Contribution short abstract

This short contribution will share three efforts to integrate ‘critical hope’ at the University of Sussex. Firstly, a student/staff workshop series on critical hope. Secondly, teaching on modules linked to the University’s forest food garden. Thirdly, our new undergraduate degree in Climate Justice

Contribution long abstract

This short contribution will share three interrelated efforts to integrate ‘critical hope’ into teaching about the climate and environmental crises at the University of Sussex. The first was a series of critical hope workshops delivered by local practitioners and organisers in Brighton, UK. Invited speakers shared their personal activism journeys and motivations with students through storytelling and practical activities, such as weeding and recycling. The second is experiences of teaching on modules linked to the University’s ‘forest food garden’, an agroforestry plot on campus that was planted with students and whose design evolves each year with suggestions and planting from each cohort. The students on the module explore political ecology through food growing, as well as what it means to work with the natural world in a multigenerational project. The third is our new BA in ‘Climate Justice, Sustainability and Development’, which is converting learning from these and other projects into a new undergraduate degree. The degree is the first in the UK to focus explicitly on climate justice and has encouraged us to transform what we teach and how we teach it, to help students graduate engaged, happy and ready to change the world. These initiatives required a significant amount of work from an interdisciplinary team to overcome institutional barriers to innovation and to take advantage of small funding opportunities and spaces of dialogue and co-creation. I will share and reflect on these in the talk, with some ideas for recreating similar initiatives elsewhere and for ongoing interinstitutional collaboration.

Contribution short abstract

This auto-ethnography from the global South posits critical development practice (CDP) as an antidote to despair that critical theory often engenders. CDP co-creates new collaborative situated knowledges and hope-ful emancipatory outcomes through grounded, site-specific action in particular locales.

Contribution long abstract

The social science and humanities classroom in universities of the global South is arguably at its most difficult juncture in contemporary times. The polycrisis poses a wicked problem, academic freedom is under siege everywhere, critique is increasingly demonized, and there is a general atmosphere of despondency and defeat. What kind of knowledges can we co-create, and whom can we co-create it with, to keep alive the hope of transition towards a more just and sustainable society? I discuss these challenges from my specific location in the academia and development sector of the global South, occupying multiple positionalities with simultaneous experiences of privilege and vulnerability. I will contribute to this roundtable through an auto-ethnographic account of nearly 25 years of productive tension between my twin worlds of critical theory in the university, and critical development practice in the forest fringe villages of central India. My students have similarly contradictory positionalities, spanning highly privileged socio-economic backgrounds to first-generation learners from families which climbed out of poverty in the early days of neoliberal growth. The pedagogical challenge in this case is to retain complex and critical thinking while birthing and nurturing a robust pedagogy of hope. I contend that a meaningful dialogue between critical theory and critical practice can co-create interdisciplinary learning spaces that produce hope for meaningful social change. This praxis generates hope through the art of observing, documenting, understanding, and participating in the micropolitical strategies through which people make their way in a deeply unequal and unjust world.

Contribution short abstract

This presentation shares educational findings from our Partnership for Youth and Planetary Wellbeing project alongside indigenous Mapuche-Williche youth from Chiloé archipelago, southern Chile in a context marked by climate coloniality and environmental (in)justice

Contribution long abstract

This presentation offers contributions to the place of pedagogies in political ecology by sharing educational findings from our Partnership for Youth and Planetary Wellbeing project, which aimed to understand youth wellbeing in contexts marked by the slow violence of ecological crises in structural contexts of climate and intergenerational injustice (Tilleczek et al., forthcoming).

We draw on our work alongside indigenous Mapuche-Williche youth of Chiloé archipelago in southern Chile. These young people emerge as anti-colonial educational revolutionaries (Aránguiz et al., 2022a, 2022b; Tilleczek, 2022) in new spirits of critical pedagogies of hope aligning and transcending Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and the contributions of Gustavo Esteva to political ecology (Tornel, 2025).

Leaning on the Youth Advisory Committee's wisdom and through interviews, community conversations, and the co-design of pedagogical materials, our relational work illustrates how our research processes and the co-development of educational tools adhere to critical, youth-centered pedagogical methods that foster an understanding of how youth live well through reciprocal relationships with territory, land, forests, sea, creatures, and kinship. These young Mapuche-Williche educational revolutionaries breathe life and knowledge (old and new) into Freire's approach through Wekimun (new knowledge in the Mapuche language, Mapundungun) and Küme Mogen (living well in relation). They understand relationships with the territory, peoples, and the more-than-human world as the pathway for a pedagogy grounded on radical hope (Esteva, 2023). We speak to the ways in which this knowledge and practice serve as tools for repair and resistance to the structural forces that threaten individual, collective, and planetary wellbeing

Contribution short abstract

Political ecology teaching helps conservation biology students see beyond technical fixes, engaging power and justice to envision transformative futures.

