Climate change and educational research: Mapping resistances and futurities

Introduction

In the last decades we have seen global climate change come to fruition. It is no longer contained to the pages of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientific reports that warn of dire futures without action. It is now regularly experienced across the planet in wildfire smoke and flames, flooding, hurricanes, heat domes and heat waves, droughts, rising sea levels, and other extreme and escalating climatic conditions with devastating human and planetary implications. This shift into global warming is having rippling impacts across the social and cultural lives of humans, such as loss of livelihood, mass migration, and physical and mental health effects.

The causes and impacts of climate change are not equally distributed. Many in the Global North are more responsible for, and less likely to suffer from, the consequences of climate change than those in the Global South (Sultana, 2022). Indigenous peoples throughout the globe also continue to be disproportionately impacted by climate change (Whyte, 2017). This continues to be a racist, classist, and gendered process of exploitation and domination, for it is the predominantly white and imperial “developed” nations that have accumulated material wealth and social power by violently dispossessing others (Grandin, 2006). Such processes also structure relationships within nations, as urban metropoles develop via extracting resources from the rural periphery (Henry, 2019). Addressing climate change requires critically examining the processes of global, carbon-based industrialization whereby wealthy nations accumulate resources and are thus disproportionally responsible for causing climate change (Táíwò, 2022). These are the same privileged people and nations who will least suffer climate shocks, for they have a greater social and material ability to protect themselves from risk and vulnerability, including the ability to deploy police and militaries to secure power (Parenti, 2011). The ‘uneven distribution of futurity’ is thus a key injustice at the heart of climate change (Grove et al., 2022: 2), with climate impacts far outpacing current global efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

There are many theories of and reasons for global climate inertia and outright resistance to change. These include the ways that modernity led to a “deepening of the imaginary gulf between Nature and Culture” in many parts of the world (Ghosh, 2016: 68). This has supported extractive relationships with Indigenous people and land, in which climate change adds to a succession of land-based colonial incursions (see Liboiron, 2021: 6). These and other forms of ‘resource capitalism’ are predicated on movement, both of people and goods, and today, also on a high carbon infrastructure that supports this movement: electric power generation and electricity grids, cars and road networks, digital technologies, and the structuring of cities, careers, and lifestyles to require regular consumption and travel (Urry, 2011). Globalization and its energy mobilities are central to our current trajectory of climate catastrophe, and yet difficult to change at an individual level due to ‘the inertia of habitual motion’ (Ghosh, 2016: 54), where our jobs and personal lives rely on technology and travel to maintain connections and livelihoods.

Just as the environmental impacts of climate change are experienced unevenly, with those already disadvantaged socially and economically more likely to be affected; so too are perceptions of its impacts differentiated, mainly across political and ideological lines. These differences align with other recent global shifts towards increasing political polarization, in part attributable to widening social understandings of reality amplified through an increasingly algorithmic culture (Boler and Davies, 2021; Ruckenstein, 2023). Buttressed by doubt manufactured by industry and others who benefit from maintaining the status quo (Farrell, 2016; Oreskes and Conway, 2011), science denial - whether regarding vaccinations or climate change - has become an approach to reality in growing segments of the population in many countries around the world (Sinatra and Hofer, 2021). Consider too the recent rise in right-wing and ecofascist violence animated in part by concerns about unstable climate futures (Joyce, 2022). No single group has a hegemonic claim to “the future” and educational scholars must be attuned to the various political valences possible in the climate change adaptation space (Long et al., 2022).

Yet in other segments, climate change is increasingly understood as a force of ‘unthinkable magnitude that create[s] unbearably intimate connections over vast gaps in time and space’ (Ghosh, 2016: 62), as emissions in one place determine the livelihoods for people on the other side of the planet, as people are called to act beyond their individual lives for those of people and species elsewhere and still to come. Indigenous communities and youth have been at the forefront of experiencing and responding to these intimate connections of global climate change - whether through globally shared Tik Tok videos of flooding and wildfires, youth rates of eco-anxiety, Indigenous resurgence and social movements, the global school climate strikes movement, or lawsuits against national governments for climate inaction (Hahn and Ahn, 2020; McKenzie, 2022).

Education is located at the crux of these recent and ongoing global shifts: of dangerous climate change, often caught in the middle of the political polarization that is forestalling urgent action, party to the boom in technological infrastructures that can both actively spread climate misinformation and are key to social movement mobilization. Education is also a forum within which many are increasingly grappling with grief, anxiety, and intergenerational anger as we move further into global climate catastrophe. Education and education policy have the potential to contribute as levers of change across these interconnections, to help address misinformation, redress wrongs, support relational onto-epistemologies, and build social momentum for climate justice action (Bang et al., 2022; Nxumalo et al., 2022). At worst, education can also further contribute to denial and inaction through, for example, use of industry-supplied pro-fossil fuel curricular resources (e.g., Joshi, 2021).

