Earth unbound: Climate change, activism and justice

Abstract

This experimental writing piece by the Earth Unbound Collective explores the ethical, political and pedagogical challenges in addressing climate change, activism and justice. The provocation Earth Unbound: the struggle to breathe and the creative thoughts that follow are inspired by the contagious energy of what Donna Haraway (2016) calls response-ability or the ability to respond. This energy ripples through monthly reading groups and workshops organised by this interdisciplinary collective that emerged organically in January 2020.

Pedagogy of the implicated: advancing a social ecology of responsibility framework to promote deeper understanding of the climate crisis

“…Climate-related art which has the ability to generate large scale public interest and engagement in the ecological crisis has a vital role to play in its amelioration. However, artworks that are as elegiacand affecting as Elegy for the Arctic arguably fail to alter the audience's subjectivity in respect of their sense of responsibility for, and indeed responseability to, the climate crisis (Lobo et al 2021). As the foregoing accounts of difficult knowledge and the figure of the implicated subject suggest, in order to alter business as usual, pedagogical and artistic resources must implicate us in the very conditions of the climate crisis.Joanna Nurmis's analysis of climate change art reveals the preponderance of an 'apocalyptic sublime aesthetic' in images representing or concerning ecological breakdown (Nurmis 2016, 510).…”

“…Taking up Rothberg's (2019) call for deeper theorisation of the complex relationship between subjective implication and systemic culpability (as quoted in Knittel and Forchieri 2020, 17), I respond to the commonly-voiced argument that an emphasis on individual complicity necessarily detracts from a robust analysis of state-corporate responsibility (e.g., McClanahan and Brisman 20152015).While not discounting differences of scale between individual actions and state-corporate practices, this article maintains that pedagogical frameworks which promote deeper understanding of the complex ways in which individual acts and structural forces interact and mutually reinforce one another are needed more than ever, so that individuals can better apprehend their role in exacerbating and alleviating the climate crisis.The paper is also indebted to de-colonial approaches to global citizenship education which call for the forging of closer links between global citizenship and environmental and sustainability education (e.g., Andreotti 2016;Pashby et al 2020;Stein 2019;Stein et al 2020). De-colonial approaches are valuable not least in terms of illuminating how citizens based in emissions-intensive societies can better apprehend their own complex entanglement in the wider structures that have produced the climate crisis and enhancing their sense of response-abilty (i.e., their ability to respondto the conditions that have created this catastrophe in the first place) (Lobo et al 2021).…”

An equity‐driven ecological model for internationalizing doctoral student research training

“…Further, the xenophobic positioning of the pandemic heightened awareness of vulnerable populations on campus, notably international students, and led to a rise of Anti‐Asian sentiment (Yao & George Mwangi, 2022). There is also increased concern about climate change and the need for climate justice, which has local and global implications that will affect future generations (Lobo et al., 2021).…”