Conference Agenda
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Daily Overview |
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30 SES 05 C: Education and Environmental Justice: Taking an artful approach
Research Workshop | ||
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30. Environmental and Sustainability Education Research (ESER)
Research Workshop Education, Environmental Justice and the Arts 1: Anglia Ruskin University; 2: Norwegian University of the LIfe Sciences; 3: University of Edinburgh; 4: University of Cambridge Presenting Author:The Education and Environmental Justice Collective approaches scholarly thinking through reading, conversation, and art-making practices. We focus on the interplays between education, environmental justice, and art, and the consequences of these interplays across multiple times and places. This proposal responds to the Network 30 Special Call, which asks ‘what kind of research is required to grasp the complexity entailed in poly-crisis?’ We posit that environmental justice (EJ) in education necessitates the consideration of epistemic (in)justices, including from a multi-species and ecological point of view. Education that attends to EJ is thus confronted with challenging habitual modes of epistemic and methodological approaches to research (Stein, 2019). This proposal arises from the work of the Education and Environmental Justice Collective which comprises a group of academics and artists from across European settings, at different stages of their career who meet regularly to read-papers-and-art-in-relational-conversation. We use this method to review literature in ways that engage critically with what counts as knowledge. As a collective, we link issues of environmental (in)justice to the dominating epistemologies of the Global North; as extensions of ongoing colonial practices that justify exploitation and exclude various knowledge systems (Silva, 2014). Our research adopts a “pluriversal” approach (Escobar, 2020), acknowledging multiple systems of knowledge within our “world of many worlds” (Blaser & de la Cadena, 2018, p.1). It is our response to a shared commitment and desire toward decoloniality in environmental education research as multiple academics (e.g. Garcia-Arias et al., 2023; Yusoff, 2018) call for. This approach offers a perspective that is attuned to the urgencies of our time (ecological, educational, and epistemic), which is indeed a time of poly-crisis, and in turn reminds us that research can be multiple, difficult, messy, slow, challenging, and beautiful. Since we first established ourselves in 2021 as a knowledge exchange-focused reading group with an artist-in-relation, we have co-created a method of reviewing literature through art and conversation within the linked fields of education and environmental justice. The method itself acts to embed environmental justice within education, as well as being the basis for identifying areas for knowledge creation. While traditional literature reviews are categorised as secondary research (for example, Munn et al., 2018; Schreiber & Cramer, 2024), our method of reading and responding through and to writing, conversation, and art is a form of primary research. We enhance the synthesis and critique of text-based literature by including human participants and art in a generative, collaborative practice. We call our practice “art-loguing”, a term which amalgamates the concepts of dialogue, catalogue and art. Art-loguing helps us describe the collective process of materialising our conversation with and through pre-selected readings in artistic and written forms, relevant to both our individual and shared interests in education and environmental justice. Methodology, Methods, Research Instruments or Sources Used In this workshop we adapt our art-loguing practice to home in on the hegemony of individualism, as exemplified by the performance culture of education worldwide, that has often been argued to be a driver of environmental injustices, and hence poly-crisis. The aim of our workshop is to critically engage with individualism through illustrating the pedagogical potential of collaboration around a known and unknown whole using art in seen and unseen ways. To achieve this, in the workshop we begin by explaining our method and the background to the workshop, and then we set up the process described below to make collaborative artwork following adaptations of two different methods: Exquisite Corpse and Collaborative Collage. ‘Exquisite Corpse’, from the Surrealist movement – is a method that explores juxtaposition, collective creativity and challenges rational perception. It embodies the surrealist principle of "pure psychic automatism" (Breton 1924 surrealist manifesto) by removing individual conscious control and instead relying on collective spontaneity. It aligns with contemporary art's broader movement towards inclusivity and interconnection, breaking down hierarchies associated with individual authorship. For the exquisite corpse round we provide provocations as questions or extracts from academic texts or artwork towards making, drawing, or writing, asking each person to start by responding individually, using materials provided. Their creation will then be obscured, and handed to someone who will build on it in response to a second prompt, and so on. Each person works individually building on another’s work, and in the end a collaboratively created artwork is revealed. Collage is understood as a “borderlands epistemology" that brings out non-dominant modes of knowing (Vaughan, 2005) both in terms of content, which is visual, and process, in that it can foreground the emotional response to the work (Gerstenblatt, 2013) and other ineffable dimensions that arise in the context of the creative practice or research. For the collaborative collage round we provide a range of materials including images, words and visual creations to potentiate a response collectively. The responses will be brought together on to a seen canvas, creating a single artwork that expresses a collective response. Here we can draw on the surrealist thinking about the importance of attention to serendipity, alongside the significance of intentional, thoughtful collaboration that collaborative collage methods present. Conclusions, Expected Outcomes or Findings In working with on the one hand the serendipitous (avant garde) coming together that happens in a game of consequences or the Exquisite Corpse movement, and on the other with a seen and curated output like what we get from a collaborative collage we use the act of communal and collective art making as critical engagement with the commodification of individuality. The art might be understood as a version of what Le Guin (2019) calls the carrier bag: a vessel that holds fragments, stories, theories, images, art, and feelings without needing to collapse them into a single, unified narrative. The carrier bag that we make in the workshop would both catalogue the process of critical engagement and illustrate the dialogical process of engaging between humans, texts, art and more; hence the workshop demonstrates how our practice of art-loguing can support new thinking about how education and environmental justice are co-implicated. We aim to show that this kind of research is important in times of poly-crisis and can have profound effects on the way that we work collectively and collaboratively to understand and seek to provide support for Education in these times. As this workshop is part of our Education and Environmental Justice Collective research project, anyone attending the workshop will be invited to join our collective, and will also be fully informed about how their engagement in this workshop might influence our thinking – including future publications. References Da Silva, D.F. (2014) ‘Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World’, The Black Scholar, 44(2), pp. 81–97. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2014.11413690. Escobar, A. (2020) Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Translated by D. Frye. Duke University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11315v0. Frank, J. (2013) ‘Mitigating Against Epistemic Injustice in Educational Research’, Educational Researcher, 42(7), pp. 363–370. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X12457812. Le Guin, U.K. and Lee, B. (2024) The carrier bag theory of fiction. Revised single edition. [United Kingdom]: Cosmogenesis. Escobar, A. (2020) Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible. Translated by D. Frye. Duke University Press. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11315v0. Schreiber, F. and Cramer, C. (2022) ‘Towards a conceptual systematic review: proposing a methodological framework’, Educational Review, pp. 1–22. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2022.2116561. Stein, S. (2019) ‘The Ethical and Ecological Limits of Sustainability: A Decolonial Approach to Climate Change in Higher Education’, Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 35(3), pp. 198–212. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2019.17. Yusoff, K. (2018) A billion black Anthropocenes or none. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press (Forerunners ideas first from the University of Minnesota Press). | ||