Cultural Studies of Science Education

, Volume 13, Issue 1, pp 299–315 | Cite as

Composing new understandings of sustainability in the Anthropocene

  • Sophia (Sun Kyung) Jeong
  • Stacey Britton
  • Kimberly Haverkos
  • Mel Kutner
  • Teresa Shume
  • Deborah Tippins
Review

Abstract

The relationship between sustainability and the Anthropocene takes on new meaning in a time of unprecedented human impact on Earth systems. This relationship is at times contested and not well researched but critical in considering how we will respond to environmental challenges of today and the future. Elaborating on the need for new perspectives and nuanced understandings of sustainability, the contributors to this volume draw on posthumanist and “new” feminist materialist methodologies and theoretical lenses to engage readers in ways, which often contrast with prevailing thinking and research. From the cosmopolitics of place in urban Berlin to the watery space of urban wetlands they share research and rich narratives, which illustrate how sustainability is theorized and enacted across a range of diverse educational contexts. Moving beyond the rhetoric of sustainability, the authors invite us to explore innovative ways to engage with new concepts and emerging tensions that are now influencing the fields of education and sustainability.

Keywords

Sustainability Anthropocene Posthumanism New materialism Feminist philosophies 

References

  1. Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Joumal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. doi: 10.1086/345321.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  2. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  3. Barad, K. (2008). Queer causation and the ethics of mattering. In N. Giffney & M. Hird (Eds.), Queering the non/human (pp. 311–338). Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.Google Scholar
  4. Bennett, J. (2004). The force of things: Steps toward an ecology of matter. Political Theory, 32(3), 347–372. doi: 10.1177/0090591703260853.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  5. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
  6. Birrell, C. (2017). A precarious body. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 77–94). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  7. Borowy, I. (2014). Defining sustainable development for our common future: A history of the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission). London; New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
  8. Clarke, D. A. G. (2017). Educating beyond the cultural and the natural: (Re)Framing the limits of the possible in environmental education. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 305–319). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  9. Crinall, S. (2017). Bodyplacetime: Painting and blogging ‘dirty, messy’ humannatured becomings. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 95–114). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  10. Deleuze, G., & Guattari. F. (2004). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). London: Continuum.Google Scholar
  11. Duhn, I. (2017). Cosmopolitics of place: Towards urban multispecies living in precarious times. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 45–57). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  12. Ehrlich, P. R., & Holdren, J. P. (1971). Impact of population growth. Science, New Series, 171(3977), 1212–1217.Google Scholar
  13. Ferfolja, T., & Ullman, J. (2017). Exploring ‘thing-power’ and the ‘spectre of fear’ on schooling subjectivities: A critical posthuman analysis of LGBT silencing. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 187–198). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  14. Foley, A. V. (2017). Deep mapping towards an intercultural sustainability discourse. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 217–235). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  15. Gaffney, O., & Steffen, W. (2017). The Anthropocene equation. The Anthropocene Review, 4(1), 53–61. doi: 10.1177/2053019616688022.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  16. Gannon, S. (2017). Watery configurations of animals, children, pedagogies and politics in a suburban wetland. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 253–267). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  17. Gray, T. (2017). Re-thinking human-plant relations by theorising using concepts of biophilia and animism in workplaces. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 199–215). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  18. Gunderson, L. H., & Holling, C. S. (2011). Panarchy: Understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Washington, DC: Island Press.Google Scholar
  19. Handa, N. (2017). Transnational knowledge exchange: Connecting knowledge traditions for sustainability of the planet. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 143–158). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  20. Haraway, D. (1992). The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, & P. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 295–337). New York, NY: Routledge.Google Scholar
