The Anthropocene’s Call to Educational Research

Abstract

This chapter is set within two parallel social processes in contemporary western societies: the growing response to the devastating impact of climate change framed within the concept of the Anthropocene and the continuing penetration of Advanced Capitalism. Through identifying the imperatives of the Anthropocene and Braidotti’s analysis of Advanced Capitalism, the chapter considers how educational research and practice might respond to the increasing recognition of human entanglement in the fate of the planet. It identifies new posthuman philosophical approaches in Anthropocene scholarship and postqualitative research that seek new ways to address the profound nature/culture binary and decentre the human being. Three particular theoretical and methodological moves of posthuman philosophies are explored: the concept of ‘intra-action’ that reconceives the human subject as produced within the agency of the world; the concept of the ‘common worlds’ that we inherit and inhabit with other species; and the concept of ‘thinking through Country’ that brings together Indigenous and western nature/culture approaches. These theoretical and methodological ideas are explored through examples of their application in the author’s current research practice as a strategy of starting where we are.