Rethinking Vulnerability in the Age of Anthropocene: Toward Ecologizing Education

Abstract

In this essay, Huey‐li Li argues that, although precariousness has always been embedded in human existence, our human vulnerability has been heightened by seemingly omnipresent and omnipotent risks in the modern era, ranging from the 9/11 terroristic attacks and nuclear meltdowns to infectious disease outbreaks and climate change. Li unravels some of the ambiguities surrounding the conceptualization of vulnerability, pointing out that human vulnerability, to a large extent, is coterminous with the increasingly more vulnerable global–local ecological systems in the age of the Anthropocene. She then connects this formulation of vulnerability to the existential, ontological, and social vulnerability in education and its accompanying discourses. Li questions the wisdom of thinking that human invulnerability is an attainable goal in the modern era and argues further that all protective and preventive efforts are actually counterproductive — that is, that they instead tend to maximize our fears and thus render us more vulnerable. Instead of perpetuating the vulnerable pursuit of invulnerability in formal educational institutions, Li concludes, modern schooling should embrace and engage ecological and human vulnerability. In this way, education might better assume ethical responsibility for mitigating the ongoing ecological decline.

The call of nature writing: A framework of attributes and intentions for environmental awareness

“…We are living in a new epoch, the Anthropocene (Li, 2017;Mychajliw et al, 2015;Waters et al, 2016). This era was created by human actions, and we continue to influence it.…”

Disaster Risk Reduction Education: Tensions and Connections with Sustainable Development Goals

“…It can be said that we are living in times of ecological precarity [2], where negative encounters between people and the threats of natural disasters are more likely, leading to social, environmental, and economic impacts. However, human efforts are central to transforming this state of vulnerability into a state of security before and after a particular natural phenomenon turns into a disaster [2][3][4].…”

“…Within this approach, context-based education promotes learning opportunities based on contexts and local needs, pointing to solving global problems and oriented to transform learners' identities, shifting science education towards an integral endeavor with human, social, and political dimensions [43,44]. Still, in many cases, educational interventions focus on knowledge of concepts or developing abilities far from a comprehensive community perspective [2,3] or acting with this knowledge to solve local or global problems.…”