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Listening to Voices from the Margins: Transforming Environmental Education

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Queer Ecopedagogies

Abstract

In the past, women, queer, Indigenous and disabled people, as well as race, class and body size issues, have been overlooked in most environmental education programs through being subsumed into the notion of “universalised people,” the “norm.” However, people in each of these marginalised groups has a distinctive contribution to make to environmental education, as a form of anti-oppressive resistance, which needs to be foregrounded. In this chapter I problematize the relative silencing of queer theory and theorizing in environmental education and discuss the contributions that queer(y)ing perspectives bring to environmental education. In particular, I discuss some possibilities for new directions for environmental education where queer ecopedagogies and research, intersectionality and assemblages are used to listen to, and work with, “queer” voices.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The earlier version of this document, A UNESCO position paper on the future of education for sustainable development (ESD) (UNESCO 2018), did not mention gender, sex or sexuality; a noteworthy oversight.

  2. 2.

    Mcphie and Clarke (2018) do not say what they mean by “post-nature”, but it is generally understood to be what will come after what we currently know as life on earth.

  3. 3.

    This is not the place for an extended discussion of the relationship between environmental education and education for sustainability/sustainable development which I have discussed elsewhere (Gough 2016, 2018). For the purposes of this discussion, the two will be taken as synonymous as both will be enhanced by adopting a queer ecopedadagogy.

  4. 4.

    Kumashiro’s “Other” are four groups: “students of color, students from under- or unemployed families, students who are female, or male but not stereotypically ‘masculine,’ and students who are, or are perceived to be, queer”, but he believes his proposal could be extended to “other forms of oppression and to other traditionally marginalized groups, such as students with disabilities, students with limited or no English-language proficiency, and students from nonChristian religious backgrounds” (2000, p. 26).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Connie Russell for her encouragement to continue writing about marginalised voices in environmental education, Joshua Russell for his thoughtful interrogation of an earlier draft of this chapter, and both for their writings to date in this area that have informed my writing here.

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    Annette Gough

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  1. Department of Animal Behavior, Ecology, & Conservation, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Joshua Russell

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Gough, A. (2021). Listening to Voices from the Margins: Transforming Environmental Education. In: Russell, J. (eds) Queer Ecopedagogies. International Explorations in Outdoor and Environmental Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65368-2_9

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