Anticipating Other Worlds, Animating Our Selves: An Invitation to Comparative Education

Iveta Silova

doi:10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2020.03.005

Volume 38 Issue 3

Mar. 2020

Turn off MathJax

Article Contents

Article Navigation > Journal of East China Normal University (Educational Sciences) > 2020 > 38(3): 42-56

Iveta Silova. Anticipating Other Worlds, Animating Our Selves: An Invitation to Comparative Education[J]. Journal of East China Normal University (Educational Sciences), 2020, 38(3): 42-56. doi: 10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2020.03.005

Citation:

Iveta Silova. Anticipating Other Worlds, Animating Our Selves: An Invitation to Comparative Education[J]. Journal of East China Normal University (Educational Sciences), 2020, 38(3): 42-56. doi: 10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2020.03.005

Citation:

PDF( 1007 KB)

Anticipating Other Worlds, Animating Our Selves: An Invitation to Comparative Education

doi: 10.16382/j.cnki.1000-5560.2020.03.005

Iveta Silova

Center for Advanced Studies in Global Education, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University, Forest Mall, Tempe, AZ 85287-1611, USA

Publish Date: 2020-03-01

Abstract

Abstract

This article aims to reimagine education – and our selves – within the context of multiple, more-than-human worlds where everything and everyone (both human and non-human) are deeply interrelated. The aim is achieved by purposefully pursuing two speculative thought experiments – an epistemological and an ontological “regressions” – to connect and bring into conversation seemingly unrelated knowledge systems across space and time – European “paganism” and 13^th century Japanese Buddhism, as well as excerpts from indigenous, ecofeminist, and decolonial scholarship. These speculative thought experiments are conducted through a series of “and if” questions around education and schooling, occasionally interrupted by shadows of butterflies fluttering at the edge of extinction. The article proposes to radically reimagine education in two ways. First, it invites readers to reconfigure education as a “connective tissue” between different worlds, bringing together rather than differentiating, ranking, and hierarchizing them. Second, it proposes to reframe education as an opportunity to learn how to anticipate and animate our ongoing entanglement with more-than-human worlds. This entails reframing learning as encountering and encountering as learning through comparison “otherwise”. Using the concept of “metamorphosis” as an antidote to Western metaphysics, the article re-situates education within a wider set of possibilities in relation to the taken-for-granted ways of knowing and being, as well as the notions of space and time.
- border thinking,
- comparative education,
- more-than-human worlds,
- pluriverse,
- SF

FullText(HTML)

References(78)

