Conference Agenda

Recent research within the field of environmental sustainability research has highlighted the need to re-engage with education philosophy and the ontological assumptions informing these philosophies in the context of what is labeled the Anthropocene (e.g. Sjögren & Hofverberg 2022, Clark & McPhie 2020a). A common concern is the anthropocentrism of common education thought, where alternative entry points are drawn up often appealing to (neo)materialism (Payne 2016, Clark & McPhie 2020b) and posthumanism (Malone & Young 2022, Weaver & Snaza 2017) to expand notions of subjectivity and agency in education.

Drawing on the loose classification of speculative realism, as it was coined by the seminal workshop with the same title, at Goldsmith the University of London in 2007, this symposium aims to differentiate a return to realism as a partially overlapping but also distinct entry point for rethinking education and instruction in the Anthropocene. What this symposium aims to focus upon is the critique and abandonment of correlationism (Meillassoux, 2009) in education thought, that is that when we think about education that we always already have to assume a mutual correlation of thought/practice/experience/discursivity and world. The symposium engages with realism, as an invitation to break this correlation and the reduction of the world to processes of human learning and formation (Bildung), without claiming access to this world as in classical or ‘naive’ realism or again reducing the world to its correlation to thought/practice/experience/discursivity. Accordingly, the symposium is to offer a venue for speculative education thought that is to engage with questions such as: How to re-think education and instruction once we break with correlationism?

The symposium is to open up a space that is often forbidden or withheld in the engagement with education as science, that is a return to the underlying ontological questions and positions of thinking education and its associated ambitions and limits. This space is opened to exactly not reduce education science to epistemology (i.e. what we can know about education and its processes/outcomes) but to return to ontology as means to speculate and engage with that what remains beyond or withdrawn in education. This return to ontology and speculative realism is to open up alternate entry points for engaging with anthropocentrism and education in the Anthropocene, raising speculative questions and answers to how to think and engage with education beyond the confines of correlationism.

The papers incorporated into the symposium are written by scholars in the field of environmental education and the philosophy of education who, in their previous, work have been engaging with speculative realism. It is a joint symposium of the environmental and sustainability and the philosophy of education networks (30 & 13) of EERA and aims to initiate a dialogue among these fields as well as representatives from philosophy. Discussant Dist. Prof. Graham Harman from the Southern California Institute of Architecture is one of the original presenters at the Goldsmith workshop on speculative realism and provides a critical reflection on how philosophy and educational sciences might nuance an engagement with the challenges the Anthropocene can be seen to impose.

Drawing on the educational experimental mega site “Naturkraft” situated at the Danish west coast (Kardyb, 2023), we engage with the questions of how 1) education in the Anthropocene faces ongoing challenges from the emphasis on anthropocentric conceptualizations of the world, and 2) how education is always enmeshed within different realities that are constantly de-centered, eccentric, destabilized, out of sync with anthropocentric aspirations of control. Drawing on Timothy Morton tri-partite notion of the world-for-us, the-world-in-itself and the world-without-us- (Morton, 2013, 2016), we open up for perspectives on how these three worlds co-exist, overlap, and struggle in Naturkraft, and potentially in any given educational setting. Adhering to anthropocentric logic within education quickly reaches its limits as we face global, regional, and local challenges in a time of hyper-object-derived wicked problems (Lysgaard, Bengtsson, & Laugesen, 2019). A way of navigating these problems is to indulge in visions of shedding existing educational thought and practice in order to transcend correlationistic foundations of education (Clarke & McPhie, 2020; Paulsen, 2021). We argue that such transcendence is never out of reach, and on an ontological level requires more emphasis on rigor of thought and less on the journey to pinpoint an authentic outside that can rip us out of our correlationistic slumber (Lysgaard & Bengtsson, 2020). Through analysis of the manmade ‘nature’ in and of the Naturkraft site, we argue for the omnipresence of the world-without-us and the potential of engaging with this darker side of the specific and general educational site (Bengtsson, 2018; Kardyb, 2023). Being attuned to and engaging with aspects of education that breaking with correlationism is no mean feat though. Such an effort shares characteristics with efforts to engage the like of the Lacanian Real, Philip Pulman’s Dust, or Lovecraftian cosmic Horror (Bird, 2001; Harman, 2012; Lysgaard, 2018). There is no chance to look directly at it without being stunned, our gaze diverted, or the thing that we want to see withdrawing from us. At the same time there is no escaping the world-without-us as our petty plans and hopes for the past, present and future are easily dashed aside by forces outside of our time, space and senses. Naturkraft offers examples of how education and educational practice benefit and suffer from the encounters with the world-without-us and how these encounters instill a notion of realism that challenges the ongoing emphasis on correlationistic foundational values of education.

