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- Convenors:
-
Melanie Walker
(University of the Free State)
Alejandra Boni (Ingenio (CSIC-Universitat Politècnica de València))
Camila Cociña (International Institute for Environment and Development, IIED)
Alexandre Apsan Frediani (International Institute for Environment and Development)
Diana Velasco (INGENIO (CSIC-UPV))
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- Format:
- Thematic Panel
- Theme:
- Environment and sustainable development
Short Abstract:
The Panel papers discuss repair at the past-present-future nexus, as well as transformative learning, and mobilizes these ideas as praxis commitments to address inequalities and planetary imbalances in many spaces (higher education, housing, social innovation) towards reparative, hence sustainable, futures.
Long Abstract:
At the HDCA conference in 2023, Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov presented one of the opening addresses and made this powerful statement: ‘It is no longer possible to save man without saving life in general and the planet itself. It is not merely insufficient, but actually impossible. Think about the question this way – to save humanity, we must save all living things, this whole web of life, as well as our home, the earth itself. Such thinking is part of the expansion of human nature. Here, paradoxically, our ego becomes eco’. This panel starts from this compelling call. It proposes ideas with regard to intersecting conceptual commitments across the three papers, and mobilizes them as praxis commitments. The conceptual aim is to think well about dimensions of sustainability; the praxis aim is to foster systems and capabilities which can advance planetary consciousness across multiple fields of practice (education, social innovation, housing). Thus, we work with the idea of sustainability as encompassing multi-dimensional historical, economic, social, political and environmental dimensions in and for the living world. The human development challenge is to redress and repair both social and planetary histories and imbalances, that is, to promote human flourishing within the flourishing of ecosystems now and in the future. Importantly, we integrate social justice with sustainability: absent social justice ecosystems of people and planet cannot be easily repaired and an unjust transition is then more likely, benefitting the few at the expense of the many. We thus need both values-based conceptual framings of transitions and futures, and changes in actual practices and processes which allow for many voices to be heard. We also do not underestimate the impact of politics on systems and choices. Sustainability as concept and commitment understood this way requires our attention to transformative learning spaces which expand agency and values in practice so that we can understand and choose differently in order to address social and planetary imbalances, while also enabling multiple, inclusive and contested narratives in learning about and doing sustainability. In this way there is the possibility of bending the directionality arc of sustainability towards social justice.
In turn, we propose that this means taking up repair as a learning practice involving complex articulations of past histories, presents and reparative futures. Reparative futures recognize and seek to repair past injustices and responsibility for past wrongs to the living world and righting them in the present and for transformative futures. It understands that even when they appear over, past injustices will continue to endure in people’s lives (economic exclusion and poverty for example, but also environmental degradation from mining and other industries) in material and affective ways unless they are carefully addressed. The challenge is broaching historical narratives in ways which do not continue to cast inequality and injustice as future inevitabilities, dismantling singular, exclusionary and hegemonic narratives about the way we live now and the choices we make.
Much, if not all of this work, is educational in shape and intent, hence we need to consider cases or niches where we find or foster transformative learning as a radical and transgressive boundary-crossing space of possibility and freedoms. Transformational learning includes dimensions and processes of solidarity and interconnectedness, epistemic freedoms for all, informed knowledge-based critique, reclaiming indigenous and other knowledges, and inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches. Such learning fosters planetary consciousness, with a firm foothold in contextual and situated histories. It seeks to find ways to think about and to actively live in reparative and sustainable ways towards just transition incremental changes that accumulate over time in the emergent world envisaged by sustainability thinking. Importantly for our purposes in this Panel, these changes arise from a vast multiplicity of struggles, each with their own context-specific temporal and spatial dimensions. We discuss examples of incremental changes and regime changes and seek to understand them as niche possibilities for wider impacts.
The three Panel papers discuss repair at the past-present-future nexus, as well as transformative learning, and mobilize these ideas as praxis commitments to address inequalities and planetary imbalances in education, housing, and social innovation for reparative, hence sustainable, futures. The goal and outcome is well-being founded on both environmental sustainability and social justice (including the eradication of poverty and global imbalances). The papers are: 1)’Repair as a foundation to sustainability. The role of the education socio-technical system’, Diana Velasco, Alejandra Boni and Melanie Walker. 2) ‘A Sustainablity Participatory Project’, Melanie Walker. 3) ‘Towards Sustainable Housing Justice: Four propositions to transform policy and practice’, Camila Cociña and Alexandre Apsan Frediani
Accepted papers:
Paper short abstract:
A hybrid participatory photovoice project with staff and students at one university in South Africa explored the theme of a sustainable, just and reparative university community. An epistemic community was formed as a transformative learning space, enabling many voices and perspectives.
