Eve Mayes

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 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.

The climate crisis has created an urgency to teach about climate change and work with young people to respond to the impacts of climate destruction. This urgency, however, risks overlooking or superficially considering the colonial-capitalist logics that drive the impending ecocide. This paper is premised on the perhaps counter-intuitive idea that we must turn our attention away from climate change to provide an appropriate educational response to it. In this conceptual paper, we first examine three manifestations of colonial-capitalist logics that drive educational aims and environmental destruction: growthism, exhaustion and alienation. This demonstrates how even well-meaning environmental sustainability education may inadvertently contribute to the ‘planetary crisis’ it is attempting to address. Second, we offer two ethico-political speculative experiments in alternative logics: degrowth and the commons. We argue that these offer openings towards reshaping the aims of education, for relations that will sustain, revive and replenish the Earth and our societies.

Inequalities have historically been conceptualised and empirically explored with primary reference to the human. Both measurements of educational inequalities through the production of data about students, teachers and schools, and ethnographic explorations of inequalities in the spoken accounts of human actors in schools can elide affective histories and material geologies of the earth that entwine with societal inequalities, and political questions of the relation between particular human bodies and the earth. In this article, we question: What might it do to rethink the concept of educational inequalities beyond human relations, from within a specific geographical territory? We seek to rethink inequalities including but exceeding these human relations; we argue that inequalities between humans, and between humans and the more-than-human, are materially generated and perpetuated. We offer three theoretical trajectories that consider the affective, spatial and material dimensions of inequality to...