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This is a draft of the presentation that will be given at the HEA Social Sciences annual conference - Teaching forward: the future of the Social Sciences. For further details of the conference: http://bit.ly/1cRDx0p Bookings open until 19 May 2014 http://bit.ly/1hzCMLR or [email protected] Imagined world This paper draws upon one world imagined through the transition movement; characterised by two interrelated and dynamic movements that will trigger a major ontological shift one is the end of cheap oil and the other is the impact of climate change. Many possible worlds may result and depend upon how we respond to climate change. The end of cheap oil spells the end to our modern industrial way of life and a need to rethink our communities in terms of their resilience. Resilience describes the capacity for communities to be able to meet their own needs - currently we are 3 days away from having no food in supermarkets should the infrastructure that support this breakdown. In this future, society faces a more inhospitable climate characterised by water shortage, extreme weather conditions and greatly diminished resources; necessitating a return to traditional skills such as weaving, hunting, bushcraft etc. On the one hand this poses a planned approach to the impending apocalypse through building resilience, but on the other hand is the view “there may be a situation where society breaks down and civil unrest leaves you and your family vulnerable". So you had better be prepared! Abstract This paper considers the future predicted through the ‘Transition’ movement which argues that our environment and lives will be drastically altered as a result of climate change and the end of cheap oil. A consequence of this is that skills and knowledge that we engage students with will need to support the development of resilient communities; which emphasise local production and a return to traditional methods. This paper draws upon sustainability, academic practice and psychoanalytic theory to explore whether working with such a scenario is helpful or unhelpful for engaging students and peers with sustainability.
Citation preview
Respite in the ApocalypseAntony Johnston, University of the Arts London
Contents
Introduction
20 years from now
Responses
Resistances
Academic Practice
Bystanders
Conclusion
Preface
Introduction
In what ways are future scenarios helpful
or not in raising issues around
sustainability with students and peers?
The Future?
Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.
In 20 years…
‘Dead End’ by Justin.Beck CC BY 2.0 / cropped from original
(Lovelock quoted in Aitkenhead 2008)
‘Peaked Oil’ by Mark Rain CC BY 2.0 Tim J Keegan 2007 [CC-BY-SA-2.0 Creative Commons
Peak Oil
(Reproduced from Duncan 2005: 7)
Teaching Sustainability
"THERE IS NO "MORAL COMPASS" APP." by University of San Francisco CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Response
Transition Movement
CraftsWoodlandBuildingFieldWorkshopTextileDomestic
Repair, maintenance & salvage
(Quilley 2009)
Defense
Photo by Kate Jewel CC BY-SA 2.0
ResistancesPhoto by Herbythyme CC BY-SA 3.0 / Cropped from original
Resistance
perhaps, there has never been a broader based and more carefully corroborated scientific consensus on any issue,
involving thousands of the world's top climate scientists, backed up by the most elaborate computer modelling.
(Jucker 2014 p27).
Why
The problem of our day is an inner deadening, and increasingly deployed defence against the stresses of living in an overbuilt industrialized civilization saturated by intrusive advertising and media, unregulated toxic chemicals, unhealthy food, parasitic business practices, time-stressed living...No wonder so many of us disconnect, feel nothing, and resort to medication or other addictions, inflicting violence upon ourselves in an attempt to temporarily drown out external hostilities...
...The environmental crisis...ultimately springs from the unmanaged demons of the human psyche, hopes for an end to the long and self-destructive war between humankind and Earth depend on repairing the damage inflicted on both.
(Buzzell and Chalquist 2009)
Transitions:
Constructive
‘Healthy’
Proactive
Enlightened
Enlivened
‘Good’
Illusory
‘Unhealthy’
Distraction
Hysteria
Today, a spontaneous sympathy for hysteria can once more be found, because our age also feels that the putting-into-action is impossible, because what they want is impossible.
(Benvenuto 2005: 17)
hysterics’ essential desire is to have an unsatisfied desire— a desire for potential (in potentia) but never acted out (in actu)
pleasure.
(ibid.: 2)
Hysteria has a primary relation to escaping from what one wants—which in turn has a paradoxical connection with the impossibility of escaping...
(ibid.: 8)
Change for Sustainability
There is still a very strong tendency to delegate the paradigm change from an unsustainable to a sustainable future to the next generations.
From all we know about successful change in communities and societies, it just doesn't work the way we tend to conceptualise it in ESD: equip the next generation...with the skills and knowledge to build a sustainable society... and we've done our job and they will be off and away into a bright future. It is a classic case of projection: because we messed up the world and cannot get a handle on our unsustainable habits, lifestyle, society and economic structures and actions... Apart from being morally highly dishonest, it doesn't work.
(Jucker 2014: 25)
To what extent do future visions defer action and set up something impossible?
Enjoy!
the hysteric annoys our society that wants to ensure the maximum hedonistic satisfaction for all...
