Education and resistance in a time of climate emergency: Affect,aesthetics,and conflict

Abstract

This special issue examines education and resistance in the context of the climate emergency, foregrounding the interconnected roles of affect, aesthetics, and conflict. Emerging from the 6th symposium of the Studies in Conflict, Culture, and the Political in Education (SCAPE) research network, convened in 2023 at Maynooth University (Ireland), the collection comprises seven articles and one provocation essay, each seeking to respond to the increasingly tangible consequences of climate change. The contributions situate education within the material, political, and existential conditions produced by climatic and ecological disruption, while critically engaging the contested interpretations through which this crisis and its emergency are understood in a polarized world. Rather than treating the climate emergency as a singular or consensual object of concern, the issue foregrounds dissensus, relationality, and aesthetics as constitutive dimensions of educational thought and practice. Conflict is thus approached not as a problem to be resolved but as a potential generative force within education, requiring attention to sensory-affective, embodied-aesthetic, and more-than-human relations. A unifying thread across the contributions is a reworking of resistance as a pedagogical practice grounded in attentiveness and gentleness, oriented against hegemonic powers and sensitive to the indeterminacy and relationality that characterizes subjectivity. Collectively, the intellectual engagements of this issue offer plural perspectives on how education might cultivate new ways of imagining, inhabiting, and sharing worlds under conditions of ecological precarity, opening pedagogical space for uncertainty, dissensus, and renewed judgment.

Introduction

This special issue brings together a collection of essays in the philosophy and theory of education exploring pedagogical modes of resistance in a time of climate emergency through the lenses of affect, aesthetics, and conflict. By reconfiguring how the ecological and climate crisis is understood and encountered within educational contexts, the collection seeks to foreground the rich multiplicity of pedagogical possibilities—those already unfolding, those yet to be imagined, and those actively enacted in response to the present planetary situation.

While not distributed evenly, the realities of climate change have, in many ways, become part of everyday experience—carried in the smoke of wildfires, intensified by heat waves and prolonged droughts, etched into landscapes by floods and hurricanes, felt through the loss of biodiversity, and sensed in the slow but relentless rise of sea levels. For many people, these increasingly extreme environmental conditions are no longer distant forecasts or remote media portrayals, but present realities with profound consequences for both social and cultural life, alongside their effects on more-than-human worlds (IPCC, 2023). At the same time, differing conceptions of the climate emergency, including its denial, are a frontier of political struggle. The consequences of climate change do not affect people and communities uniformly, and responses towards ecological and climate challenges in society are differentiated, often shaped by political and ideological divisions that reflect and reinforce wider patterns of polarization (Ghosh, 2016). In parallel, emissions and pollution shape living conditions across geographical regions and over time, and damaging effects on the environment extend beyond individual lifespans to human and more-than-human others, connecting living and nonliving entities, near and distant places, and present and future generations in unsettling ways (Ghosh, 2016). As scholars of the Anthropocene have argued, responsibility does not fall indiscriminately on all living beings; to treat it so would shift the onus away from national governments, corporations, economic elites, and the anthropocentric politics and logics that perpetuate the crisis (Yusoff, 2018). Considered together, this complex and conflictual situation underscores the need for educational scholars to carefully attend to the multiple, ethically and politically charged directions that responses to the climate emergency may take in educational contexts. It also highlights the value of creative thinking and new approaches in uncertain and precarious times.

The rhetoric of urgency and crisis in relation to environmental and climate issues has long permeated media discourse and civic mobilizations, as well as influenced the content, form, and ethics of educational practice (Block et al., 2018; Wildemeersch et al., 2023). Following Hannah Arendt (1961/2006), however, a crisis only threatens to become devastating when we approach it with preconceived solutions. According to Arendt, every crisis marks a rupture in the fabric of shared meaning, thereby opening a rare and indispensable space for genuine political thought and action. Arendt often portrays crises as thresholds, that is, occasions when new beginnings and judgments become possible through a confrontation with a new reality in which our familiar frameworks and conventional notions fall short. This exposure, she argues, reveals both the necessity of forging common understandings about our current situation and the significance of independent judgments.

Perhaps, we argue, educational scholars are currently situated in an Arendtian threshold moment—one in which, rather than reproducing established patterns of thought in these times of climate upheaval, there is a need to pause in order to open space for new and more careful ways of thinking and acting in and through education (see also Block et al., 2018; Wildemeersch et al., 2023). This means moving away from the familiar impulse to rush toward predefined solutions and instead advocate slowing down as a deliberate scholarly practice. Such a scholarly approach, we suggest, provides a way to navigate the thresholds of the current interconnected crisis by broadening our judgment and thinking, thereby enabling us to generate new questions and responses to complex issues, such as the fragility of public spaces, the ethics of remembrance, and the worlding of the world. Against this background, the aim of this special issue is to invite educational scholars to engage more openly with fundamental questions concerning the role of education, giving particular attention to an ethics of gentleness, in the sense meant by philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle (2018), as that which “beckons to our responsibility as human beings toward the world around us, toward the beings making up this world and even toward the thoughts we commit to it” (p. 13).

