Educating for the Anthropocene : Schooling and Activism in the Face of Slow Violence

The work of environmental educators and activists in India and South Africa offers new models for schooling and environmental activism. Education has never played as critical a role in determining humanity's future as it does in the Anthropocene, an era marked by humankind's unprecedented control over the natural environment. Drawing on a multisited ethnographic project among schools and activist groups in India and South Africa, Peter Sutoris explores education practices in the context of impoverished, marginal communities where environmental crises intersect with colonial and racist histories and unsustainable practices. He exposes the depoliticizing effects of schooling and examines cross-generational knowledge transfer within and beyond formal education. Finally, he calls for the bridging of schooling and environmental activism, to find answers to the global environmental crisis. The onset of the Anthropocene challenges the very definition of education and its fundamental goals, says Sutoris. Researchers must look outside conventional models and practices of education for inspiration if education is to live up to its responsibilities at this critical time. For decades, environmental activist movements in some countries have wrestled with questions of responsibility and action in the face of environmental destruction; they inhabited the mental world of the Anthropocene before much of the rest of the world. Sutoris highlights an innovative research methodology of participatory observational filmmaking, describing how films made by children in the Indian and South African communities provide a window into the ways that young people make sense of the future of the Anthropocene. It is through their capacity to imagine the world differently, Sutoris argues, that education can reinvent itself. f000200_9780262370721 1 f000300_9780262370721 9 f000400_9780262370721 13 c000600_9780262370721 15 c000700_9780262370721 17 c000800_9780262370721 21 c001300_9780262370721 53 c001800_9780262370721 73 c001900_9780262370721 75 c002000_9780262370721 81 c002300_9780262370721 113 c002700_9780262370721 159 c002800_9780262370721 161 c003200_9780262370721 165 c002900_9780262370721 181 c003600_9780262370721 225 r004500_9780262370721 255 c004600_9780262370721 285 "Based on a multi-sited ethnography among schools and activist groups in India and South Africa, this study offers an exploration of education practices in the context of impoverished, marginal communities where environmental crises intersect with colonial and racist histories and unsustainable presents"-- Provided by publisher