Conference Agenda

Economic growth in most areas of the world has resulted in increased food availability. Our dietary patterns have changed toward increased intake of animal proteins and processed food bought in supermarkets, rich in sugars and saturated fat. Current food consumption patterns negatively affect people’s health and the environment.

Concerning health, studies found a correlation between eating home-cooked meals and better dietary quality(Tiwari et al., 2017). Per capita meat consumption is rising, and most meat is already processed before it reaches our shopping baskets (FAO, 2018). High meat consumption can increase the risk of certain chronic diseases (GBD, 2013). In Hungary, 25% of children are overweight or obese, and it is the highest rate in Europe 60% of adolescents reported not eating either fruits or vegetables every day (Inchley et al., 2020).

Concerning environmental issues, studies showed that greenhouse gas emissions from animal-based foods are two times bigger than from plant-based foods (Xu et al., 2021), so meat production is one of the most significant ways humanity damages the environment (Ramankutty & Foley, 1999).

Dietary habits formed and fixed in childhood are challenging to change later on (Ábrahám & Csatordai, 2006). Education could play a crucial role in addressing these issues. Knowledge itself is rarely enough to change behaviour (Christiano & Neimand, 2017). Many studies investigate the effectiveness of different interventions (Kwasny, Dobernig, & Riefler, 2022) to reduce meat consumption. Evidence shows that increasing the visibility of vegetarian alternatives can nudge people to choose them more likely than meat options (Kurz, 2018; Wansink & Love, 2014; Garnett et al., 2019). However, our previous research (Varga et al., 2024) revealed that reducing meat consumption is the least favourable choice for Hungarians from several green lifestyle options. That is why we assumed that an indirect attempt to make plant-based meals more attractive rather than meat consumption less attractive could effectively change people’s attitudes and behaviours concerning meat consumption, a culturally deeply rooted element of the Hungarian diet.

Our main assumption is that skill interventions focusing on plant-based foods delivered at an appropriate age could tackle more than one face of this complex problem. The presented research aimed to assess whether an experiment for children aged 10-12 and their parents based on the participants’ experiences gained during two online cooking workshops with plant-based foods without a direct argument for meat reduction could change attitudes and behaviours towards a plant-based diet and meat consumption.

With the rapid digitalization of society, emotions are increasingly commodified, symbolized, and shared through digital practices. Furthermore, global climate change has led to the emergence of new psychological disorders and exacerbated pre-existing vulnerabilities in youth. Climate anxiety has been featured in a mental health crisis. The youth of today, especially those living in the global North, must grapple with the paradox of the societal demand for constant digital consumption and innovation, propelled by the market economy's unabated pursuit of growth, versus the moral imperative to foster planetary well-being, which requires transformative changes in energy and technology use. This paradox can exert a potent, sometimes paralyzing force. The affective toll is often obscured in the talks of cognitive load/dissonance and the popular well-being discourses in learning science such as grit and mindset. The disharmonies we may encounter when trying to integrate what we know and feel, what we think we should do, what we do, what we would want to do if we didn't have to worry about money, and what we would want to tell our kids or our future selves: how am I supposed to make sense of how to be in the world?

Against the backdrop of medicalizing or psychologizing climate emotions which can be understood as both an appropriate response to climate injustice and valuable for moral functioning, we argue for a greater educational emphasis on contemplative practices that nurture holistic human development, such as dialogue, improvisation, and deep listening. To this end, and informed by critical pedagogy and phenomenology, we repurposed an educational game designed for teaching critical thinking based on philosophy for children (P4C) pedagogy, incorporating role-play and adapting it to the needs and queries of adolescents and young adults. The broader goal of this learning activity is to foster a critical stance towards digital sustainability, and the intermediary goal is to let learners exercise their perspective-taking in an engaging and stimulating peer talk setting.

The design work is conducted as part of my doctoral thesis within the interdisciplinary learning sciences, with co-supervision in philosophy and affective science. The affective experiences that I investigate as part of my thesis are situated in the larger context of ecological, social, digital economic, and sustainable transitions across institutions in western Europe. By utilizing conceptual frameworks from disciplines that are relatively underrepresented in affective science, I propose to join two well-debated, non-essentialist theories of emotions — the constructed theory of emotions (Barrett, 2017) and the enactive, agency-based accounts (Varela et al, 1992, Colombetti, 2014) — in a framework of emotional capabilities development. We tentatively define having emotional capabilities as “being able and willing to maintain or improve relevant practices for one’s inner development in relationship with others and the world”.

During the design, I have either implicitly or explicitly borrowed from several frameworks, namely from Nussbaum’s capabilities approach for human development, critical pedagogy, contemplative practices, and recent attempts to integrate the goal of human flourishing in education and science (Nussbaum, 2009; Jordan et al., 2021; De Ruyter et al., 2020; Schumann et al., 2022). The practice framework is deliberately interventionist. It is derived from the design, observations, and reflections on a learning activity that embeds diverse values and reflective inquiry practices within an intricate mesh of character narratives that describe character actions, goals, and positions on (environmental, social, and economic) sustainability. In this presentation, I will report on the design, data analysis, and lessons learned from our first cycle of DBR, which raises questions regarding the content features and configurations that support the potential mediating processes involved in acquiring some of the transformative capacities, as described in Wamsler (2021)’s work.