Education, conflict, and resistance

The featured essays in this special issue originate from the 6th Symposium of the international research network Studies in Conflict, Culture, and the Political in Education (SCAPE), held in November 2023 at the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy at Maynooth University in Maynooth, Ireland. Inaugurated in Sweden in May 2008, the research network brings into dialogue international scholars in education who are united by a shared commitment to explore how difference, conflict, and dissensus shape the vitality and dynamics of political and educational life. At the heart of their interest lies the conviction that certain forms of dissensus and conflict are not merely unavoidable in society but are, in fact, indispensable — constitutive of democracy itself and of the very idea of democratic education (Carusi, 2022; Ruitenberg, 2011).

Centered on the theme of “Education and the climate emergency in a world of conflict,” this 6th symposium deliberately broadened its focus on dissensus and conflict to cover a range of areas, from discursive disagreement over societal power relations to sensory-affective, lived-embodied, and aesthetic-poetic modalities. This expansion sought to capture the more profound existential and ethical questions posed by the climate crisis for education, integrating the cognitive, affective, and poetic dimensions of human experience. Given this broadening of focus, the notion of resistance invoked in the title of the special issue should not be conceived in activist terms—as a deliberate act of opposition, or the political deployment of countermeasures—but rather as minor gestures of resistance, carried out in an ethic of gentleness in response to the precariousness, incompleteness, and injustice woven into the fabric of human and more-than-human life (Dufourmantelle, 2018). In her book Power of gentleness: Meditations on the risk of living (2018), Dufourmantelle describes gentleness as embodying transformative power, that is, as “an active passivity that may become an extraordinary force of symbolic resistance” to the status quo (p. 5), rendering gentleness an essential part of ethics and politics. As a gesture of care and quiet vigilance, she suggests, gentleness is the opposite of intrusive thinking and acting, and yet “reaches beyond the limits prescribed by your imagination” by inviting what is different and other (p. 83). Those who embody gentleness may at times appear as activists, yet their resistance does not take place on the familiar battleground of social and political confrontation. Instead, following Dufourmantelle (2018), the power of gentleness arises from an immanent mode of being and becoming in the world with others, an orientation that transforms activism into attentive presence toward the interconnectedness of living and dying environments, and which opens educational theory and practice to new possibilities and imaginaries of sharing the world otherwise – or, as Sharon Todd argues in this special issue, worlds in the plural. In this sense, we suggest, the symbolic resistance embedded in an ethic of gentleness speaks to the heart of education and to what is troubling, dissonant, and conflictual within human and more-than-human encounters.

Thinking together, by practicing openness and gentleness, also characterized the dialogue and responses throughout the SCAPE symposium in Maynooth, lending the often difficult conversations about the climate emergency an attentive and gentle atmosphere. The concluding essay by Carl Anders Säfström, framed as a personal meditation and which opened the SCAPE Symposium, embodies this atmosphere by drawing attention to the difficulty educational scholars face in translating the severity of the present situation into meaningful, sustained action. During the symposium, each presentation was followed by a vigorous discussion, and the authors subsequently revised their papers for this special issue. The result is a collection of seven thought-provoking original articles and one provocation essay that highlight different contexts and ways in which education, conflict, and the climate emergency intersect. The authors are based in Ireland, Canada, Poland, New Zealand, and Sweden and the articles draw upon topics and examples originating from a wide spectrum of theoretical and geographical contexts, spanning from educational encounters with living (and dying) beings and environments to the pedagogical potentials of dissent and conflict in face of climate emergency; from public pedagogy in Poland to the sustainability education classroom in Sweden. Some of the articles are fully theoretical, while others are based on empirical examples, but all can be seen to illustrate, in one way or another, the need for new ways of imagining, speaking about, and embodying education in this moment of time.

Contributions to special issue: An overview

The first three articles in the special issue focus on informal educational settings by elaborating alternative concepts and ways of thinking that help illuminate the ontologically rooted sites of conflict and transformative encounters emerging in an era of planetary instability, while exploring the pedagogical possibilities these perspectives entail.

