Pedagogical Encounters in the Post-Anthropocene, Volume 1

This volume, the first of a two volume set, addresses three major areas in response to the post-Anthropocene: childhood, environment and indigeneity. Each of these areas is broadly addressed in relation to the concerns that have arisen both theoretically and educationally. The author terms these to be encounters as each area presents a particular problematic when addressing the phase change that the planet is undergoing where the anthropogenic labour of global humanity is contributing to climate change, endangering our very existence. There has been a concerted effort to overcome the nature-culture divide in education. The author reviews this development in the first section where there has been a particular emphasis placed on childhood education. In the second section he turns to the pedagogical theories that are attempting to overcome this same divide in environmental and science education. The last section attempts to bring into the conversation the vast literature on Indigeneity and their attempts to revise traditional education to meet these extraordinary times.

“This is one of the most original books within contemporary posthuman pedagogical thought, both beyond and up to date with our current ecological crisis. Through its conceptual courage and innovations, jan jagodzinski, in an exciting way, moves educational thinking into new terrain, tackling the difficulties of our age of environmental and societal disaster head on. In this two-volume book, jagodzinski has created a new classic for the future, gathering his thoughts from a lifelong engagement with art, education, political ecology, capitalism, media and the (post) Anthropocene into a baffling masterpiece. If you want to engage seriously with finding new ways out of the miserable ecological and societal situation we face today within pedagogy, as elsewhere, this is doubtless a book for you.” (Michael Paulsen, Associate Professor and Head of CUHRE – Center for Understanding Human Relationships with the Environment, University of Southern Denmark)

“The scope of this work is extensive in its attempt to ‘turn away’ from education as it exists within its institutionalised formats that are driven largely by the values of capitalist economies and to argue for education and approaches to pedagogy that try to recognise and work with the complex issues confronting people today in what are called post-Anthropocene times…times in which new values are required, new subjectivities, new assemblages of practice that try to appreciate (though this may be impossible) and work with local and global problematics towards, we might say, a convivial future.

The striking feature across all of this work is its depth and range of scholarship as well as its extensive reference to and critical discussion of numerous problematics covering a number of surfaces including education, pedagogy, numerous philosophical fields, social and cultural studies, anthropology, local and global politics, ethics. It is a text, which in Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology, is attempting to ‘become with a world’ and in doing so registers the enormous and unending problematics of such becoming without pretending to offer solutions, rather it faces our difficulties with concern in the Quaker sense of this term (as employed by whitehead).

I know of no other text in the domain of educational or pedagogic work (though the scope is much wider than this) that is tackling our current difficulties head on. The critical discussion of theoretical work in the many fields that are covered is comprehensive and may be somewhat daunting to some, but this feeling only then emphasises the complexities that the work is attempting to engage with in a serious manner.” (Dennis Atkinson, Professor Emeritus, Goldsmiths University of London, UK)

“jagodzinski’s two volume work presents encounters with a number of areas that address the topology of the post-Anthropocene: childhood, environment, Indigeneity, technology, neurology and his own attempt that projects a possible future path for education to confront the phase change of the Earth. While no solutions are offered, the right problems are put into focus through an in-depth and comprehensive discussion concerning this problematic as undertaken by numerous philosophical fields. Calling predominately on the theoretical tool kit of Deleuze and Guattari, the recognition of creative destruction cannot be dismissed. Education, he suggests, needs to address the disruptive potential of the planet’s physical change that offers no redemptive anthropomorphization. An important book in these dark times.” (Bernd Herzogenrath, Institute for English & American Studies, Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany​)

jan jagodzinski is Emeritus Professor of Art and Media Education in the Faculty of Education, University of Alberta, Canada. His is the author of twenty book titles and the series editor for Palgrave Studies in Educational Futures.