On Thursday February 21, Nayla Naoufal (University of Oslo) will give a talk in the Greenhouse seminar series in R-218, Hulda Garborgs hus, from 12:30-14:00. All are welcome!
Reimagining ecocitizenship and its educational implications beyond anthropocentrism
Environmental degradation, climate change and socio-ecological injustice are transforming citizenship visions and practices throughout the world: Individuals and communities are increasingly mobilizing against projects that affect the places where they live and other environments. Many of them also create alternative practices, such as urban agriculture projects, ‘Transition Town’ initiatives, degrowth initiatives, etc. This evolution of citizenship visions and practices invites us to reimagine the notion of citizenship conveyed by schooling as well as its pedagogical implications.
Ecocitizenship is a portmanteau word formed from the Greek word oïkos (meaning house or habitat) and citizenship. During this lecture, I will explore the emergence of the concept of ecocitizenship in the last decade of the 20th century and diverse perspectives in that regard in the fields of environmental politics and environmental education. I will also outline the main elements of an ecocitizenship theoretical framework that holds environmental justice at the core of its concern and foregrounds responsibilities towards geographically and temporally close and distant human and more-than-human others. Informed by feminist new materialisms, this framework breaks away from a dichotomous ecocitizenship approach (based on dualisms such as individual/collective; domestic/public; embodied/political, etc.). Anchored in the rights of nature and multispecies justice, this framework entails educational implications. Drawing on multispecies studies (van Dooren, Kirksey et Münster, 2016; Kirksey, 2018), I will propose two pedagogical practices informed by several fields of research and practice (environmental education, somatic education, environmental justice, posthumanist pedagogies, applied theater…): a pedagogy of attentiveness towards more-than-human voices and a multispecies theater.
Nayla Naoufal is a researcher in environmental education. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Teacher Education and School Research at the University of Oslo in Norway. She also works as an art critic and writes among others about choreographic practices that grapple with decolonial and more-than-human perspectives.