The aim of this special issue of Research in Education (RIE) is to draw together scholarship that can help map out potential roles of education in both the possibilities and resistances of addressing climate change. While early climate change education research had its origins in science and environmental education (Busch et al., 2019), there has been a diversification of scholars, research contexts, and subfields taking up this focus within both education and climate change research. Climate and environmental considerations are no longer relegated to the dusty corners of education research - journals are now interested in special issues on the topic; climate and sustainability education is now taken seriously, increasingly in the curriculum, and addressed in education policies and infrastructure. Much climate change education research in English language journals has historically been focused in the Global North, however, scholars in the Global South are increasingly contributing to global dialogues on CCE (e.g. Apollo and Mbah, 2021; Mbah et al., 2021). However there remains much to do in institutionalizing and deepening climate change education. Despite recent increased interest, climate change remains marginalized in education structures including schools of education, teacher professional development, state policies, and more. When included, it still too often focuses on the science of climate change, rather than addressing structural, psychosocial, or justice aspects that are core to just climate futures (Henderson, 2019).

Given that human-caused climate change is one of the defining educational contexts in the 21st Century, we ask this question of ourselves and our educational research community: What is the role of education and educational research as we attempt to “cultivate equitable educational systems” in a world dominated by climate breakdown and related emergencies? We suggest our scholarly community needs to examine the systems and ideologies that are responsible for climate change: human supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, industrialization, and white supremacy, among others. The perpetuation of these ideas via educational institutions and practices is a significant part of the problem that has led to the current climate crisis. Any educational intervention that attempts to address the myriad of issues surrounding climate change must confront these power dynamics, and this is something that dominant approaches to climate change education frequently background or outright ignore.

Mapping resistance and futurities: Overview of the special issue

Linda Knight’s paper, Inefficiently mapping extinction: A research-creation, practice-led approach to visualizing biodiversity loss advocates for the value of research-creation, practice-led approaches to climate education and education action. It focuses on how ‘inefficient mapping’ can be used as a counter-mapping, methodologic protocol, to critically examine the impacts of colonization on the more-than-human. Knight’s project 'Mapping Extinction' addresses catastrophic biodiversity loss due to the 2019/2020 Australian bushfires, as well as the impacts of hunting, clearing habitats, industrialisation and extraction practices on Australian native wildlife and biodiversity. As a white, non-invited settler in Australia, the project was developed to enable Knight to further decolonial practices and investigations into climate change. The research-creation and practice-led approach meant that drawing took place alongside research into Indigenous languages, biodiversity data, social media content, reading on mapping and the Anthropocene, speculative theory, and visits to galleries. The primary driver for the project was to research the impacts of the bushfires of biodiversity, and through that create a body of work that contributes to contemporary commentary on climate change and its relationship to colonialism and capitalism.

Sara Truman’s paper, Colonial crises of imagination and climate change: The necessity to foreground Caribbean literatures in English education contributes to possibilities for interdisciplinary climate change education to include the kinds of stories created, told, retold and untold about both the current colonial crisis and, importantly liberatory imaginaries of otherwise climate futures. Situated within the context of English literary education, this work troubles colonial erasures by tracing the centrality of Caribbean authors’ work in ontological and epistemological (re)storying of relational human life beyond the repetitions of human supremacy and racial capitalism that currently structure dominant forms of Euro-western literary education. This work is resonant with calls for climate change education to include anticolonial story-telling pedagogies that enact ontological and epistemological shifts reciprocal nature-culture relations (Bang et al., 2022; Nxumalo et al., 2022). Truman’s article provides insights into mapping resistance to coloniality and imagining affirmative relational futurities in climate change curriculum-making.

In resonance with Sara Truman, Fikile Nxumalo and Pablo Montes’ article Encountering creative climate change pedagogies: Cartographic interruptions also maps possibilities of anti-colonial, interdisciplinary pedagogical practices as forms of climate change education. Nxumalo and Montes think alongside Black and Indigenous conceptualizations of relationality, cartography, futurity and fugitivity to show their potential as anti-colonial ontological and epistemological orientations in climate change education. They engage with the specific example of an Indigenous youth camp to illustrate how the emplaced creative curriculum and pedagogies of visual arts, poetry, dance, song and theater enacted liberatory fugitive cartographies of nature-culture relationality, and Indigenous futurity. The authors intentionally push against the disciplinary boundaries of what counts as climate change education. They underline the importance of the embodied, land and water -based, and creative approaches to climate change education. They also foreground Black, Indigenous and Black-Indigenous relational onto-epistemologies and theories of liberation in pedagogically and narratively unsettling the human and white supremacy that underpins the climate crisis (Bang, 2020; King, 2019; Roane and Hosbey, 2022). This article is an invitation for educators in their particular context to consider how pedagogies of creative expression can be designed as anticolonial climate change education.