References

[1]	Abe, R. (2002). Mantra, hinin, and the feminine: On the salvational strategies of Myōe and Eizon. In ed. by B. Faure (Ed.), Buddhist Priests, Kings and Marginals Studies on Medieval Japanese Buddhism, Special issue of the Cahiers d’Extreme-Asie, 13, 101−125.
[2]	Abram, D. (2017). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
[3]	Anzaldúa, G.E. (1999). Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
[4]	Bowers, C. (1995). Educating for an ecologically sustainable culture: Rethinking moral education, creativity, intelligence, and other modern orthodoxies. New York: SUNY.
[5]	Bowers, C. (2002). Towards an eco-justice pedagogy. Environmental Education Research, 8(1), 21−34. doi: 10.1080/13504620120109628
[6]	Bulbeck, C. (1998). Re-orienting Western feminisms: Women’s diversity in a postcolonial world. Cambridge University Press.
[7]	Clifford, J. (1997). Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
[8]	Common World Childhoods Research Collective (2016). Common World Childhoods Research Collective Website. Retrieved from: www.commonworlds.net.
[9]	Connell, R. (2018). Meeting at the edge of fear: Theory on a world scale. In Reiter, B. (Ed.), Constructing the pluriverse: The geopolitics of knowledge (pp. 19−38). Durham & London: Duke University Press.
[10]	Dean, C. (2010). A culture of stone: Inka perspectives on rock. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
[11]	Debaise, B. & Stengers, I (2017). The insistence of possibles: Towards a speculative pragmatism. Parse, 7, 13−19.
[12]	Duhn, I. (2012). Places for pedagogies, pedagogies for places. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood Education, 13(2), 99−107. doi: 10.2304/ciec.2012.13.2.99
[13]	Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
[14]	Gannon, S. (2015). Saving squawk? Animal and human entanglements at the edge of the lagoon. Environmental Education Research, 23(1), 91−110.
[15]	Grosfoguel, R. (2013). The structure of knowledge in Westernized universities: Epistemic racism/sexism and the four genocides/epistemicides of the long 16th century. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 11(1), 73−90.
[16]	Haraway, D. J. (2004). The Haraway reader. New York: Routledge.
[17]	Haraway, D. (2013). SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, No.3. [Online]. Available: https://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway/.
[18]	Haraway, D. J (2015). Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 159−165. doi: 10.1215/22011919-3615934
[19]	Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
[20]	Haraway, D. (2017). Donna Haraway: Statements on “Decolonizing Time” [Excepts from a video interview with Berno Odo Polzer, which took place on 2.3.2017 on occasion of Thinking Together 2017 – Decolonizing Time]. Available: https://time-issues.org/haraway-statements-on-decolonizing-time/
[21]	Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnessota Press.
[22]	Ideland, M. (2018). Science, coloniality, and “the great rationality divide”: How practices, places, and persons are culturally attached to one another in science education. Science and Education, 27(7−8), 783−803. doi: 10.1007/s11191-018-0006-8
[23]	Izutsu. (1980). The nexus of ontological events: A Buddhist view of reality. Eranos-Yearbook, 49, 357−392.
[24]	Jensen, C., Ishii, M. & Swift, P (2016). Attuning to the webs of En: Ontography, Japanese spirit worlds, and the “tact” of Minakata Kumagusu. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(2), 149−172. doi: 10.14318/hau6.2.012
[25]	Kawai, H. (1991). The Buddhist Priest Myoe: A life of dreams (trans. Mark Unno). Venice, CA: Lapis Press.
[26]	Kawai, H. (1995). Dreams, myths, and fairy tales in Japan. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon.
[27]	Kaza, S. (1993). The attentive heart: Conversations with trees. Boston, MA: Shambhala.
[28]	KLKI. 2015. Latviešu Ābece Piecgadniekiem [Latvian ABC for five-year-olds]. Latvia: Kustība par Latvisku Kultūru Izglītībā.
[29]	Komatsu, H., Rappleye, J., & Silova, I. (forthcoming in 2019). Will achieving SDG4 promote environmental sustainability? Critical Reflections Looking Towards 2030. In A. Wulff (Ed.), Grading Goal Four: Tensions, Threats and Opportunities in the Sustainable Development Goal on Quality Education. Sense Publishers/Brill.
[30]	Latour, B. (2004). The politics of nature: How to bring the sciences into democracy. Tanslated by C. Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[31]	Law, J. (2015). What's wrong with a one-world world?. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 16(1), 126−139. doi: 10.1080/1600910X.2015.1020066
[32]	Mignolo, W. D. & Tlostanova, M. V (2006). Theorizing from the borders: Shifting to geo- and body-politics of knowledge. European Journal of Social Theory, 9(2), 205−221. doi: 10.1177/1368431006063333
[33]	Mignolo, W. (2011). The darker side of Western modernity: Global futures, decolonial options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
[34]	Mignolo, E. (2013). Geopolitics of sensing and knowing: On (de)coloniality, border thinking, and epistemic disobedience. Confero, 1(1), 129−150. doi: 10.3384/confero.2001-4562.13v1i1129
[35]	Orr, D. (2004). Earth in mind: On education, environment, and the human prospect. Washington, DC: Island Press.
[36]	Orr, D. (2009). Down to the wire: Confronting climate collapse. New York: OUP.
[37]	Orr, D. (2011). Hope is an imperative: The essential David Orr. Washington DC, Island Press.
[38]	Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2013). Frictions in forest pedagogies: Common worlds in settler colonial spaces. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(4), 355−365. doi: 10.2304/gsch.2013.3.4.355
[39]	Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., and A. Taylor (2015). Unsettling pedagogies through common world encounters: Grappling with (post)colonial legacies in Canadian forests and Australian bushlands. In V. Pacini-Ketchabaw and A. Taylor (Eds.), Unsettling the colonialist places and spaces of early childhood education (pp. 43–62). New York: Routledge.