In the opening article, Conflicting worlds in a time of environmental emergency: Worlding as an educational response, Sharon Todd approaches the climate emergency not as a crisis of a singular world but as a confrontation among multiple, coexisting worlds grounded in divergent ontological commitments. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s critique of modernity and extending Arendt’s understanding of the world as a shared, intersubjective space of human existence, she challenges educational research that treats “the world” as a universal, neutral backdrop within anthropocentric, world-centred frameworks. Engaging pluriversal thinking (Escobar, 2015), she shows how worlds are enacted through different relations to land, resources, and beings, developing “worlding” as a pedagogical orientation responsive to ontological plurality. Worlding is framed not as learning about the world but as an embodied, relational practice through which humans and more-than-humans mutually constitute their worlds. Inspired by Indigenous relational epistemologies and theories (Yunkaporta, 2019), Todd concludes that climate change education must move beyond merely transmitting skills toward curating encounters that enact and acknowledge the constitutive interdependencies of existence.

In Juliette Bertoldo’s contribution, Learning from absence in times of ecological loss: Vinciane Despret, relationality, and the pedagogical work of fabulation, the ecological crisis is framed as a crisis of memory, calling for collective, ethical modes of remembrance amid profoundly altered ecologies and unjust, premature nonhuman death and extinction. Moving beyond death as metaphysical absence, she presents Vinciane Despret’s (2021) interrelated notions of “fabrication” and “fabulation” to discuss the agential presence of the dead and the spatiotemporal conditions —what Despret terms a “conducive milieu”—through which they continue to participate in and shape the world of the living. Within this milieu, Bertoldo suggests, the “death narrative,” as conceptualized in Extinction Studies scholarship, may be mobilized in narrative-based pedagogies and artistic practices to foster relationality and remembrance, not through personal memory or subjective experience, but through new aesthetic imaginaries and counter-memory (Gibson, 2021), understood as the collective work of not forgetting the dead and what is owed to them.

The third article by Maria Mendel, Tender public pedagogy: Being fragments in more-than-human figurations of public space, opens by observing that contemporary crises—ecological collapse, pandemics, and economic instability—have exposed the limits of human exceptionalism, prompting a turn toward regenerative ways of living and new pedagogical narratives. Central to this vision is the redefinition of public space that prioritizes relational living and mutual interdependence among humans and nonhumans. In this context, Mendel proposes the notion of tender public pedagogy as a form of care informed by education, directed at protecting a fragile, more-than-human common good. Grounded in Olga Tokarczuk’s fourth-person narrator, she traces its emergence through four antecedents: the narrator’s role in co-creating public space, the fourth-person perspective that transcends ego, the radar-like sensitivity of tenderness, and the ontological weight of the fragment and gap (Jullien, 2011) as spaces of connection and potential. Ultimately, Mendel argues, tender public pedagogy emerges not as a fixed model but as a retroactive practice, sustained by care and rooted in the recognition that we are all fragments, capable of becoming public together only through tenderness.

The next three articles engage more explicitly with formal education, foregrounding the inherently conflictual character of climate change issues and conceptualizing the classroom as a key arena for both political engagement and sustainability education.

In her contribution, Political education in the climate crisis: Elaboration and reinvigoration of the agonistic model, Claudia Ruitenberg engages with agonistic democratic theory to identify three conceptual features for political education in the climate change classroom and beyond. The climate crisis, she argues, must be understood not merely as a scientific problem but as a fundamentally political one. Central to her argument is a reorientation of Chantal Mouffe’s (2000) notion of the “enemy” toward the “adversary”—one with whom disagreement is possible, yet whose position is grounded in rationally motivated commitments. Building on this, Ruitenberg challenges conflict-driven models of political education, instead advocating pedagogies that enable critical examination of political struggles and resistance, as they manifest in and around students’ lives. The third proposition concerns the transformation of antagonism into agonism, echoing Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (2004) call to “tame and sublimate antagonist desires” by redirecting them from negation toward a constructive desire for democracy. An agonistic approach, Ruitenberg argues, frames climate change as a “frontier of struggle,” making it a core task of political education to expose the political interests shaped by global capitalism and colonial legacies that produce and sustain the crisis.

Elisabet Langmann’s article, The classroom as a “holding environment”: Affect and dissonance in education for sustainability, introduces a conceptual language for engaging with the micro-conflicts and generative tensions that characterize classrooms for sustainability education. Moving beyond views of the classroom as a neutral site for knowledge transmission, it is reconceptualized as an embodied, affective, and existentially charged pedagogical space where contradictory emotions and divergent values converge. Drawing on Bonnie Honig’s (2017) political reading of “holding environments”—understood as public spaces capable of sustaining tension without resolving it—Langmann reframes the sustainability classroom as a pedagogical holding environment: an educationally crafted space that enables students to remain with the frictions of consensus and dissent around “public things” (Honig, 2017). This framework is explored through an empirical classroom scene and analytically refined using the notion of attunement through atmosphere (Heidegger’s Stimmung), which is employed to examine how classroom climate mediates students’ capacities to sense, feel, and respond differently to shared concerns. The article foregrounds a central educational task: cultivating conditions under which a public orientation of care and responsiveness toward a shared world can emerge—an undertaking that necessarily involves dissonance and the articulation of students’ own voices.

