Karen Malone

Karen Malone · Son Truong Tonia Gray Editors Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times Karen Malone • Son Truong • Tonia Gray Editors Reimagining Sustainability in Precarious Times Editors Karen Malone Son Truong Centre for Educational Research Centre for Educational Research Western Sydney University Western Sydney University Penrith, NSW, Australia Penrith, NSW, Australia Tonia Gray Centre for Educational Research Western Sydney University Penrith, NSW, Australia ISBN 978-981-10-2548-8 ISBN 978-981-10-2550-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2550-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016959465 © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2017 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Foreword The current impacts of environmental crisis such as climate change are devastating outcomes of broader conditions of global precarity. Indeed, a range of interdisciplinary research suggests the ways precarity has become an everyday existential state in many parts of the globe under new norms of neoliberal capitalism (Neilson & Rossiter, 2008). Focusing on labour conditions such as the flexibilisation of labour markets, job insecurity, and economic uncertainty, scholarship on precarity emphasises its dominance as ontological experience that has spread to an increasing range of labour classes, sectors, and national contexts (Jørgensen, 2015). These conditions are also an extension of longer trajectories of colonial capitalism, including histories of slavery and settler colonisation (Coulthard, 2014; Wolfe, 2001). As forms of biopower in which capital relies on ‘immaterial labour’ and genocide, enforced social, economic, and environmental precarity has been ongoing over cen- turies in many regions of the globe (Morgensen, 2011; Sunder Ranjan, 2006). More-than-human actors are also implicated in current conditions of precarity – in the interrelationships which enable forms of neoliberal capitalism, including the ideological cleaving of humans from nature that allows conceiving of land as prop- erty and biological life as biovalue (McCarthy & Prudham, 2004; Smith, 1984), as well as in associated outcomes of changing climates, pollution, and species extinc- tion. The twinned articulations of ‘a need to push beyond limits’ and a need to reimpose them in the form of ‘scarcity’ are mutually constitutive in creating conditions of precarity (Cooper, 2008). As a result, environmental precarity becomes economic opportunity in a myriad of ways, from capitalising on food insecurity via crop development and exportation, to green energy technologies, to other consumer responses such as ‘eco’ laundry detergents, reusable shopping bags, edible land- scapes, and other aspects of what Kath Weston (2012) terms ‘political ecologies of the precarious’ (p. 429). Engagement with maintaining conditions that are in fact obstacles to fulfilling the need for real change can be understood as part of the affective conditions of precarity (Berlant, 2011). An optimistic attachment to the status quo enables us to tinker, making small adjustments that are confirming in their sense of action, and yet leave undisrupted the problematic relations. For scholars concerned with researching v vi Foreword precarious times, this then involves ‘thinking about the ordinary as an impasse shaped by crisis in which people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on…In the impasse induced by crisis, being treads water; mainly, it does not drown’ (Berlant, 2011, p. 8, 10). However, interdisciplinary scholarship on precarity also tracks and debates whether precarity can be politically constituting or a catalyst for a new politics of everyday life (Lorey, 2010). As Jørgensen (2015) writes, this is going beyond what precarity is, to asking what precarity does. Arguably, some scholarly ‘doings’ of climate precarities have included the naming of the current geological period of human impact on the climate as the ‘Anthropocene’, as well as shifts in theoretical engagement with the ontological and material aspects of life: As homes are flooded, droughts persist, and nations are faced with responding to climate refugees, theo- rists are responding by articulating human relations with the world differently, as evident in various trajectories of post-human and materialist thought including those represented in the current volume. Or as Colebrook (2010, p. 15, as cited in Sommerville, Chap. 2, this volume) writes, ‘[c]limate change is not only a change of the climate but a change in the very way in which we think’ requiring us ‘to develop new concepts of the human, new figures of life, and new understandings of what counts as thinking.’ It seems we are caught somewhere between treading water via forms of cruel optimism and denial about current conditions of climate precarity (Berlant, 2011), to being part of the potentially radical ‘doings’ that such precarity can elicit. Indeed, this valuable edited collection grapples with how we go beyond treading water in the precarities of the Anthropocene and instead mobilise towards post-humanist politics which enact life more fully and ethically (Braidotti, 2013; Malone, Chap. 11, this volume). A shared characteristic articulated in many materialist and post-humanist theori- sations is a move away from critique and towards a focus on indeterminacy and possibility (see Coole and Frost, 2010; Snaza & Weaver, 2015). This implies an understanding of agency as ‘no longer the expression of sovereignty and of an autonomous, knowing self but a seeking of encounters with vibrant matter that force continual invention’ (Duhn, 2014, p. 8, cited in Chap. 4, this volume). This stance entails experimentation with the foci and methods of research, enabling expanding understandings of ‘childhoods’, ‘curriculum’, ‘pedagogy’, ‘policy’, ‘place’, and more, across the chapters of this book. Distancing from a subject-object relationship to research, the focus is on exploring how research understandings and pedagogical meaning are instead generated among subjects (Clarke, Chap. 21, this volume). A worry in the often ‘zoomed in’ focus of some genres of new materialist research is that micro description is favoured over also including a macro analysis of broader conditions or that the emphasis on theory and opening research methods can over- ride broader contexts of the ethics and implications of doing research in the first place (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). It is thus an inspiration to see chapters in this volume take post-humanist and new materialist lenses to critical questions of climate change, child poverty, LGBT inclusivity, speciesism, racism, the power Foreword vii relations of place, and other important intersectional issues. Snaza et al. (2014) sug- gest that post-humanist work in fact ‘pushes intersectionality’ through its critique of humanism’s violence (p. 41). The current volume helps lay that groundwork in educational scholarship, with a focus on the sociomaterial relationships of life and politics in the context of sustainability and education. A central aspect of how this is engaged is the book being situated in particular places and in relation to the indigenous peoples of those places. The volume begins by indicating its origins in the traditional country of the Darug, Gundungurra, and D’harawal peoples; and the book’s preface by D’harawal elder Aunty Fran Bodkin sets the tone for the work as a ‘gathering place…of diverse people, places, and sto- ries’ (Preface, this volume). There are commonalities and yet incommensurabilities among indigenous and decolonising theories and materialist and post-humanist theoretical trajectories (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). There is thus the ongoing and bumpy work of non-indigenous scholars (in some cases with indigenous colleagues) engaging indigenous knowledge and perspectives without collapse or appropriation of indigeneity into settler futurities and knowledge (Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013; Snaza et al., 2014). This is a book that breaks new ground in education, as one of the first volumes to engage a range of empirical and conceptual papers that draw on materialist and post-human theories to explore human-nature

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