Dark Pedagogy

Education, Horror and the Anthropocene

Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard, Stefan Bengtsson, Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783030199333
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Dark pedagogy explores how different perspectives can be incorporated into a darker understanding of environmental and sustainability education. Drawing on the work of the classic horror author H.P. Lovecraft and new materialist insights of speculative realism, the authors link Lovecraft's 'tales of the horrible' to the current spectres of environmental degradation, climate change, and pollution. In doing so, they draw parallels between how humans have always related to the 'horrible' things that are scaled beyond our understanding and how education can respond to an era of climate catastrophe in the age of the Anthropocene. A new and darker understanding of environmental and sustainability education is thus developed: using the tripartite reaction pattern of denial, insanity and death to frame the narrative, the book subsequently examines the specific challenges of potentials of developing education and pedagogy for an age of mass extinction. This unflinching book will appeal to students and scholars of dark pedagogies as well as those interested in environment and sustainability education.

© The Author(s) 2019

Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard, Stefan Bengtsson and Martin Hauberg-Lund LaugesenDark PedagogyPalgrave Studies in Education and the Environmenthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19933-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Living in Dark Times

Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard¹ , Stefan Bengtsson² and Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen³

(1)

School of Education, Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

(2)

Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

(3)

School of Education, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Stefan Bengtsson

Email: [email protected]

Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This chapter introduces the link between speculative realism and pedagogical and educational issues that acts as the background for our conception of Dark Pedagogy. Dark pedagogy is situated as an effort to understand and rethink current pedagogical and educational perspectives on how we handle issues such as the imminent climate crisis, environmental issues on a global level and ways to include the more than human into our theories and practices. Drawing on inspiration from the horror author H. P. Lovecraft and his intriguing representation of the things that threatens and haunts us humans we argue for a tri-partite reaction pattern that the meeting with the more than human of e.g. climate crisis can result in: (1) Denial, (2) Insanity, (3) Death. These three reaction patterns form the basis of the book and our development of the concept of Dark pedagogy.

Keywords

Dark pedagogyDenialInsanity deathSpeculative realismEducationPedagogyLovecraftClimate crisisClimate changeEnvironmental issues

End Abstract

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. —H. P. Lovecraft

At the end of the second decade of the new millennia, we face a strange world that is no longer the stable background for human history as it has seemingly turned against us, running amok. Previously recognized climatological standards are shattered, records are set, in a most alarming way, all over the world and we scramble in order to understand how to navigate in this extraordinary new normal. Dark pedagogy is a response to how our world is changing and an effort to think the consequences and potential new practices as pedagogical and educational key issues. Dark pedagogy is an experimental effort provide a pedagogy for an age of mass extinction.

While notions of climate change have been with us for decades recent events have underlined that we no longer are in negotiation and planning mode, but unwillingly find ourselves in the midst of an environmental and climate crisis. A crisis whose causes are now being recognized on a hitherto unforeseen scale, and people—especially children and adolescents whose future the future is—mobilize in order to protest against the political status quo and business-as-usual approach to decision-making and to demand a new ecologically and environmentally oriented and respectful way of politically reconfiguring modern, industrial, urbanized and consumer-driven economies and societies.

Dark Pedagogy took shape during 2018, a year that turned out to be record-breaking and climatologically extraordinary in more than one aspect. As we enjoyed a rare scorcher of a Scandinavian summer, the entailing consequences slowly dawned. Denmark and Sweden went through one of the longest and hottest summers in a hundred years causing a drought with severe negative consequences for farmers and urbanites alike. At the same time, ironically, Copenhagen airport had its busiest day in history (the 13th of July) with over 110.000 travellers arriving or departing by way of flight. In Sweden, we experienced wild forest fires during the worst drought since the 1940s. Not typical weather situations in Scandinavia from a historical perspective. Around the globe extreme weather conditions also manifested. Greece was ravaged by wild forest fires and on the other side of the Atlantic, California witnessed raging wildfires causing the official authorities to carry out mass evacuation of both locals and tourists in areas north of the city of Redding. In Namibia on the African continent, a seven-year drought persevered while deadly flash floods hit Vietnam in Asia. Considering the best available climatological research, all of these events were, however, to have been expected and events like these are, regrettably, to be expected in the future as well. And unfortunately, they are not just to be expected to recur. On the contrary, it is to be expected that the extreme weather phenomena will aggravate in the foreseeable future. As Johann Goldammer, a specialist in global fire ecology put it: “This summer is plagued by extensive and in some places deadly forest fires. And it will happen again. Actually, this is only the beginning” (Goldammer 2018).