Contribution long abstract

The proposed presentation draws on my personal teaching experience as the sole social scientist within a team, to co-design and run the Integrative Biodiversity Conservation Science course at University of Bern over the past three years. Working with Conservation Biology students—most trained in technical, intervention-oriented approaches—I encountered early, disarming questions: “Why does nobody care about nature?” and “Why do conservation interventions work here but not there?” These questions revealed their growing discomfort with the limits of technocratic solutions and opened space for political ecology to help them examine power, institutions, inequality, and knowledge pluralism in shaping conservation outcomes.

The course is taught in two complementary formats. The first is a formal workshop series featuring speakers from diverse disciplines, paired with group work anchored in real-world projects through the ACT approach. The second is a parallel, student-led Seminar and Journal Club, in which students propose themes at the start of each semester and take turns leading discussions. Over three years, participation has expanded from two to more than twenty students, transforming the course into a collective learning space where students actively interrogate conservation paradigms and articulate new analytical orientations. Teaching political ecology within this predominantly natural-science environment—and doing so at the twilight of ecological and democratic crises—requires holding space for students’ anxieties while cultivating agency. I reflect on how political ecology can serve as a pedagogy of hope: a critical and dialogical practice that supports students in moving beyond despair and technocratic thinking toward imagining more just, relational, and sustainable futures.

Contribution short abstract

My sharing focuses on what happens when Political Ecology & Degrowth Master students engage in performative and site-specific practices in Barcelona’s public space, using embodied artistic methods as a pedagogical strategy to reflect on the “inconvenience of being together.”

Contribution long abstract

My contribution emerges from four years of co-teaching artistic practice modules in the Political Ecology and Degrowth Masters at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Between 2022 and 2025, four cohorts moved through co-designed sessions with María Heras that combined Theatre of the Oppressed, improvisation, collective listening and rhythm work, theatre of objects, and score-based performances in Barcelona’s public space.

I can share about what happens when students step out of the traditional classroom into artistic relational practices. Through their written reflections and our observations as space-holders, I delve into how artistic methods can produce shifts in perception and open a space in which discomfort and shared vulnerability can be worked with rather than avoided.

I would like to intertwine three threads that continually surface in our classes: the uneasy task of teaching about oppression with students who often hold privileged positions; the capacity of embodied methods to make power, fragility, solidarity and conflict felt in the body rather than kept at a critical distance; and the way public space can act as a partner in the learning process, through its almost-forgotten presence and through its social and material tensions. Together, these threads form a pedagogical approach to embodied political ecology that is continuously put to the test and that, every year, offers us new learnings.

Keeping these threads in relation, I would like to reflect together on the methodological and ethical challenges of facilitating processes where students may enter states of heightened vulnerability, working with body, biography and emotion.

Contribution short abstract

“Digging for Diversity” is a teaching experiment that uses inter-, transdisciplinary and arts-based methods to empower students. It attempts to implement pedagogies of hope by facilitating experience in real world problem solving and giving the students a sense of agency.

Contribution long abstract

This short talk is about how arts-based, transdisciplinary and embodied teaching and learning can explore our current crises’ while empowering the students. It draws a connection to the idea of “pedagogies of hope” by highlighting how real world problem-solving can restore a sense of agency. The course was structured around three phases: "digging," "sowing," and "harvesting & composting”. The first phase was designed to facilitate self-reflection on the own positionality of the students and their role in these challenging times. The second was focused on getting to know the idea of “regeneration” through reading, engaging with researchers from different disciplines and artistic exercises that offered space for cognitive and emotional processes. In the last phase the students put the idea of regeneration into practice in projects in various civil society contexts (e.g. elementary school, international development cooperation, adults with special needs, activism). The students reflected on their learning processes in these projects extensively. It became apparent that the students felt empowered and could recognize their own agency through the projects. The focus on “regeneration” created a sense of hope among the students because the concept acknowledges the crises, the losses and the challenges but offers hope that new forms of community, human-non-human relationships are possible.

Contribution short abstract

The talk shares an ongoing arts-led project adopting poetry-writing as a popular education methodology inspiring intersectional climate justice. The poetry workshops tackle the trans-national impacts of financialised savings of the global North, inviting emotions from discomfort to empowerment.