  21. Hultman, K., & Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 525–542. doi: 10.1080/09518398.2010.500628.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  22. James, P. (2017). Alternative paradigms for sustainability: Decentring the human without becoming posthuman. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 29–44). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  23. Kuhlman, T., & Farrington, J. (2012). What is sustainability? Sustainability, 2(11), 2436–3448. doi: 10.3390/su2113436.Google Scholar
  24. Louv, R. (2008). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Chapell Hill, NC: Algonquin Press.Google Scholar
  25. Malone, K. (2017). Ecological posthumanist theorising: Grappling with child-dog-bodies. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 161–172). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  26. Malone, K., Truong, S., & Gray, T. (Eds.). (2017). Reimagining sustainability in precarious times. Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1.Google Scholar
  27. Massey, D. (2005). For space. London: Sage.Google Scholar
  28. Mcphie, J., & Clarke, D. A. G. (2015). A walk in the park: Considering practice for environmental education through an immanent take on the material tum. Journal of Environmental Education, 46(4), 230–250. doi: 10.1080/00958964.2015.1069250.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  29. Mitten, D. (2017). Connections, compassion, and co-healing: The ecology of relationships. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 173–186). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  30. Morton, T. (2010). The ecological thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
  31. Naess, A. (1973). The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 16(1–4), 95–199. doi: 10.1080/00201747308601682.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  32. Perez de Vega, E. (2014). Thinking the ecological present. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/2964186/Thinking. The Ecological Present.
  33. Philpott, T.-A. (2017). Nurturing female outdoor educators: A call for increased diversity in outdoor education in precarious times. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 281–292). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  34. Quantz, R. (2008). Leadership, culture, and democracy: Rethinking systems and conflict in schools. In D. Carlson & C. P. Gause (Eds.), Keeping the promise: Essays on leadership, democracy, and education (pp. 45–60). New York, NY: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
  35. Quantz, R. (2011). Rituals and student identity in education: Ritual critique for a new pedagogy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  36. Somerville, M. (2017). The Anthropocene’s Call to Educational Research. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 17–28). Singapore: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  37. Taylor, A. (2017). Romancing or re-configuring nature in the Anthropocene? Towards common worlding pedagogies. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 61–75). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  38. Taylor, C. A. (in press). Diffracting the curriculum: Putting ‘new’ material feminism to work to reconfigure knowledge-making practices in undergraduate higher education. In K. Scantlebury, C. A. Taylor, & A. Lund (Eds.), Turning feminist theory into practice: Enacting material change in education. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.Google Scholar
  39. Tesar, M. (2017). Tracing notions of sustainability in urban childhoods. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 115–127). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  40. Thomson, N., & Tippins, D. (2013). Envisioning science teacher preparation for 21st century classrooms: Some tensions. In N. Mansour (Ed.), Science education for Diversity in a knowledge society (pp. 231–249). Dordrecht: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  41. Truong, S. (2017). Expanding curriculum pathways between education for sustainability (EfS) and health and physical education (HPE). In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 239–251). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  42. Vozzo, L., & Smith, P. (2017). Caretakers or undertakers: How can education support humanity to build a sustainable future? In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 293–304). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  43. Ward, K. (2017). Beyond sustainability: New visions for human econnection in early childhood education. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 129–142). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  44. Wright, D. (2017). The ecological curriculum: Teaching, learning, understanding. In K. Malone, S. Truong, & T. Gray (Eds.), Reimagining sustainability in precarious times (pp. 269–279). Singapore: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1_18.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  45. Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Steffen, W., & Crutzen, P. (2010). The new world of the Anthropocene. Environmental Science and Technology, 44(7), 2228–2231. doi: 10.1021/es903118j.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  • Sophia (Sun Kyung) Jeong
    • 1
  • Stacey Britton
    • 2
  • Kimberly Haverkos
    • 3
  • Mel Kutner
    • 1
  • Teresa Shume
    • 4
  • Deborah Tippins
    • 1
  1. 1.University of GeorgiaAthensUSA
  2. 2.Department of Early ChildhoodUniversity of West GeorgiaCarrolltonUSA
  3. 3.Department of EducationThomas More CollegeCrestview HillsUSA
  4. 4.North Dakota State UniversityFargoUSA

Personalised recommendations