In the sixth contribution, The pedagogical potential of classroom ritualization: Or, teaching in the subjunctive, Lovisa Bergdahl offers an alternative account of the everyday work of pedagogy in response to the growing dominance of metrics and measurement in education—a tendency that risks reducing complex challenges, such as the climate emergency, to quantifiable outcomes. She approaches the climate crisis not solely as a scientific problem, but as an educational challenge concerned with how classroom spaces can be created and sustained as sites of imagination, contingency, and openness to disagreement, while remaining oriented toward shared commitments to care and justice. Drawing on ritual theory, particularly Seligman et al.’s (2008) distinction between the mode of sincerity, focused on normative coherence, and the mode of the subjunctive, oriented toward transformation and difference, Bergdahl develops an empirically grounded analysis of classroom practice. She foregrounds a pedagogy of the subjunctive—attuned not to “what is,” but to “what could be.” By reimagining the classroom as a collective, sensory landscape, ritualized pedagogical practices are thus reframed as imaginative invitations for students to act as if a world animated by care and justice were already real, even in the face of everyday resistance.

In the second-to-last contribution, What is educational about a climate emergency?, Tony Carusi moves beyond the classroom to ask what it might mean to understand the climate crisis as educational without reducing education to a technical means for solving ecological problems. While acknowledging the importance of climate-mitigating action, he critically examines instrumental framings that position education primarily as a means to an end. Such approaches, Carusi argues, risk foreclosing education’s distinctive capacity to hold open spaces for the new, the unanticipated, and the conflictual. To articulate an alternative, he distinguishes between two senses of emergency: urgency and emergence. Rather than aligning education with the demands of urgency—marked by immediate action and predetermined outcomes—Carusi foregrounds emergence as an open, unfolding process through which new relations, meanings, and subjectivities can come into being. This orientation is grounded in a kairotic (Todd, 2020) understanding of time, conceived not as externally imposed but as lived through practice, presence, and attentiveness. Within this emergent conception of the educational, conflict and dissent are not problems to be resolved but constitutive features that keep education responsive, porous, and alive to the complexities of life in a climate-altered world.

Carl Anders Säfström’s closing provocation, A Meditation Over Some of the Intrinsic Conflicts of our Capitalist Ego in the Face of Climate Emergency. An Activist Standpoint, served as the opening paper at the SCAPE symposium in Maynooth and now concludesthis special issue. Moving beyond the conventional academic article, the essay takes the form of a personal meditation that invites reflective engagement. Säfström foregrounds his struggle to fully apprehend the gravity of the current environmental condition and to translate this awareness into responsible action. Rather than framing planetary crises as abstract or external problems, he situates them within himself, attending to modes of violence, control, and domination inscribed through education and socialization within Western capitalist culture—a culture in which perfection, progress, and mastery are upheld as ultimate ends, shaping institutions, desires, and modes of relating. Against this “ego of perfection,” Säfström cultivates a more humble orientation through what he calls “the unharmonizable plant-ness” of life: its irreducible multiplicity, vulnerability, and resistance to closure. Embracing such incompleteness, he suggests, entails relinquishing fantasies of control, aligning with intertwined struggles against ecological and gender-based violence, and opening oneself to attentiveness, solidarity, and coexistence in a world that remains irreparably fractured yet insistently in bloom.

Conclusion

While united by their shared concern with the transformative character of education in a time of climate emergency, the eight essays assembled in this special issue approach the question of conflict and dissensus from diverse angles. Together, they gently challenge conventional boundaries of pedagogy, inviting readers to reconsider how education might respond to and unsettle—not so much in bold or radical ways, but through subtle and minor shifts—the complex and entangled polycrisis that defines our present moment. Given the convergence of multiple accelerating crises, the collection offers a generative space for varied responses and voices, each illuminating different facets of the conflicts, opening up a diversity of ways of being and becoming sensitive to living and dying environments in educational contexts. Together, they create a constellation of perspectives in which each piece proposes a unique and insightful way of thinking, acting, and approaching difficult problems, while opening up new lines of inquiry, new questions, and new imaginaries.