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Paper short abstract:

We wish to discuss from a critical development studies perspective how to maintain anti capitalist pedagogy and academic activism within the neoliberal university, especially around the topic of the climate crisis

Paper long abstract:

As critical development scholars teaching the climate crisis, we sit at a juncture. The neoliberal university has put employability, policy relevance and impact at the front of teaching metrics to our student cohort, dominated by international elite students who aspire to go into law, finance, policy or consultancy careers. Within climate change, this means a commitment to ecomodernist principles and policy-based approaches driving big “D” development in the global south. In this paper, we draw on focus groups with undergraduate and postgraduate students enrolled in climate change modules in international development at KCL to co-produce a novel climate curricula. We find we need to teach to the “concrete” and be situated in the political realities of international climate politics and the neoliberal university. There is still an urgency to critique hegemonic capitalist power responsible for the climate crisis. However, we need to do so without it paralysing students into apathy and anxiety and obscuring hopeful possibilities coming from climate justice movements from the global south. This means valourising everyday struggles for wages, working conditions, land rights – direct, bottom-up approaches to respond to the climate crisis, as ‘solutions’. We also re-think the boundaries of what ‘valuable’ knowledge is from both educator and student perspectives, confronting and rethinking what ‘value’ means for advancing a radical climate pedagogy of hope in the context of climate anxiety and the specific career aspirations of students at neoliberal universities.