Paper long abstract:
The Sustainablity Universities in South Africa (SUSA) project ran from July 2022 to December 2023. The research team were interested in how can/does higher education mobilize and develop transformative, just learning spaces towards sustainable values, practices and futures across classrooms, campus, and communities. We interviewed people at two university sites to map and compare diverse university stakeholders understandings and looked for transformative actions. We brought together multiple narratives: from above (university leadership), from the middle (academic staff), and from below (students and workers) to understand the sustainable university in our context, what enables and what gets in the way of transformative education and sustainable futures. We adopted an intersectional conceptual framing of planetary consciousness, reparative humanism and transformational learning to analyze how human development and capabilities expansion were enabled and achieved. This paper focuses on one strand of the project, a participatory hybrid photovoice project (PHP) with staff and students at one university on the theme of sustainable university communities. The PHP project generated a tentative response to the question: what is emerging now in universities that is suggestive of the kind of future embodied in the vision of a sustainable world? Crucially it enabled diverse bottom-up voices to emerge and to contest the sustainability space. The project comprised three moments which are discussed in the presentation: 1) collective discussions and substantive understandings of sustainability to produce a common definition for further discussions, also drafting the implications of our definition for university policy and practices; 2) training, production and discussion of photo narratives focused on a self-chosen personal theme that mattered to each participant, each person scripting up to 200 words and selecting around 6 to 12 images which could include photographs they took themselves; 3 ) sharing, revising and curating the photo-stories and holding a public seminar.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the concept of repair as a foundational element for achieving sustainability within the context of large-scale and long-term socio-technical systems change, with a particular focus on the role of the education system.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the concept of repair as a foundational element for achieving sustainability within the context of large-scale and long-term socio-technical systems change, with a particular focus on the role of the education system. In this context, sustainability can be understood as a nascent surge of development and the inception of a second deep transtition, after the industrial revolution (Schot and Kanger, 2018). In the development of the sustainability surge, which encompasses, among others, a shift to renewables, decentralised generation of energy, design for circularity, decarbonise, internalise environmental costs, and view humanity as part of nature (Mathews, 2013; Kanger et al., 2023), we acknowledge the need to address the enduring impacts of previous surges and the imperative of reparative action from both a decolonial and human development perspective (Mbembe, 2016).
Central to our inquiry is the exploration of transformative spaces facilitated by education, particularly within higher education institutions (Walker, 2024). We argue that building pathways towards reparative futures necessitates critically examining and overhauling education as a socio-technical system that has underlying patterns, routines, values, ways of doing and seeing the world, or rules (Geels, 2004). We focus on the higher education system in particular and explore how knowledge production, the editorial industry, the cultural and aspirational values of families and students, the way the system is regulated and incentivised, and education as a market product have contributed to maintaining unequal and unfair power structures. This involves not only reimagining the rules and structures of the system but also envisioning a future where sustainability (encompassing social, economic, and environmental dimensions) is fully integrated.
The research question driving this paper is: How can we envision a sustainable world cultivated through reparative and transformative educational spaces? To address this question, we draw upon theoretical frameworks, including deep transitions, human development and the capability approach, and mainly upon Walker’s (2024) framework of futures and reparation in education spaces using the Sustainable Futures and Universities in South Africa as a case study. We look at different expressions of sustainability through the transitions normative lenses, using the multi-level perspective (MLP) as a way of understanding long-term processes and also as a guidance for actionable pathways (Geels, 2002). By exploring the implications of building desirable sustainable futures, we aim to propose actionable strategies through reparative and transformative educational practices.
Ultimately, this paper seeks to contribute to ongoing conversations within the field of sustainability by offering a nuanced exploration of the interplay between education, reparative action, and transformative change.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation defines the scope of IIED’s housing justice work. It identifies and discusses four areas of intervention that such a definition opens for sustainability thinking and transformative learning spaces in/as/for housing justice, which also takes account of past inequalities and harms.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation defines the scope of IIED’s housing justice work, in dialogue with longstanding efforts led by social movements, grassroots groups, researchers and allies around the right to adequate housing. A housing justice agenda aims to tackle the perverse nature of current housing systems which reduce opportunities for transformative learning: they are exclusionary, extractive, exploitative, and enclosed. Building on spaces of solidarity and resistance that have been forged to contest these current dynamics of housing systems, the presentation proposes housing justice as a frame to challenge these orientations and transform policy and practice. We propose a placeholder definition of housing justice: housing justice is a vision that seeks the transformation of housing systems to ensure the equitable distribution of capabilities for people to live in housing conditions that enable just and sustainable human flourishing. The presentation unpacks each part of this definition, discussing: ‘just and sustainable human flourishing’ from a social justice perspective; ‘capabilities to live in housing conditions’ from a capability perspective, focusing on the personal and the collective; ‘ensure the equitable distribution’, drawing on feminist, decolonial and southern theories; and ‘a vision that seeks the transformation of housing systems’, asserting that justice is a horizon always in the making, requiring continuous deliberation and contestation to define meaningful pathways. The main section identifies and discusses four areas of intervention that such a definition opens for sustainability thinking and transformative learning spaces in/as/for housing justice, which also takes account of past inequalities and harms. The paper concludes by reflecting on the challenge of mobilising this lens towards a collective horizon, and framing the collaborative work on sustainable housing we do at IIED, linking local struggles and transformative learning spaces with global processes.