Education "outliers" and future-making practices in the Anthropocene

Supervisor: Dr Peter Sutoris

A) Rationale for the project

The education system is a key pathway for achieving a more sustainable world, yet much of the discourse around formal education is still confined to the narrowly-defined "21st century skills". Work to articulate an alternative to this and recognise the significance of the Anthropocene’s onset is still rare. By examining future-making practices of "positive deviant" educators, the project will examine how environmental futures can be moulded, both at the level of the individuals participating in this research and at-scale through the education system. The project will use immersive ethnographic research through extended fieldwork (either in the UK or internationally, depending on the candidate’s background, language skills and personal preferences) to build trust with study participants and explore their future-making practices in depth.

B) References that should be read

Appadurai, Arjun. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. Verso, 2013.

Bradshaw, Corey J. A., Paul R. Ehrlich, Andrew Beattie, Gerardo Ceballos, Eileen Crist, Joan Diamond, Rodolfo Dirzo, et al. ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’. Frontiers in Conservation Science 1 (2021): 9.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Holfelder, Anne-Katrin. ‘Towards a Sustainable Future with Education?’ Sustainability Science 14, 4 (2019): 943–52.

Sutoris, Peter. ‘Politicising ESE in Postcolonial Settings: The Power of Historical Responsibility, Action and Ethnography’. Environmental Education Research 25, 4 (2019): 601–12.

Sutoris, Peter. Educating for the Anthropocene: Schooling and Activism in the Face of Slow Violence. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2022.

C) Research aims / questions

The project’s goal is to identify ideas and practices among educators that are particularly promising as models for curricula and pedagogies tackling environmental decay. The research will look for positive deviance among a variety of education practitioners (not necessarily only teachers but also others who educate about the environment - activists, journalists, influencers) and assess the potential for scaling up their ideas and practices through the formal education system. The ways these “positive deviants” cultivate a political imagination of alternative futures will be of particular interest, as will be "fringe" ideas such as degrowth.

D) Methods

This is an ethnographic research project, which will rely on extensive fieldwork research, a deep immersion in the field, relationships of trust with research participants and meaningful co-production of knowledge between the researcher and the researched. Depending on research location, language competency in local language may be required. The use of innovative and transdisciplinary methods will be encouraged.