(Benvenuto 2005 :8)
Academic Practice
Teaching Sustainability
...uncertainty...arises from the complexity of the world and our knowledge of it...arises out of a personal sense that we never could hope satisfactorily even to describe the world, let alone act with assuredness in it. `Anxiety', `fragility', `chaos': these are as much characterizations of an inner sense of a destabilized world. It is a destabilization that arises from a personal sense that we never can come into a stable relationship with the world. The descriptions of the world that are available to us especially in a global and multicultural world multiply and conflict with each other.
(Barnett 2004: 250)
Paradigmatic Approaches
(Sterling, 2001, 2003 & 2009, table reproduced from Plymouth CDIP)
Educational paradigm
Positivist Interpretivist,Constructivist
Critical,radical
Participative
Role of educator
Instruction Facilitation Critical pedagogy/‘transformativeintellectual’
Mediation, mentoring/ ‘invitational’ leadership
Curriculum Prescribed Constructivist,Student centred
Issues based Indicative, emergent
Pedagogy Delivery Transactional Critical pedagogy Coinquiry
Careful where you tread…
‘Karpman Drama Triangle’ image by Cdw1952 CC BY-SA 3.0
Alienation
Frustration
Denial
Anxiety
Anger/aggression
Competition
Refusal
Loss
Bystander
...a person who does not become actively involved in a situation where someone else requires help...Bystanders... could, by taking some form of action, affect the outcome of the situation even if they were not able to avert it. Thus, by definition, anyone who gets actively involved in a ‘critical situation’, whether we describe this choice as pathological (scriptbound) or autonomous, is not a Bystander.
(Clarkson 1987: 82)
Image by زودة رمزي
CC BY-SA 3.0
Criteria
1. Something seems wrong in a situation.2. The person is aware of it.3. They do not actively take responsibility for their part in
maintaining the problem or preventing its resolution.4. Existential bad faith or inauthenticity – they claim they could
have acted otherwise.5. It is base on minimising their capacity for autonomy, intimacy
and potency in the world(Clarkson 1996: 54)
Moving to action
1. Notice that something is happening2. Interpret the situation3. Assume personal responsibility4. Choose a form of assistance5. Implement the assistance
(Latané and Darley 1970 cited in Clarkson 1996: 102)
Utopias/dystopias exercise our values
Can provide an alternative to hegemonic power
May offer a way to engage in meaningful praxis
Offers creativity, agency and potency
Ideological (right/wrong)
Distraction
Defers action
Squanders agency, creativity and potential
Ideological (wrong/right)
By way of a conclusion
A ‘helpful’ phantasy?
References 1
Aitkenhead, D. (2008) ‘James Lovelock: 'enjoy life while you can: in 20 years global warming will hit the
fan‘’, The Guardian, 1 March 2008,
http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2008/mar/01/scienceofclimatechange.climatechange Accessed 15
May 2014.
Barnett, R. (2004) ‘Learning for an unknown future’, Higher Education Research & Development, 23(3).
Barnett, R. (2007) A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill/
Open University Press.
Chalquist, C. & Buzzell, L. (2010) ‘Introduction: Psyche and Nature in a Circle of Healing’. In: Chalquist, C.
& Buzzell, L. (eds.) Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind. Kindle Edition: Sierra
Club/Counterpoint.
Clarkson, P. (1987) ‘The bystander role’, Transactional Analysis Journal 17(3), 82-87.
Clarkson, P. (1996) The Bystander (An End to Innocence in Human Relationshps?), London: Whurr
Publishers.
Duncan, R. (2005) ‘The Olduvai Theory: Energy, Population, and Industrial Civilization’, The Social
Contract, Winter 2005-6. http://www.thesocialcontract.com/pdf/sixteen-two/xvi-2-93.pdf.
Accessed 15 May 2014
Benvenuto, S. (2009) ‘Dora Flees…Is there anything left to say about hysterics?’, Journal of European
Psychoanalysis, 21(2).
References 2
Hopkins, R. (2008) The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience,
http://www.transitie.be/userfiles/transition-handbook(1).pdf, Accessed 25 January 2014.
Jucker, R. (2014) Do we know what we are doing? Reflections on learning, knowledge, economics,
community and sustainability,
http://rolfjucker.net/20140116_Do%20we%20know_incl%20Strachan_webversion.pdf. Accessed 20
January 2014.
Latané, B. & Darley, M. (1970) The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t HE Help?, New York: Appleton
Century Crofts.
Rockström, J. et al. (2009) ‘Planetary boundaries:exploring the safe operating space for humanity’.
Ecology and Society 14(2).
Quilley, S. (2009) ‘Transition Skills: Skills for transition to a post-fossil-fuel age’. In: Stibbe, A. (ed.) The
Handbook of Sustainability Literacy: skills for a changing world. Kindle Edition:
Green Books.Sterling, S. 2001. Sustainable Education: Re-visioning Learning and Change, Dartington, Green Books.Sterling, S. 2003. Whole systems thinking as a basis for paradigm change in education: explorations in the
context of sustainability. University of Bath.Sterling, S. 2009. Ecological Intelligence: viewing the world relationally. In: STIBBE, A. (ed.) The Handbook
of Sustainability Literacy: skills for a changing world Kindle Edition: Green Books.
