficiency, Scale, and the Question of (Im)possibility - II

Abstract

This paper builds on the author’s prior research on science communication as context production to examine design decisions embodied in three different experimental education infrastructures. Drawing on seven years of teaching/fieldwork in sustainability studies, design, and STS at a polytechnic institute, this paper outlines some key pedagogical approaches to centering climate justice in higher educational contexts that can be highly obdurate, with schools with a dominant focus on technical education and research presenting particular challenges. Driven by the work of multiple intersecting social movements, this paper presents findings on how experimental educational infrastructures have helped students understand - and intervene in - highly complex contexts at different scales. It argues for the importance of project-based learning of design process, creatively mobilizing the theory/practice nexus, and questioning the social/technical dualism (and other dualisms) so prevalent and powerful at polytechnic institutes and beyond. It also outlines some ways that the classes analyzed (ethnographically, as field sites) have had limited but important material success in addressing climate change and how seemingly immaterial effects may materialize in the future in multiple rippling ways, especially by disrupting the underlying conditions that limit and enable what actions are possible in classrooms, at universities, and in broader communities. The paper concludes with calls for pedagogical innovations to be taken seriously in STS scholarship as a way to inform our attempts to make STS relevant in larger systems that at first glance can seem so impossible to shift.

Author

• Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, RPI