Examples of the dire symptoms of the planet’s current climatological development are omnipresent, and it is beyond any reasonable doubt that extreme weather phenomena such as the above mentioned is to a large degree co-caused by the global impact of human industrial and consumption activity on Earth since, at the latest, the 1780s. These developments have influenced, but only peripherally, how pedagogy and education have been thought for decades. It is due time, however, to draw them into the very midst of how we think the concepts that inform our pedagogical practices that go into educating the generation of tomorrow in order to ensure that they are given the best possible points of departure to theoretically acknowledge and practically change the current status quo of human societies. We are even beginning to see students themselves demanding that university curricula be changed so that issues concerning global warming, biological mass extinction and its anthropogenic (i.e. caused by humans) roots be laid bare from the perspective of all kinds of different studies. It should not only be geology, biology, environmental studies that deal with the issues and topics related to our planetary climate crisis and sustainable solutions. Economists, political theorists, psychologists and philosophers, for instance, should also engage with the pressing agendas involved in the dangerous developments characteristic of the Anthropocene. To have a dark pedagogical outlook involves a sympathetic stance towards such demands, and, as you will see, the book Dark Pedagogy offers a variety of different ways to motivate and justify such a sympathy.

We, the three authors of Dark Pedagogy , are concerned with the current critical state of things and specifically how the challenges of the Anthropocene can be thought and said to take on a central role in pedagogy and education. Luckily we are far from alone in our interest in environmental and sustainability challenges and across (and beyond) academia an invigorating current of new thinking on these challenges are emerging. Within the tradition of continental philosophy the contemporary philosophical movement of “speculative realism” is proving most productive and influential (Bryant 2011; Harman 2009; Meillassoux 2009). The umbrella concept of speculative realism covers thinkers that specifically work with the autonomy of reality and the objects that populate it. The longstanding tradition of putting human beings at the centre of all thought and theory is now being challenged by the new theoretical perspectives and invitations of “object-oriented ontology” (OOO) (Harman, Morton), “cosmic pessimism” (Thacker, Brassier) and “speculative materialism” (Meillassoux), just to name a few. Their timeliness is seen to imply that they are currently seeping into other academic fields, and often joining forces with the prospects of “new materialism” (Bennett), “agential realism” (Barad) and “post-human feminism” (Haraway, Braidotti). Despite the many differences between the listed -isms a shared central premise seems to be the case: To critique and subvert the long reign of anthropocentrism in theory, and to propose new ways of thinking about human-related issues from the perspectives of nonhuman forces, objects, factors, materialities and life forms (Harman 2009). To put it briefly: The nonhuman appears to be the shared interest of many of the cutting edge thinkers of our time. Or, as Saari and Mullen puts it: “We argue that Morton’s thoughts further the post-structuralist and new materialist critique of bounded, stable places through introducing an ontology of finitude, withdrawal, and excess” (Saari and Mullen 2018). In this book, we draw inspiration from speculative realism, and occasionally from other contemporary trends as well, in our attempt to develop new perspectives on environmental and sustainability education (ESE).

The Horror!

A central point we borrow from speculative realism is an emphasis on the constructive aspects of focusing on the darker side of central ESE concepts, such as nature, place, body, learner, climate and environment and how this approach can be a useful point of departure for trying to deal with these concepts in an educational context. By drawing on recent research on the purpose and potential of the horror genre (Haraway 2015; Harman 2012; Morton 2016; Thacker 2011; Wallin 2014) we set out to explore how the different perspectives on the notion of “the great outdoors” (Meillassoux 2009) can be understood and incorporated in a new and darker understanding of the role of pedagogy and ESE in engaging with the nonhuman aspects of the Anthropocene.

Both the concept behind and the narrative situating the book are inspired by the ongoing surge of interest in the classic horror and weird tales author Howard Philips Lovecraft (1880–1937). An interest that is also most evidently shared by the speculative realists (Harman 2012). Lovecraft is considered by many to be the greatest horror fiction writer of his time and as one of the first writers to elevate the beforehand fringe genre of pulp-horror to a more central place within literature (Joshi 2013). Lovecraft’s universe consists of a fragile human world constantly threatened and rearranged by uncanny nonhuman powers that lie beyond the direct control of human manipulation. Through a myriad of novellas and short stories, some of which will be directly discussed in this book, Lovecraft developed his particular and distinct universe and its specifically non-anthropocentric perspectives ...