Bengtsson, S. L. (2018). Outlining an Education Without Nature and Object-Oriented Learning. In K. M. Amy Cutter-Mackenzie, and E. Hacking, Barratt (Ed.), Research Handbook on Childhoodnature: Springer. Bird, A.-M. (2001). “Without Contraries is no Progression”: Dust as an All-Inclusive, Multifunctional Metaphor in Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials”. Children’s Literature in Education, 32(2), 111-123. Clarke, D. A. G., & McPhie, J. (2020). Tensions, knots, and lines of flight: themes and directions of travel for new materialisms and environmental education. Environmental Education Research, 26(9-10), 1231-1254. Harman, G. (2012). Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy: ZERO books. Kardyb, D. F. S. (2023). PhD.-thesis. (PhD), Aarhus University, Copenhagen. Lysgaard, J. A. (2018). Learning from Bad Practice in Environmental and Sustainability Education: Peter Lang. Lysgaard, J. A., & Bengtsson, S. (2020). Dark pedagogy – speculative realism and environmental and sustainability education. Environmental Education Research, 26(9-10), 1453-1465. Lysgaard, J. A., Bengtsson, S., & Laugesen, M. H.-L. (2019). Dark Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave. Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: University of Minnesota Press. Morton, T. (2016). Dark Ecology: Colombia University Press. Paulsen, M. (2021). Bildung & Technology: Historical and Systematic Relationships. In D. Kergel, M. Paulsen, & J. Garsdal (Eds.), Bildung in the Digital Age: Routledge.

If there is one educational question that the Anthropocene should evoke, it has to concern the mechanisms through which reality - that is, human-independent objects like the ecological crisis - come to matter for human subjects. This topic lies at the very heart of the discussions generated by speculative realism. After all, Meillassoux (2010) posited overcoming correlationism as an ontological condition for the possibility of engaging with reality as such. Yet this very condition multiplies the difficulties involved in the educational question. If reality is indeed non-correlative with human experiential apparati, it is not immediately obvious how it can become an object of concern for human beings. We aim to explore this ambiguity in the ontological register. The main issue we wish to investigate is the status of the human psyche as one object among others. On the one hand, this concerns the object we call the human psyche - what is this object like, ontologically speaking? On the other hand, it concerns the relations this object has with other objects - how does this object interact with other objects? We seek an ontology capable of making sense both of the irreducibility of objects to human experiential apparati and the fact that some of these objects matter to us. We stage our investigation as a critical encounter between object-oriented-ontology (OOO), as formulated by Graham Harman (2011), and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (Lacan 2019). Received wisdom would see these theoretical positions as deeply irreconcilable: Lacan’s theorizing is a paradigm case of correlationism while OOO is one way of overcoming correlationism. However, following recent work by Lucas Pohl (2020), we argue that making the accusation of correlationism stick to Lacan’s theory is not as easy as it might seem. This opens the possibility of a more fruitful encounter between the two positions, which we pursue under Pohl’s Lacanian label “object-disoriented-ontology”. While we cannot hope to resolve the educational question of how objects begin to matter, our analysis does clarify the ontological requirements for answering this question.

Harman, G. (2011). The quadruple object. Zero Books. Lacan, J. (2019). Desire and Its Interpretation: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VI. Polity. Meillassoux, Q. (2010). After finitude: An essay on the necessity of contingency. Bloomsbury Publishing. Pohl, L. (2020). Object-disoriented geographies: the Ghost Tower of Bangkok and the topology of anxiety. cultural geographies, 27(1), 71-84.

This paper focuses on the status of the content of education and how the content might be rethought by drawing on speculative realist thought. Drawing on our previous work (Bengtsson 2022), where we differentiate between the content of education and the object of education that this content refers to, we aim to provide an object-oriented ontological differentiation between sensible object and real object (Harman 2011) in order to break with the correlationist reduction of the object of education to the content of education as always already incorporated into human practice and historicity. The paper is to outline, against the background of the German Geisteswissenschaftliche Didaktik (curriculum theory based on the epistemological principles of Geisteswissenschaft), how the theory of curriculum and instruction is based on expressions of correlationist thought- We will here specify by relating to Klafki’s (2013, 1959) and Menck’s (1986) influential work what the consequences are for the conception of the content of education (Unterrichtsinhalt) as well as how this conception frames the project of education as a project of self-cultivation and formation (Bildung). By critiquing the consequences of a reduction of the content to a conflation of its position in nature and culture, we illustrate how content only attains a stable educative substance by an appeal to a static notion of nature and how the determinism of a static and universal educative substance is only partially bracketed by the appeal to human exceptionalism and agency in relation to the appropriation of that content in culture (Bildung of humanity) and the project of self-formation (Bildung of the individual self). The correlationist conflation of those two positions of the content leads here to explanatory difficulties with regard to the relation between the Bildung of self and humanity, as well as how the stability and substance of the content in the natural world can be maintained in the context of the Anthropocene. By rehabilitating the notion of the object of education, we aim to explore how objects have a form of agency that shapes self-formation and the formation of humanity. We draw here on the concept of “allure” in Harman´s (2010, 2011) work to illustrate how the object of education exerts a form of causal aesthetic influence on individuals and humanity’s Bildung. This is particularly relevant for ESE and how we - as humans - come to know ourselves in the Anthropocene, which will be further addressed in the paper.

Bengtsson, S. L. (2022). Didaktiken efter idealismen: Undervisningsobjektets återkomst i antropocen. Pedagogisk Forskning i Sverige. Harman, G. (2010). Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures. Zero Books. Harman, G. (2011). The Quadruple Object. Zero Books. Klafki, W. (1959). Das Pädagogische Problem des Elementaren und die Theorie der kategorialen Bildung. Beltz Verlag. Klafki, W. (2013). Kategoriale Bildung: Konzeptionen und Praxis reformpädagogischer Schularbeit zwischen 1948 und 1952. Verlag Julius Klinkhardt. Menck, P. (1986). Unterrichtsinhalt oder Ein Versuch über die Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit im Unterricht. Peter Lang.