Contribution long abstract

The roundtable talk shares insights and questions from an ongoing artistic/environmental humanities research project, which experiments with learning and writing documentary poetry as a form of intersectional climate justice education. The key method includes poetry-writing workshops in different settings, mainly in education and cultural spaces in the European North (with planned research stay in South Africa).

In the spirit of popular education, the poetry workshops create spaces of learning about socio-environmental contentions, as well as discussion using political ecology concepts, e.g. “ecologically unequal exchange,” green/grey extractivisms ecological debt, resource colonialism, etc. Poetry exercises work with policy, legal, corporate, scholarly and journalistic/independent materials. These are associated to contentious savings tied to pension savings in Sweden.

The transnational socio-environmental impacts of private and public savings are largely invisibilised from the citizens/workers/pension savers. In Sweden, the state-run pension funds invest more than 350 billion USD into bonds and shares in thousands of enterprises across the world. These investments cause millions of tonnes of GHG emissions. This makes it a crucial area for trans-hemispheric climate justice, and arena for repair and solidarity work.

How can an art-research practice address this “unsettling” reality for transformative learning, acknowledging and “holding together hope and despair” (Beban, Korson, 2025). The intricacy of the financialised savings system, as well as “our” (workshop participants’) different complicity in it, may invite feelings of disempowerment and hopelessness. Yet, through collective creative work in a study setting, the workshops aim to empower and inspire transnational solidarity with the most affected peoples and areas.

Contribution short abstract

Outdoor learning and collective narrative practices help students face ecological disruption by connecting deep-time awareness, shared stories and attentive presence, fostering grounded hope and reflective, future-oriented learning.

Contribution long abstract

Together, outdoor learning and narrative co-construction offer pathways toward a pedagogy of hope— a learning process that allows students to cultivate hope, justice and systemic awareness in disrupted times (Bohlayer, 2023; Dodd et al., 2022; Hägg et al., 2021). Following David Denborough’s work on collective narrative practice, the use of narrative frescoes enables students to assemble fragments of experience, concern and imagination into shared stories that help them make meaning in the midst of ecological and social upheaval.

Meanwhile, an adapted version of Stephan Harding's Deep Time Walk invites learners to discover the planet's long history, recognising the creativity of the living and non-living world as a source of teaching in itself. Walking becomes a form of inquiry grounded in the rhythms, textures and temporalities of the more-than-human. The approach is supported and enriched by insights from Lesley Roberts’s coaching outdoor, which helps shape conditions for attentiveness, sensory presence, and reflective dialogue.

In outdoor settings and through shared narrative work, learners come to perceive that the systems unravelling today are part of much larger temporal movements—some destructive, others regenerative. This awareness strengthens their capacity to witness damage lucidly while recognising that change unfolds across multiple timescales. Such a relational understanding of time deepens the kind of reflective, grounded hope that neither denies suffering nor idealises the future, but emerges from seeing oneself as part of continuum of life, struggle and renewal. In this way, outdoor learning and collective narrative foster learning that remain open, critical and future oriented.

Contribution short abstract

Art-based methods enable collective learning spaces for addressing societal challenges. Community-based work builds agency, solidarity and hope. The presentation explores participation during sustainability transformation through restoration art projects.

Contribution long abstract

Art-based methods can enable learning spaces and experiences where we collectively seek more sustainable ways of living and build collective agency. Pedagogical approaches based on shared imagination and experimentation create opportunities to envision a more hopeful future.

Ethically and ecologically sustainable practices require the courage to experiment and learn together – in ways that acknowledge planetary boundaries while strengthening human solidarity and sense of community. Community-based work not only enhances capacity for collaboration, but also supports strategic thinking and future-building.

Agency emerges through collective work. Learning experiences facilitated by experimental, imaginative and collaborative art-based methods play an essential role in this process.

This presentation examines cultural sustainability transformation through community art-based examples: land art workshops that address endangered species and their relationship to place, metamorphosis and embodiment, opening space for experiences of hope and shifts in scale.

Shared imagination and concrete realization create agency and pedagogical opportunities to build narratives that support ecosocial education and more sustainable living. Thus, cultural means can awaken change and strengthen belief in a better future.

Contribution short abstract

AIBIA’s field school in rural Southern Italy uses critical reimaginative theory to turn inner areas into living laboratories. Students learn with communities, control their own learning paths, and practice educational democracy as a concrete pedagogy of hope.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution introduces AIBIA’s work in rural Southern Italy as an experiment in critical reimaginative pedagogy from the margins. Rather than treating inner areas and postcolonial regions as “left behind,” we approach them as living laboratories where people already quietly practice alternative ways of organizing economies, ecologies and social life under precarious conditions.

