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Project

Litter Pollution and Critical Zones: An Idioplomatic Proposal for Collective Study

The starting point of my PhD project is our current predicament in which precarity has become the default position for many human and non-human entities on this planet. This destabilizing situation is the result of the dream of modernization (viz., global economic and scientific progress) turning out to be an illusion for the vast majority of the earth's inhabitants, i.e., we are left with a world in ruins: heavily polluted, forced mass migration, climate change and a growing social and economic inequality. Scholars warn for how people are becoming cynical about the power to alter our current unsustainable predicament and the possibility of a truly sustainable future. Nonetheless, educational researchers argue that, even in conditions of despair, educational practices can and should bring back hope. In my PhD research, I combine this call with the global appeal for more educational research on the pressing issue of anthropogenic litter pollution. Anthropogenic litter is all around us, in or near all the places human beings live. Our habitats are globally filled with materials we do not want or fail to reuse due to increased plastic consumption and poor waste management. Merging the need for more research about sustainability education with the call to broaden the role of local inhabitants in place-based knowledge creation about litter pollution, I will reflect in my PhD on the question of how non-formal sustainability education can contribute to the collaborative challenge of living well together on a litter damaged world. Reading the work of Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Isabelle Stengers through the lens of educational scholars like Hans Schildermans and Jan Masschelein, among others, I propose a study pedagogy for investigating litter polluted environments, viz., critical zones, as Latour wants it. Based upon three case studies In Flanders I will not only analyse place-based educational initiatives, I also intervene myself drawing from my theoretical framework on study pedagogy. During these interventions, I for instance address the relationship between activism and education as well as between arts and education. Throughout the course of the PhD manuscript, my main theoretical focus is on the unique educational dynamic of study pedagogy for which I also pay great attention to its temporal and spatial dimension. With the help of extensive empirical data, I propose study pedagogy as situated within new materialist and post-constructivist approaches to sustainability education. I conclude the manuscript with a plead for educational researchers to take up the role of the idioplomat, viz., a convergence of the figures of the idiot and the diplomat, as elaborated by Isabelle Stengers and Martin Savransky.

Date:1 Oct 2019 →  1 Oct 2023
Keywords:Sustainability Education, Study, Philosophy of Education
Disciplines:Education, culture and society not elsewhere classified
Project type:PhD project