In The incommensurabilities of digital and climate change priorities in schooling: An infrastructural analysis and implications for education governance Marcia McKenzie and Kalervo Gulson take an infrastructural lens to the intersections of climate change and education. The paper focuses on how the data infrastructures enabling digital education governance include those that support the collection, storage, analysis, and visualization of data through algorithms, along with the materiality required to undertake these functions. Accompanying the increasing use of data infrastructures in education is a growing need to recognize the high carbon costs they entail. In other words, it is important to attend to the underlying energy infrastructure of the digital infrastructure. In this paper, McKenzie and Gulson examine both direct and indirect uses of energy for digital infrastructure to access materials (extraction), build infrastructures (logistics), and operate infrastructures (computation). Using the framing of ‘disposition’ or the stories that are embedded in the twinned digital and energy infrastructures of schooling, the paper proposes three implications for education governance. These entail greater consideration of the limits of each of current school climate change infrastructures such as ‘eco school’ programs and ed tech ‘AI for good’ initiatives, pushes for ‘computing within limits’ without substantial changes, and current school governance practices which unnecessarily rely on digital infrastructures. Instead, the paper proposes that what may be needed is a reversal of the extensive use of digital infrastructures by schools and education governance bodies.

In Climate change as superordinate curriculum? David Long and Joseph Henderson, anthropologists of education who study political conservatism, work from within the federated political reality of the United States. They use theories of curricular change to investigate the kinds of social and political conditions capable of pivoting education toward engaging climate change as a “superordinate” curricular concern at scale. By using political theories of curriculum change vis-a-vis international relations (e.g., Apple and Aasen, 2003; Hursh, 2007), they ask whether and how climate change can be a superordinate concern of schooling in the United States given its current role as a global hegemon and high carbon-emitting imperial superpower. They note that compulsory public education in the United States has never truly been a site of equality and they seek to understand whether and how climate change will be subsumed or taken up as a concern given past and present inequalities in the society, especially given an increasingly reactionary and fascistic counter-mobilization among the political right in the realm of state-level educational policies (see Schneider and Berkshire, 2020). They conclude with political and cultural considerations for those who wish to assert a normative focus on an equitable or just climate education within the political complexities of the United States’ educational system.

In the paper titled “We're fighting for our lives”: Centering affective, collective and systemic approaches to climate justice education as a youth mental health imperative, Maria Vamvalis draws attention to the affective and emotional dimensions of youth agency within the collective social movements deploying climate justice education as an organizing strategy. Her qualitative study centers the voices of young climate justice activists in Canada to explore educational responses that take youth mental health and well-being seriously. She articulates how their solidaristic commitments to create more life-affirming and equitable realities reject common “apolitical” and individualistic approaches to climate change education. The youth activists in her study reject narrowly atomized and scientistic approaches to climate change education due to their collective commitment to a humane common good, suggesting a political move away from dominant neoliberal approaches to environmental education (Hursh et al., 2015). While her interlocutors have developed a keen sense of collective human well-being, they have a less-well developed sense of ecological interrelationships, suggesting that the kinds of ecorelational pedagogical approaches developed by Bang (2020) and others (Nxumalo and Berg, 2020; Whyte, 2017) may show great future promise. Channeling Arundati Roy (2003), Vamavalis shows us that another world is already on her way.

Conclusion

Collectively the papers map possible and much-needed educational futures where climate change is a matter of urgent superordinate concern including through enacting resistance to human-centrism, coloniality, racial capitalism, and their interconnections. In these futures, climate change education inquires - at multiple scales - into possibilities for materializing less extractive and more livable worlds through education policy and data infrastructures to youth coalitions and even the small everyday encounters with the more-than-human world. The papers also illustrate the potentials of climate change pedagogical orientations that are affective, interdisciplinary and intergenerational. Such interdisciplinarity is illustrated through engagements with storytelling and literature, art-making and creative movement as modes of climate change education. It is via the creation of new educational narratives that we can begin to envision and enact transformational change in the face of climate disasters. This is a necessary move in climate change scholarship, for “guid[ing] decision making and direct[ing] social change in collectively determined directions is an essential capacity for securing social well-being and prosperity in times of rapid and often unpredictable global change” (Milkoreit, 2017: 1). We therefore hope this special issue prompts our colleagues to consider how the collective work of educational scholarship might produce desirable futures amid a rapidly changing climate.