Anthropocentrism’s<i>fluid binary</i>

Affifi, Ramsey

doi:10.1080/13504622.2019.1707484

Cited by 20 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Here, other values play a much greater role-as demonstrated by the poplar dilemma instrument. The evaluation categories of ecocentrism, eco-pragmatism and anthropocentrism, which have also been discussed as being important influencing factors in other studies (Affifi 2020;Kopnina and Cocis 2017;Cocks and Simpson 2015;Kortenkamp and Moore 2001), had large and partly opposing influences on the decision. A particularly interesting fourth category was a so-called religious stewardship pattern (Graham 2020;Martin 2015;Welchman 2012).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Religious education for ecological sustainability: an initial reality check using the example of everyday decision-making

Altmeyer

2021

j. relig. educ.

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There is a widely accepted consensus that religious education, together with all other school subjects, should contribute to the goals of education for sustainable development. As a result, theoretical models have been developed to profile what the specific contributions of religious education might be. However, the question whether religious education can achieve the intended goals has not yet been researched in more detail. More fundamentally, to be able to formulate realistic goals involves the clarification of students’ predispositions. In the light of these questions, the author focuses on an ecological sustainability dilemma, the so-called poplar dilemma, and asks how students react to this conflictive situation and what roles religious orientations play in their responses. Analysis of the responses of a sample of more than 1100, 14- to 16-year-old students at secondary schools in Germany and Austria led to the conclusion that over-reaching, action-changing environmental sustainability goals are probably beyond the reach of religious education as a single subject. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that ecological issues are regarded by many as religious and spiritual questions and can therefore be addressed in a focused way through religious education. The idea of religious stewardship, which implies taking responsibility and addresses both religious and non-religious students, could be particularly promising. Religious education could develop a characteristic profile as an area in which translation between different motivations for engaging in religious stewardship occurs, and where commitments to taking responsibility are sought.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Religious education for ecological sustainability: an initial reality check using the example of everyday decision-making

Altmeyer

2021

j. relig. educ.

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“…While we recognise that seeing nonhumans as persons is a form of anthropomorphism, we are persuaded by Bennett's (2010, 120) argument that anthropomorphism "oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism: a chord is struck between person and thing, and I am no longer above or outside a non-human 'environment'". For Affifi (2020Affifi ( , 1445, this applies only with an "engaged" form of anthropomorphism that assumes a degree of difference with the other being. he distinguishes this from a "naïve" form, which in assuming too high a level of similarity with other species, "shuts off our capacity to acknowledge and respect their differences" (1445).…”

Section: Empathymentioning

confidence: 99%

Stewardship and beyond? Young people’s lived experience of conservation activities in school grounds

Ruck

Mannion

2021

Environmental Education Research

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This article provides ethnographic insight into the more-than-human relationships enacted through young people's participation in school grounds conservation activities. As a response to the escalating biodiversity crisis, conservation appears well-placed to facilitate young people's development of an environmental ethic of care, and a capacity to work towards addressing environmental issues. Proponents of posthuman pedagogies, however, argue that the 'stewardship' perspective underlying these activities fails to achieve the radical shift in human-environment relations required in response to the Anthropocene, given its apparent reinforcement of a perceived human/nature binary, and narrow 'solutions'-based approach. Considering these critiques, this article demonstrates that where there is openness to unplanned more-than-human encounters and the enactment of young people's own 'lived curricula' , conservation activities can nonetheless enable forms of 'collective thinking with the more-than-human world' that transcend any underlying 'stewardship' perspective. We therefore point to the potential role of conservation activities within posthuman responses to the Anthropocene, provided such openness is maintained. Introduction: conservation, stewardship and posthumanismIn October 2019, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) issued an urgent call for action to address the "unprecedented, unsustainable and growing impacts on wild species from human activities" (IUCN 2019, 1), highlighting an accelerating biodiversity crisis often referred to as the Earth's "sixth mass extinction" (Cole and Malone 2019). People across the world, the IUCN (2019, 1) states, "must accept responsibility for this emergency and act now to ensure we pass on a rich natural heritage to future generations". This article provides ethnographic insight into young people's lived experience of the Polli:Nation project -a UK-wide, school-linked conservation initiative that engaged them in a direct response to this call for action.Young people's participation in conservation activities, particularly in formal education contexts, has seen relatively little coverage in academic literature. "Conservation" here refers to the transformation of a particular site in order to have positive impacts on biodiversity. Students need not travel to celebrated or protected landscapes to participate in conservation activities.

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“…Verlie and CCR15 (2018) further contribute with their application of intrasectionality, acting-with, and diffraction, which attune our attention to the constant flux and rearrangement of boundaries and hierarchies in attempts at posthuman practices of pedagogy and research. Even with the most critical offering, Affifi (2019) points to the importance of considering what our concepts do with the world, and how they come to matter. Experiments in the direction of concepts matterings are most forcefully endorsed by Gough and Adsit-Morris (2019), and Mcphie and Clarke (2018).…”

Section: Politics Ethics and Decolonial Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Tensions, knots, and lines of flight: themes and directions of travel for new materialisms and environmental education

Clarke

Mcphie

2020

Environmental Education Research

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In this introduction to a special issue of Environmental Education Research on New Materialisms and Environmental Education, we begin with a brief overview to this publishing project and to scholarship on new materialisms and environmental education. Against this backdrop, we then discuss various themes of significance arising from the broader tumult of thought that occurs in the 17 papers that bring these areas into conversation. In brief, papers gathered in this collection illustrate a series of engagements with: (1) new empiricism and post-qualitative inquiry; (2) the meeting of politics, ethics, and decolonial theory with new materialisms; (3) conceptions of nature, environment, sustainability and the human subject; and (4) new materialisms as environmental pedagogy. We recognise that readers will imagine, detect and respond in diverse ways to the papers and the thematics on their own terms too, noting that other inclusions in the collection would likely have generated different patterns and affordances for insight, challenge and debate. Thus, we argue that in some senses, the collection must remain open rather than closed, while we also invite further contributions on the topics, that engage with what the collection does and does not offer, and to rework it. In other words, we trust our introduction underscores the immanent performativity expected of many of the new materialisms, and highlights their potential to forge axiological pathways away from dominant onto-epistemologies of environmental education research.

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Anthropocentrism’sfluid binary

Cited by 20 publications

References 49 publications

Religious education for ecological sustainability: an initial reality check using the example of everyday decision-making

Religious education for ecological sustainability: an initial reality check using the example of everyday decision-making

Stewardship and beyond? Young people’s lived experience of conservation activities in school grounds

Tensions, knots, and lines of flight: themes and directions of travel for new materialisms and environmental education

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