[40]	Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., Kind, S. &. Kocher, L. (2016). Encounters with materials in early childhood education. New York: Routledge.
[41]	Plumwood, V. (1991). Nature, self, and gender: Feminism, environmental philosophy, and the critique of rationalism. Hypatia, 6(1), 3−27. doi: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.1991.tb00206.x
[42]	Plumwood, V. (2001). Nature as agency and the prospects for a progressive naturalism. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 12(4), 3−32. doi: 10.1080/104557501101245225
[43]	Plumwood V. (2007). Journey to the heart of stone. In F. Becket and T, Gifford (Eds.), Culture, creativity and environment: New environmentalist criticism, (pp.17-36) Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi.
[44]	Plumwood, V. (2009). Nature in the active voice. Australian Humanities Review, 46, 113−129.
[45]	Pratt, M. L. (1992). Imperial eyes: Travel writing and transculturation. New York: Routledge.
[46]	Querejazu, A. (2016). Encountering the pluriverse: Looking for alternatives in other worlds. Rev. Bras. Polít. Int., 59(2), 1−16.
[47]	Rappleye, J. & Komatsu, H. (forthcoming). Comparative education for a finite future. Comparative Education.
[48]	Rautio, P. (2013a). Being nature: Interspecies articulation as a species-specific practice of relating to environment. Environmental Education Research, 19(4), 445−457. doi: 10.1080/13504622.2012.700698
[49]	Rautio, P. (2013b). Children who carry stones in their pockets: On autotelic material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies, 11(4), 394−408. doi: 10.1080/14733285.2013.812278
[50]	Rautio, P., & Jokinen, P. (2016). Children’s relations to the more-than-human world beyond developmental views. In T. Skelton, J. Horton, and B. Evans (Eds.), Geographies of children and young people: Play, recreation, health, and well being (pp. 35–49). Singapore: Springer.
[51]	Roberts, M. (Trans.). (1979). Chinese fairy tales and fantasies. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
[52]	Rose, D. B (2013). Val Plumwood’s philosophical animism: Attentive interactions in the sentient world. Environmental Humanities, 3, 93−109. doi: 10.1215/22011919-3611248
[53]	Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
[54]	Sánchez-Bayo, F. & Wyckhuys, K.A.G (2019). Worldwide decline of the entomofauna: A review of its drivers. Biological Conservation, 239, 8−27.
[55]	Schumacher, E. F. (1973). Small is beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered. London: Blond & Briggs.
[56]	Silova, I., Mead Yaqub, M. A., Mun, O., Palandjian, G (2014). Pedagogies of space: (Re)imagining nation and childhood in post-Soviet states. Global Studies of Childhood, 4(3), 195−209. doi: 10.2304/gsch.2014.4.3.195
[57]	Silova, I. (2019). Toward a wonderland of comparative education. Comparative Education, 55(4), 444−472. doi: 10.1080/03050068.2019.1657699
[58]	Somerville, M., & Green, M. (2015). Children, place and sustainability. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
[59]	Stengers, I. (1997). Power and invention: Situating science (theory out of bounds). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[60]	Stengers, I. (2011). Comparison as a matter of concern. Common Knowledge, 17(1), 48−63. doi: 10.1215/0961754X-2010-035
[61]	Stengers, I. (2012). Reclaiming animism. E-Flux Journal, 36, 1−10.
[62]	Stengers, I. (2014a). Gaia, the urgency to think (and feel). Colóquio Internacional os mil Nomes de Gaia: Do Antropoceno à Idade da Terra. Casa de Rui Barbosa, Rio de Janeiro. Departamento de Filosofia/PPGAS Museu Nacional/UFRJ, 15, 2.
[63]	Stengers, I., & Despret, V. (2014b). Women who make a fuss: The unfaithful daughters of Virginia Woolf. U of Minnesota Press.
[64]	Stengers, I. (2018). Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
[65]	Sterling, S., Dawson, J., Warwick, P (2018). Transforming sustainability education at the creative edge of the mainstream: A case study of Schumacher College. Journal of Transformative Education, 16(4), 323−343. doi: 10.1177/1541344618784375
[66]	Taylor, A. (2013a). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. London: Routledge.
[67]	Taylor, A., Blaise, M. & Giugni, M (2013b). Haraway’s ‘bag lady story-telling’: Relocating childhood and learning within a ‘post-human landscape. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(1), 48−62. doi: 10.1080/01596306.2012.698863
[68]	Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V (2015). Learning with children, ants, and worms in the anthropocene: Towards a common world pedagogy of multispecies vulnerability. Pedagogy, Culture, Society, 23(4), 507−529. doi: 10.1080/14681366.2015.1039050
[69]	Tayler, A. (2017). Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene. Environmental Education Research, 23(910), 1448−1461.
[70]	Taylor, A. & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2018). The common worlds of children and animals: Relational ethics for entangled lives. New York and London: Routledge.
[71]	Tlostanova, M., Thapar-Björkert, S., & Koobak, R (2016). Border thinking and disidentification: postcolonial and postsocialist feminist dialogues. Feminist Theory, 17(2), 211−228. doi: 10.1177/1464700116645878
[72]	Tomalin, E. (2017). Gender and the greening of Buddhism: Exploring scope for a Buddhist ecofeminism. Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, 1(4), 455−480.
[73]	Warner, M. (2007). Fantastical metamorphoses, other worlds. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
[74]	Whitehead, A. N. (1929). Process and reality. An essay in cosmology. New York, NY: Macmillan.
[75]	Whitehead, A. N. (1938 [1966]). Modes of thought. Toronto: Macmillan.
[76]	Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. (2019). Western monarch call to action - The Xerces Society's Action Plan. Retrieved from https://xerces.org/save-western-monarchs/
[77]	Zhao, W. (2018). Historicizing tianrenheyi as correlative cosmology for rethinking education in modern China and beyond. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(11), 1106−1116.
[78]	Zhao, W. (2019). China’s education, curriculum knowledge and cultural inscriptions: Dancing with the wind. New York and London: Routledge.