'Hybrid' Sustainability Issues and the Entanglement of Discourse and Matter: Epistemology and Didactics

Within the academic literature, a growing awareness is surfacing with regard to wicked socio-ecological problems' resistance to resolution by existing institutions and available expertise being linked to their specific 'hybrid' nature. It is argued that our dominant and deeply rooted Western worldview, with its strict division between, on the one hand, the world of nonhuman objects, science, nature, materiality, etc. and, on the other, the world of human subjects, society, politics, ethics, discourse etc., runs counter to the 'hybridity' of such issues (Goeminne 2011) as they are characterised by an inextricable entanglement of social, political, human aspects and material, technical, natural elements (Latour 2010). ESE researchers have critically described the risks involved in both a Modern, objectivist and a postmodern, subjectivist approach to teaching and learning in the face of such hybrid sustainability issues (e.g. Ashley 2000; Garrison et al. 2015; Van Poeck et al. 2014; Lysgaard and Fjelsted 2015; Van Poeck and Lysgaard 2015) and argue for developing theoretical, methodological as well as didactical frameworks that neither exclusively rely on language, discourse, and notions like social constructivism, nor solely focus on materiality and scientific 'matters of fact'. Instead, an 'other than modern' (Garrison et al. 2015) approach to ESE simultaneously takes into account discourse and materiality. The researchers that collaborate on this symposium contribution are interested in investigating how ESE practices (can) deal with the hybrid character of sustainability issues and how an 'other than modern' educational practice can possibly contribute to satisfactorily tackling wicked, unstructured sustainability issues. In this paper, they develop a conceptual framework in view of this ambition. Drawing on theoretical, epistemological work in the fields of Speculative Realism (Meillasoux, 2007; Bryant, 2013) and Actor Network Theory (Latour 2005), the presented framework should enable ESE researchers to empirically examine didactics and pedagogy in ESE practices as to whether – and, if so, how – the intimate entanglement of social, political, human aspects on the one hand and material, technical, natural elements on the other is reflected in the content of ESE, that is, in the way in which educational practices present and approach the subject matter. Then, they critically discuss the conceptual framework by distinguishing descriptive and prescriptive ways of applying it and illustrate their argument with examples of how topics such as the ecological footprint and the Anthropocene are/can be addresses in ESE.

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