Planetary Futures – On the Crisis of Transformation in the Anthropocene
Within current discourses on climate change and the Anthropocene, diverse crisis figurations have become recognizable. Their inherent thought and argumentation patterns on global, cultural, and societal transformation dynamics require reflections from an educational sciences’ viewpoint. Taking the example of planetary studies, which interweave poststructuralist, postcolonial, and postdigital approaches, as well as insights from new materialism, the talk traces from a hegemony-critical and epistemological-political perspective research practices which do not only “decenter the human” (Chakrabarty 2021, Gabrys 2018), but also explore the human, the in-human and the non-human (Yusoff 2018; see also Taylor 2021) in terms of their historical entanglements. Therefore, transformation processes become accessible on a relational agency and non-agency basis.
Against this background, the talk first examines a (post-)modern understanding of education arising from the principle of futures always being “open.” Secondly, on the basis of an international research initiative that analyzes the diagnoses of the present and the designs for the future of marginalized youth, it initiates a discussion on qualitative-reconstructive research methods that transcend anthropocentric epistemological logics. In conclusion, the contribution considers the educational epistemological potential of planetary research as a practice of involvement.