Towards Transgressive Learning through Ontological Politics: Answering the “Call of the Mountain” in a Colombian Network of Sustainability

Abstract

Abstract:In line with the increasing calls for more transformative and transgressive learning in the context of sustainability studies, this article explores how encounters between different ontologies can lead to socio-ecological sustainability. With the dominant one-world universe increasingly being questioned by those who advocate the existence of many worlds-a so-called pluriverse-there lays the possibility of not only imagining other human-nature realities, but also engaging with them in practice. Moving towards an understanding of what happens when a multiplicity of worlds encounter one another, however, entails a sensitivity to the negotiations between often competing ontologies-or ontological politics. Based on an ethnographic methodology and narrative methods, data were collected from two consecutive intercultural gatherings called El Llamado de la Montaña (The Call of the Mountain), which take place for five days every year in different parts of Colombia. By actively participating in these gatherings of multiplicity, which address complex socio-ecological challenges such as food sovereignty and defence of territory, results show how encounters between different ontologies can result in transformative and potentially transgressive learning in terms of disrupting stubborn routines, norms and hegemonic powers which tend to accelerate unsustainability. Although we argue that a fundamental part of the wicked sustainability puzzle lies in supporting more relational ontologies, we note that such learning environments also lead to conflicts through inflexibility and (ab)use of power which must be addressed if sustained socio-ecological learning is to take place.

Learning to Navigate (in) the Anthropocene

“…However, within HESD research, a second emancipatory approach contends that whilst instrumentalism definitely has its place in acting upon and formulating responses to sustainability issues, education is not the place par excellence in order to do so, e.g., [2,12]. According to this approach, instrumentalism largely conceives of sustainability as a delineated end-goal, and of education as an instrument that allows one to instruct or convince students to behave (and think) as deemed appropriate [13]. The corollary of such reasoning, it is argued, is the imposition of pre-identified (and often seemingly simple) solutions to very complex problems, which might quickly end up in an 'eco-totalitarian' form of education that seeks to produce "diligent, disciplined and complacent" students and citizens [12] (p. 10).…”

Transgressing Boundaries between Community Learning and Higher Education: Levers and Barriers

“…The implementation of the course (step 9) was analyzed through co-researcher narratives connected to the different forms of learning presented in section 2.2. Narratives have been shown to be a useful way of communicating community learning [30], with narrative-inquiry research being especially useful in curriculum development [60,61]. This method also aligns closely with the Transgressive Action Research methodology, which seeks to bring in the voice of co-researchers [13].…”

“…In response to these challenges, transgressive learning takes a dynamic perspective on knowledge, one that recognizes that dominant power structures and persistent inequalities act as barriers to the realization of more sustainable futures [9,11,[29][30][31]. The contribution of transgressive learning to decolonial debates is that rather than replacing dominant with marginal paradigms, the focus is on the learning processes that can disrupt or transgress often highly resilient "locked-in" systems [32] and can thereby open up possibilities for transformation of the system itself.…”

The transgressive gardener : Cultivating learning-based transformations towards regenerative futures

“…As a research assistant, I had been part of the research process, conducting fieldwork and co-authoring academic papers. The research I was part of identified the possibilities of transgressive learning in the initiatives and activities of the CASA network [79], facilitated by the inclusion of a diversity of multiple stakeholders engaging with one another in a transformative environment [80]. Towards the end of the research project, we were fortuitously invited into the International T-Learning project (see section 1.3.).…”

“…๑ Power relations are especially inherent in transgressive research: As researchers and active members of the intercultural network CASA, we had believed that the network could provide a 'rainbow' umbrella for articulating diverse cultural groups around a shared sustainability message. The reality was that the diverse members of CASA came with a different ways of enacting sustainability, different interests and political agendas, which required special attention to negotiating these power dynamics, or what we could call ontological politics [80]. It had become an ontological struggle to keep the network and the CotM moving forward, and we had not succeeded.…”