Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures

This book explores new pedagogical challenges and potentials of the Anthropocene era. The authors argue that this new epoch, with an unstable climate, new kinds of globally spreading viruses, and new knowledges, calls for a new way of educating and an alertness to new philosophies of education and pedagogical imaginations, thoughts, and practices. Addressing the linkages between the Anthropocene and Pedagogy across a broad pedagogical spectrum that is both formal and informal, the editors and their contributors emphasize a re-imagining of education that serves to deepen our understanding of the capacities and values of life. 

This book interrogates the ways in which “end of the world” thinking has come to define and delimit pedagogical approaches in Anthropocene times. Chapters unfold through a series of speculative studies of educational futurity—sustainable futures, energy futures, working futures—each of which is positioned as an experimental site for probing the limits of pedagogical unthinkability so as to speculate, through concept creation, on unthought educational trajectories. Specifically, the book is oriented towards the creation of pedagogical concepts that work to problematize and resituate questions of educational futurity in relation to the planetary realities raised by today’s pressing extinction events. It is from this experimentation that a weird pedagogy emerges, that is, an experimental pedagogical anti-model, a speculative program for the unprogrammable that seeks to counter-actualize potentials of and for unthinking pedagogy at the (so-called) end of the world.