An Emerging Concentric Spatial Turn for Sustainable Systems: Beyond the Diametric Spatial Frame in Bacon’s View of Humans as Apart from and above the Natural World towards Being-Alongside Nature

Abstract

A spatial turn is increasingly being recognised across education, the humanities, and social sciences to critique Western Cartesian assumptions treating space as either empty or a diametric opposition bringing dualistic splits between reason/emotion and mind/body. Bacon’s vision of human subjugation of nature as a tool for human progress is examined as a diametric spatial projection, where humans are above and apart from nature, in a mirror-image inverted symmetry of above/below hierarchy and side-by-side assumed separation as diametric space. Building on an interdisciplinary synthesis between an aspect of the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, De Beauvoir’s othering, and Bronfenbrenner’s social-ecological systems in psychology, allied with a Heideggerian critique of being as needing a mode of ‘being alongside the world’, a shift in experiential and conceptual space is proposed in this conceptual review article for education. This shift is towards a framework of concentric spatial systems of sustainability. Concentric relational spaces of assumed connection and relative openness and away from diametric spaces of splitting and closure have been developed recently for sustainability concerns regarding inclusion in education. This article goes further to interrogate systems of concentric relational space for belonging with and encountering the natural world for environmental sustainability.