Our field schools invite students to learn with communities rather than simply about them. Students encounter “everyday economies” through provocative encounters with small producers, subsistence households, neo-rural projects, and community initiatives, then translate these encounters into grounded analyses and proposals for alternative futures. Built around what we call critical reimaginative theory, the pedagogy moves beyond critique towards reimagining and prefiguratively implementing alternatives: doing, reflecting, reimagining, and implementing in iterative cycles.

If critical reimaginative practice is the method, the core pedagogical shift lies in how control over learning outcomes is redistributed to students, creating a form of educational democracy. Facilitators place them in provocative situations; students then choose which moments move them, make sense of these encounters on their own terms and move their work in directions that interest them, thickly describing those situations, analyzing them, and critically reimagining alternatives. Educational democracy – and therefore pedagogies of hope – lie in how learners themselves exercise power over the direction, meaning and consequences of their learning, and how they choose to address wider crises important to them. Through this practice of critical reimagining, they reconceptualize their world on their own terms, rather than being taught about alternatives from above.

Contribution short abstract

This work presents the method of future interviewing as an agile approach to engaging students in creative and positive thinking about their future.

Contribution long abstract

How often do you allow yourself to imagine what the future might look like if there were no sustainability crises? What would you smell, feel, and hear? How would you live, and what would you do?

Future interviewing is an agile method that is easy to apply in learning settings of various sizes. Drawing on my experience using this method in teaching bachelor’s and master’s level sustainability students, I will introduce the method, demonstrate how to apply it, and share the kinds of outcomes it has created in my courses. Applying the method serves a dual purpose: i. It enables students to engage with positive future visions by tapping into their creativity, and ii. it provides them with first-hand experience in a method that can be used in envisioning workshops.

Experience shows that future interviewing offers a powerful way to explore diverse futures, resulting in a range of hopeful visions.

Contribution short abstract

In trouble conscious design studios in Munich and Utah, we explore how resonance, dialogical pedagogy, Deep Adaptation, and collective imagination can cultivate hope as a situated and collective practice and strengthen students’ capacity to act.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution reflects on six years of continuously taught urban design research studios, approached through a political ecology lens and shaped by crisis across two contexts: Munich during Covid 19 and the University of Utah during the Trump administration. In both settings, students encountered overlapping ecological, political, and affective disruptions that shaped how they learn and how they imagine futures. Our response draws on Hartmut Rosa’s resonance, Paulo Freire’s dialogical pedagogy, the Deep Adaptation Agenda, and Donna Haraway’s call to stay with the trouble, to cultivate hope as a situated and collective practice.

At TU Munich we created learning environments that foreground relationality, shared inquiry, and co-produced knowledge. Freire’s emphasis on dialogue informed our non-hierarchical studios, while Deep Adaptation operated as a wakeup call that made the multitude of systemic crises visible and opened space for new forms of agency. Through stakeholder engagement and student led spin offs, projects extended beyond the university into real world experimentation.

At the University of Utah students worked from lived experience and local attachments, developing situated projects that respond to political tension and ecological precarity. This echoes Haraway’s insistence that we cannot escape trouble but can learn to inhabit it with responsibility.

We argue that pedagogies of hope emerge when teaching practice engages crisis as structural and shared and enables collective capacity to act.

Ref: Freire 1970, Haraway 2016, Rosa 2019.

Contribution short abstract

The Geneva Hope Project is a collective to reflect on how we might respond with hope to these systemic and personal challenges.

Contribution long abstract

"On Hope: The Study and Practice of Keeping Going" This small-scale, qualitative study will ran from 1 October- 30 November 2025. It examined what hope means in our daily lives, and offer the opportunity to share practices in a facilitated, online space. From 10 October- 14 November), we met each Friday via Zoom, to explore conceptions of and practices around hope. Together we shared stories about how we experience, sustain, and mobilize hope in our work and in our daily lives. This convening space for collective reflection was a salve and an inspiration for the group. We integrated the Community Life Competence Process as our tool for collective reflection and action planning. We responded to the questions in the Adult Hope Scale and the Locus of Hope Scale (short form)--and then shared our reflections on how age, geography, spiritual faith and so many other factors influence our relationship with hope. We were invited to do the River of Life reflection exercise to recall the turning points in our own lives when hope was present, and when it waned. We responded to weekly journal prompts, and share them (or don’t). By the end of the six weeks, we agreed that something profound has happened in our collective space. We wanted to keep going. So here we are.