This session brings together friends affiliated with the Enlivened Cooperative who have been engaging in what we have been referring to as cosmopolitical learning. This refers to the practice of learning with, in between, across and beyond distinct ontologies, especially alongside indigenous teachers and in/from place. Cosmopolitics, first coined by philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers (2005), is a concept intended as an antidote, a slowing down, to the practices and processes of the ontological commitments characteristic of modernity. This opens the possibility of engaging with the cosmos as not a predetermined entity already named and described according to particular disciplinary methods and epistemologies, but rather as messy, plural and becoming, open to other ways of knowing and being in relationship with. At the same, cosmopolitics brings into focus how non-human actors, such as mountains, forests, rivers and others are also subjects and political beings who ought to be included into the constitutional arrangements of how we order our world.
In this seminar we will share experiences from Mexico, Peru, Hawai’i, New Zealand and the US that engage with these practices and the kinds of learning that has emerged from participants.
Further, the seminar will be an opportunity to collectively reflect on what this kind of work looks like in the contexts and practices that you engage with and how we might support each other in this kind of work.
Date: Wednesday November 16th of 2022
Time: 16:00 (UTC/GMT)
Duration: 90 minutes
This webinar series, called "Learning for Alternative Futures", is co-organised by Ecoversities, Educere Alliance, Global Tapestry of Alternatives, PeDAGoG, Radical Ecological Democracy, The Alternatives Project and Wellbeing Economy Alliance.
A paper engaging with some of these themes was published by 3 of us in a recent volume of Educação & Realidade on ‘Within or Beyond the University? Experiences of alternative higher education’. This can be freely accessed here: https://www.scielo.br/j/edreal/a/J5GpZcZm5YwCnHhYpDtcrRc/?lang=en.
The Enlivened Cooperative is a worker-owned, not-for-profit, eco-social learning organization, reimagining learning in support of people, grassroots communities and organizations with tools, practices and sensibilities to co-construct inter-cultural and ecological worlds. https://www.enlivenedcooperative.org.
Over the last 20 years Udi has been active in ethnographic and participatory action research on issues of social, ecological and epistemic justice and regenerative practices that can bring human and ecological flourishing. He has taught social anthropology, communication and sustainability in universities in the UK, US, Brazil and Costa Rica and collaborated with communities in Europe, the Pacific, North and Latin America, especially with indigenous and grassroots organizations. With other friends he co-founded the Enlivened Cooperative, Enlivened Learning and the Ecoversities Alliance.
E-mail: udi@enlivenedlearning.com
Gerardo Lopez-Amaro’s interests include co-labor, participatory-action research with people in territories where stained experiments and practices around Buen Vivir and cognitive, climate and relational justice are taking place, participating in a planetary, trans-generational learning ecosystem to birth worlds of dignity.
E-mail: gtupac.amaro@gmail.com
Kelly Teamey has been active in the fields of international/sustainable development and education for the past 20 years. Her work has focused on critical approaches to educational policy and practices within internation- al development contexts, looking particularly at how education, learning, and pedagogies can become transformative, holistic, and sustainably con- nected to local ecologies and communities.
E-mail: kellyteamey@gmail.com
Rosemary Logan has spent the last 20+years teaching at the intersections of sustainability education, transformative learning and sustainable food systems. From integrative and participatory, community-based research and learning in museums and K-12 schools to sustainable food systems, field-based learning, and permaculture design within higher education, she seeks to create spaces for learning that nurture transformations of self, community, and the earth.
Email: rosemaryglogan@gmail.com
Links shared during the session: