Complex Considerations for Critical Qualitative Childhood Studies: A Perspective From Aotearoa (New Zealand)

Abstract

This article considers the complexities of the historical and current context for critical qualitative childhood studies in Aotearoa (New Zealand), a country with a two-century history of colonization by Britain of the Indigenous people, the Māori. This was despite the undertakings of the British contained within a treaty, Te Tiriti o Waitangi to uphold Māori authority over their lands, resources, and things of value, as equal citizens to the British settlers. Māori children were traditionally deeply respected and their contributions to collective decision-making valued. In blatant disregard of these treaty obligations, Māori have been severely impacted by warfare, introduced diseases, and dispossession of lands, language, and identity. There remains within current educational practice a long-standing historical amnesia and wilful ignorance of the intergenerational trauma that has resulted. This extends to the pedagogical and research implications for working in this context of colonization. This piece therefore considers how those who work in tertiary settings, particularly critical childhood studies scholars, might challenge the ongoing hegemonies of White privilege and complacency to create new ethical imaginaries in our teaching and scholarship, research methodology courses, and ethical review processes, beyond token mention of Māori concerns.

Introduction: As I Write—Current Headlines

The current epoch, recognized by many as the Anthropocene, is characterized by anthropogenic forces dramatically influencing the geology of Earth (Tiessen, 2018). This is marked by anthropogenic fossil fuel consumption having induced global heating which is destabilizing our biosphere, causing increasingly frequent and deadly disasters across the globe, presaging global biocide (Carrington, 2022). Our current moment could be characterized as a convergence of social, economic, and environmental crises which include (post)-COVID and climate crisis exacerbations of social inequities, conflict, displacement, and poverty, magnified by increasing authoritarianism, disinformation, and relinquishment of social contracts to artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.

Scanning headlines while completing this article, I encountered a raft of increasingly distressing news. There was reporting of the deliberate obfuscation of global fossil fuel reduction agreements at the recent COP28 annual United Nations climate meeting. ¹ Glaringly bizarre was the irony of the annual United Nations climate negotiation meeting being hosted this time in Dubai, by Sultan Al Jaber, who is the chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company, and was observed to be deliberately undermining the aspirations for an agreement on a timeline to end fossil fuels extraction (Bennett, 2023; Kolbert, 2023). Domination of the talks by large monied interests continues to obscure the reality that “the climate crisis is deeply linked with questions of environmental and social justice, and how continuing legacies of racism and colonialism drive environmental degradation and hinder changes to slow global warming as well as drive nationalistic violence” (Berwyn, 2023, para. 13).

The indications are that “increasing climate shocks could trigger more social unrest and authoritarian, nationalist backlash” (Berwyn, 2024). While attending a climate child research commission in Australia in January 2024, there was reporting of highly visible neo-Nazi activity there. In one instance, a large group of men dressed in black and wearing black balaclavas and face masks were prevented by police from traveling by train to an Australia Day national commemoration (Wilson, 2024).

The resurgence of right-wing authoritarianism has been a hallmark of the cynical hubris of the Trump-led MAGA movement in the United States (Applebaum, 2019). Meanwhile, social divides are increasingly entrenched, since disinformation is rife and its damage to democracy both insidious and disastrous (Lewandowsky et al., 2023). Ignorance of these threats to democracy and to planetary and human wellbeing is perpetuated through social media fracturing of the commons, feeding siloed social schisms (Gluckman et al., 2023). For example, in Aotearoa there has been a marked increase in vaccine hesitancy associated with anti-government sentiment, while simultaneously global warming is increasing the spread of vectors of diseases such as those carried by mosquitoes, and the risk of future pandemics looms on the horizon (Siani, 2024).

The latest United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (2023) Comment #26 “on children’s rights and the environment with a special focus on climate change” was inspired by children and young people’s global activism and included extensive input from children globally. It recognizes that “The extent and magnitude of the triple planetary crisis, comprising the climate emergency, the collapse of biodiversity and pervasive pollution, is an urgent and systemic threat to children’s rights globally” (United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2023, para. 1). It further proclaims the “urgent need to address the adverse effects of environmental degradation, with a special focus on climate change, on the enjoyment of children’s rights, and clarifies the obligations of States [Nations] to address environmental harm and climate change” (United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2023, para. 2). While such United Nations documents are clearly well intentioned, the United Nations seems to be ineffectual in stemming wars in Sudan, Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere, in which children’s lives are being destroyed and homelands devastated.

All these ‘headlines’ illustrate compounding effects on and implications for care and education, wellbeing, and democracy. The use of our energies and resources to urgently advocate for life and justice for all, always including young and old, human and more-than-human, and the earth itself, has never been more important or immediately needed.

Aotearoa: Current Crisis of Representation

In Aotearoa in October 2023, an election resulted in the formation of a bizarre right-wing coalition government, which claimed a questionable mandate to immediately start rolling back 50 years of progress to reinstate treaty obligations to Māori. In 1975, a Labour (left-wing) government had finally acknowledged legislatively the Te Tiriti o Waitangi—the Treaty of Waitangi, the 1840 treaty between Rangatira, Māori Chiefs, and the British Crown. This treaty had stated that Māori would retain their tino rangatiratanga, their absolute chieftainship, or self-determination over their lands and everything they valued, as well as protecting their status and equal rights as citizens. After 135 years of colonization that disregarded these treaty obligations, severely impacting Māori wellbeing through loss of lands, resources, and language, the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act established the Waitangi Tribunal, tasked with researching Māori claims of treaty breaches. Consequently, subsequent legislation had recognized the Māori language as the official language of the nation, while the education sector gradually shifted to uphold obligations to Māori.

During the recent two-term Labour government led by Jacinda Ardern, further significant steps were taken. These included the promulgation of the first ever Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2022), along with the expectation that finally, children in Aotearoa would learn the history of colonization and its impacts on Māori. Other restorative steps taken by this comparatively progressive government had included the establishment of a Te Aka Whai Ora, a Māori health authority to run parallel to the existing system which has demonstrably failed Māori, as well as further progress in the arena of co-governance, whereby Māori were to be represented in the bodies overseeing a new model for ensuring the “three waters” (drinking, waste, and storm) of the nation would be brought up to a sufficient standard (Palmer, 2021). That Māori were increasingly and visibly leading in these arenas seems to have been a provocation for racist discourses to surface (Black et al., 2023), and may have influenced the swing to the right.

Despite her honorable intentions with regard to social and climate justice, and a particular focus on wellbeing as a key legislative goal, Ardern had faced an unprecedented array of significant disasters during her term as Prime Minister, which included a major earthquake, a volcanic eruption, an extremely serious massacre of 51 Muslims attending prayer, and a global pandemic. These unsettled times appeared to have stirred up a sense of distrust and dissent, whereby a virulent undercurrent of anti-vaccine and anti-mandate sentiment resulted in nationwide protests culminating in an occupation of Parliament grounds. The extent of this vitriol was recently demonstrated when, a year after Ardern had left parliament, and having had no further engagement in local politics, a group of people protested angrily outside her wedding venue. In retrospect, that Ardern was able to achieve any progressive initiatives during her term is worthy of recognition, since it has been recognized that times of crisis provide ripe pickings for neoliberal incursion (Klein, 2007).

Māori have termed the new three-party coalition government, led by the National Party, a “three-headed taniwhā.” ² Its plans have been resoundingly negative, predominately aimed at undoing progressive initiatives pertaining to honoring Tiriti obligations. A recent opinion piece by political journalist John Campbell (2023) pointed out that of the Coalition’s fourteen bullet points prefacing its 100-day plan, “TEN OF THE FOURTEEN, contain the words, repeal, ban, remove, stop or disestablish” (section 3). ³ Coalition commitments include removing Māori names for government departments, eliminating financial incentives for Māori speakers in the civil service and schools, disestablishing co-governance arrangements, and walking back work by the previous government toward honoring obligations to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP). One of the coalition partners, ACT, has secured agreement to “Amend the Education and Training Act 2020 to enshrine educational attainment as the paramount objective for state schools” and to “Restore balance to the Aotearoa New Zealand’s Histories curriculum” (New Zealand National Party, & ACT New Zealand, 2023). That the new Histories Curriculum was in itself an attempt to restore balance to the situation whereby Māori histories and histories of colonization had been ignored since 1840, seems to have eluded them. The other coalition agreement with partner New Zealand (NZ) First reflects the leader Winston Peters’ attention to addressing what he terms “woke” policies, and reflects anti-COVID mandate, anti-UN and anti-WHO discourses (New Zealand National Party, & New Zealand First, 2023).

Campbell (2023) described the current Aotearoa political scenario as demonstrating the “resentment populism” of the coalition partners ACT and NZ First. He derided their focus on removing the Māori language in favor of the English language of the settler majority: “The politics of resentment, this rising meanness, affirms one language and regards another as a kind of threat. And in doing so, it casts shadows not light” (Campbell, 2023, section 3). He highlights “The surprising amount of space given to things that felt reductive. The priorities that seemed small, regressive, and unhopeful. The strange, circling sense of a new colonialism” (Campbell, 2023, section 3). This 21st century recirculating of colonizing narratives in government policies has been previously identified by Indigenous scholars such as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2006).

Perhaps, most egregious of all the coalition commitments is the ACT party leader David Seymour’s Bill to conduct a referendum aimed at rewriting the “principles” of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. This proposal has been hugely and unilaterally denounced by Māori and many others as completely inappropriate and deeply insulting. The eminent historian and anthropologist Dame Anne Salmond (2024) did not mince words, calling it “a bloody stupid idea”. Similarly, former Green politician Catherine Delahunty (2023) decried the removal of the commitment to the UNDRIP as “taking another step backward into bad faith” para. 16). And she called the intention to rewrite the new Aotearoa Histories Curriculum, “a commitment to wilful ignorance,” describing this as a move to “maintain white supremacy into future generations” (Delahunty, 2023, para. 23).

Wilful ignorance has been described as “the way individuals protect the systemic privilege they enjoy but take for granted” (Applebaum, 2019, p. 31). Furthermore, Applebaum explains wilful ignorance as the situation whereby “one does not know and does not know that one does not know and, in fact, thinks that one knows but most significantly, one does not want to know” [italics in original] (p. 30). Not only is this revisionist intention to enact this treaty principles referendum an “insult” to Māori and others who esteem Te Tiriti o Waitangi as a founding document, it is yet another epistemic refusal to hear the enduring well-expressed concerns of Māori (Smith, 2006). As Applebaum explains, this syndrome of entitlement means that “systemically privileged knowers refuse to listen [even] when the concepts necessary to hear what the marginalized are saying are available” [italics in original] (Applebaum, 2019, p. 34).

Māori, along with allies, have rallied in their thousands on multiple occasions since the agenda of this coalition government first became apparent. The newly elected wave of young, highly articulate Māori language speaking Kōhanga Reo ⁴ graduate parliamentarians are leading challenges within the parliamentary processes, widely supported by the masses nationwide who join them in challenging this imposition of settler colonial racist discourses, the presumption of White, Euro-Western, patriarchal, superiority, and of the reinstatement of epistemic injustice (Applebaum, 2019). This rising tide of young Māori, articulate in both Māori and Western worlds and languages, is redolent of a previous wave of highly influential Māori leaders who also drew on their Māori language and heritage along with their Western academic backgrounds to restore the wellbeing of their people at a time of great demoralization. These included Sir Apirana Ngata, Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck), and Sir Maui Pomare, all graduates of Te Aute College in the early 1900s, when the school principal John Thornton had defied government policy and provided these boys with an education that equipped them to attend university (Walker, 2004).

The current government’s justification of its rapid and minimally consulted regressive legislative changes on the grounds of electoral mandate is problematic. That the two coalition partners which between them received less than 15% (14.72%) of the total vote (ACT won 8.6% and NZ First won 6.1%), have steered their coalition lead party, the National Party (which itself received only 38.08% of the total party vote) so severely to the right is an anomaly of our MMP system (Electoral Commission-Te Kaitiaki Take Kōwhiri, 2023). ⁵ Bizarrely, the NZ First leader Winston Peters who is Māori and David Seymour the ACT leader who has Māori ancestry are both astute at seeking the populist vote. They also share a disposition of unctuous arrogance and self-righteousness, and readiness to dismiss opposing views with disrespectful sarcasm. Interestingly, the fickleness of our voting population has been exposed in a recent political poll indicating that the favorability of the ruling coalition had already dropped considerably in the 4 months since the election (Roy Morgan, 2024). Meanwhile, the school strikes for climate activists have renewed the call for lowering the voting age to 16 (Ball, 2024), despite opposition from the coalition government.

Current Problematics of Education in Aotearoa

Despite some progressive initiatives such as the sociocultural early childhood education curriculum Te Whāriki: He whāriki mātauranga mō ngā mokopuna o Aotearoa: Early childhood curriculum (Ministry of Education, 1996, 2017), our Ministry of Education continues to be heavily influenced by neoliberal cognitivist global discourses that emphasize early childhood education as preparation for school (Brown, 2024). For example, it prefers to import expensive behaviorist programs from the United States rather than fostering home-grown approaches that focus on supporting children’s holistic emotional and spiritual wellbeing (Ritchie, 2016).

Schooling in Aotearoa has long been influenced by globalized discourses that pressure education systems to deliver measurable “evidence-based” achievement outcomes. The previous decade (2008–2017) of a National-led government’s education policy had imposed, against the advice of education scholars and teacher unions, a narrow set of “national standards” in literacy and numeracy. Teachers were required to regularly label each child as above, at, or below the standard. The unfortunate, unsuccessful outcomes for children of this policy were demonstrated in the research of the late Martin Thrupp (2014; Thrupp & Easter, 2013; Thrupp & White, 2013). The new National-led government now requires all primary schools to include one hour per day each of reading, writing, and maths. As part of its coalition agreement with the ACT party, the government intends to reintroduce charter schools, also a feature of the previous National/ACT government, and which are not required to follow national curriculum or teacher registration expectations. Education professionals are highly critical of both of these initiatives (Schwanecke, 2023).

The insensitivity and arrogance of our current coalition government with regard to policy for Māori and for education demonstrate denial of the historical and ongoing impacts of colonization, its violence and destruction, including intergenerational trauma (Pihama et al., 2014). The whitestream education system has perpetuated ongoing historical amnesia and barely concealed racist undercurrents. The demonstrated educational success “as Māori” provided by Kaupapa Māori education, which upholds the Māori language and knowledge system, is unfortunately limited to only 3% of Māori children (Education Review Office, 2020).

Barbara Applebaum (2019) has critiqued “the continued insistence on employing epistemic resources that distort [or deny] the experience of the marginalized” (p. 34). This situation of wilful ignorance means that “On the one hand, the epistemic agency of the marginalized is not respected and, on the other hand, the systemically privileged can continue to remain ignorant as the marginalized experience remains unintelligible to them” (p. 35). Meanwhile, depriving the marginalized of the epistemic resources that would support their educational achievement enables those who are systemically privileged to avoid recognizing their implication in perpetuating the oppression.

Two Recent Research Examples

I now reflect on two research-related illustrations from my own context: (a) epistemic assumptions in a generic research course and (b) institutional research ethics approval, or disapproval. I first wondered how a commitment to epistemic justice in the Aotearoa context of the ongoing impacts of our history of colonization, in which education has played a key role, might be reflected in a research methods paper offered to students of education by the Faculty of Education in which I teach. It has a rather technicist course description:

This course is designed to help you develop critical thinking skills for evaluating the quality of research, and for understanding methods used to produce research. We will emphasise content and skills needed to be a consumer of research, which will eventually enable you to be a producer of research. Attention will also be paid to content and skills relevant to developing and carrying out a Master’s thesis or similar.

While the opening sentence states the intention of fostering “critical thinking skills,” this seems undermined by the aspiration that content and skills are aimed at students becoming “consumers” of research. The wording of this brief course description is generic, failing to locate this course in our particular national and cultural context of colonization and ongoing uneven power effects that continue to disadvantage Māori, nor the need for decolonizing methodologies (Smith, 2021)

The course learning objectives state that “Students who pass this course will be able to:

1. Understand, analyze, and critique research methodologies

2. Explain and interpret research problems, hypotheses, variables, causality, threats to validity, and interpretation of results

3. Communicate their understanding of research methods, in media appropriate to purpose.”

Only the first of these learning objectives signals some intention for critique, although the nature of this is not elaborated upon. Since research and its methods are never neutral, I wondered how this course might be contributing to the perpetuation of epistemic oppression. When I review proposals for masters and doctoral research projects, I often encounter un-reflective recitation of the value of qualitative methods, with little consideration of the hidden power effects that may be perpetuating hegemonies of White privilege and complacency.

Yvonna Lincoln has called for the problematizing of taken-for-granted research methods (in Denzin et al., 2017). Given the troubled history of research related to Māori and education in Aotearoa (Smith, 2021), it is to be hoped that despite its bland description, this and other research method courses in universities in Aotearoa actively support emerging researchers to understand the complexities of researching in this context. In particular, they should be covering specific methodologies that adhere to social and cultural justice commitments. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2006) has outlined some examples of such methodologies, which include participatory action research, Kaupapa Māori research, oral histories, critical race theory, and testimony, all of which have the potential to foreground the voices, experiences, and concerns of Māori and other potentially marginalized peoples, providing there is ongoing attention to ethical processes, critical reflexivity, and cultural resonance on the part of the researcher.

Experiences with Human Research Ethics approval processes have also raised matters of concern. In Aotearoa, almost all educational research is likely to involve Māori knowledges, Māori children, and/or the Māori language. In 2023, for example, Māori comprised 24.85%, or a quarter of the national school enrolment (Education Counts, 2023b). Furthermore, 28.5% of the total school population were engaging with the Māori language within English medium schools (Education Counts, 2023a). The stipulated procedure of university ethics committees has been to escalate applications for projects which focus on or may impact Māori to a highly scrutinized category that must be assessed by the full ethics committee. While this precautionary approach is presumably intended to protect Māori communities from ill-prepared non-Māori researchers, this blunt categorization fails to recognize the epistemic resources of prospective Māori researchers intending to research within their own tribal community, nor acknowledge the inherent and rigorous accountabilities that exist in such circumstances.

These examples of wilful ignorance and epistemic refusal in higher education highlight the importance of critical pedagogies in generating critical consciousness. Critical qualitative education scholars have a role to serve in challenging the “taken-for-granted” ways in which systemic ignorance is upheld via wilful ignorance and epistemic refusal (Applebaum, 2019) along with structural complicity (Aragon & Jaggar, 2018, p. 451).

The Dynamic of Educational Affect

Missing from my discussion so far is the dynamic of affect. Deliberate maintenance of a contract of ignorance has strategic value in that it enables the wilful denial of the pain inflicted on Māori and other Indigenous peoples, according to Aboriginal educational researcher, Ngugi/Wakka Wakka woman Professor Tracey Bunda (in Gilbey & Bunda, 2017’). This pain is inflicted through daily micro-aggressions such as sighs and dismissive body language and via decisions that fail to adhere to institutional commitments to Māori, who despite being under-represented are also in great demand to serve on committees and as ‘cultural’ representatives for the university. The university in turn fails to provide Māori with the institutional-level equity that would support them with the multiple demands upon them to deliver Māori presence, burdens that are taken for granted, the toll on their wellbeing unrecognized. Adding insult to injury are the instances whereby the systemically privileged dismiss the testimony of a Māori or Indigenous colleague or student, to avoid their own discomfort that may arise when their dominant worldview is challenged (Applebaum, 2019, p. 35). The entitled person is in a position whereby they can privilege their own emotional wellbeing over that of the person who is marginalized within that institution.

Meanwhile, Māori and other Indigenous academics are subjected to racist vitriol and resistance from students whose life experience and schooling have failed to challenge their White privilege and entitlement. Tracey Bunda provides an example of this race hatred, when in response to a course evaluation question: “How can the lecturer improve their teaching?” a student had written: “by dying” (Gilbey & Bunda, 2017, p. 196). Tracey Bunda explains further:

It is not about ignorance but the possessive investment in it, the deliberate maintenance of it. That ignorance is taught and structured throughout our society, that ignorance is the fundamental backbone that allows the truth about Australia’s invasion and colonization to remain unacknowledged.

This deliberate structural ignorance underlies both the recent loss of the “Voice” referendum in Australia (Keneally, 2023) and New Zealand’s recent election of a regressive, racist three-party coalition government. Since governments call the tune with regard to education policies, the implications for the entire education sector are dire.

Critical Qualitative Research in Times of Crisis: Childhood Studies and New/Old Imaginaries

In 2017, Norman Denzin posed the question: “What is the role of critical qualitative research in a historical moment when the need for social justice has never been greater?” (in Denzin et al., 2017, p. 492). And at this moment in 2024, I would add here the need for climate and biodiversity justice, as the climate emergency escalates to the point whereby planetary boundaries for human and ecological wellbeing are fast being exceeded (Richardson et al., 2023) and climate disasters are occurring with escalating frequency and severity (Pörtner et al., 2022). In the light of the contextual considerations outlined above, this section focuses on the role of critical qualitative inquiry in offering counter-narratives in the face of multiple, overlapping, and overwhelming crises. Offering such counter-narratives to the current educational status quo is key if we are to transform humanity’s relationship and interactions with Earth and our planetary co-habitants in service of mutual wellbeing. A key focus for critical qualitative researchers in the field of early childhood care and education is to focus on policies and pedagogies that facilitate dispositions of care, including for more-than-human others. Previous research has demonstrated that young children are receptive to Indigenous cosmologies that are inherently respectful in this regard (Ritchie, 2011, 2013, 2017).

The present moment calls for new/old imaginaries, unknowing/unlearning/relearning ways of knowing, relating, desiring, imagining, creating, and doing (Amsler, 2019; Ritchie, 2023a). I say new/old, because I was recently at a conference where I heard climate researchers from the field of early childhood education call for new imaginaries. After their presentation, I asked them to consider the inclusion of “old” imaginaries such as those exhibited by Indigenous peoples living sustainably in co-evolution within their ecological settings for millennia. The need for critical qualitative research to draw attention to such dynamics has been previously emphasized: “Faced with circumstances of disaster, needed contextual knowledge is required from a range of sources—ideologically, culturally, and locally” (Cannella & Perez, 2009, p. 172). This knowledge needs also to be concerned with historical and political contexts such as the insidious pervasiveness of White supremacist, racist discourses, and the capacity for these to be resurfaced in divisive ways at times of crisis, as seen with the neo-Nazi resurgence in Australia currently.

A key arena for counter-narratives offered by critical qualitative inquiry, therefore, is to pose alternative conceptualizations in recognition of the failure of the Anthropocentric, modernist project. Countering such hegemonies requires radically different approaches to education, drawing on non-Western ethico-onto-epistemologies, grounded in consciousness that humans are not separate, superior, or entitled to dominate and exploit the entities with whom we share Earthly habitats. This requires a critical consciousness that transcends orthodoxies, embracing ways of “becoming ‘otherwise’ by affirming ‘forms of life that are at odds with dominant, and dominating, modes of being’” (Povinelli 2011, 2012, as cited in Amsler, 2019, p. 925). Rather than perpetuating narrow, mind-numbing cognitivist goals of “educational achievement” that desensitize children to sensory engagement with the more-than-human, an alternative approach could engage in fostering dispositions of critical consciousness, hope, care, resistance, and activism in service of liveable future ecologies (Amsler, 2019).

While we, as critical education scholars, can continue to challenge our institutions from within, it is also important to recognize their implication in neoliberal hyper-capitalist hetero-patriarchal modes of operation in settler colonial contexts (Arvin et al., 2013, p. 8). Our universities have built their wealth in colonial contexts of inequity and exploitation. Since we have succeeded within these institutions, we have been socialized to play the game of academic achievement and into “colonial habits of being that block the potential knowing, being, relating and desiring differently” (Amsler, 2019, p. 927). This may make it difficult for us to see beyond these hegemonies, to notice and call out the oppressions that continue to damage and deflate Indigenous colleagues and exploit our planetary wellbeing and biodiversity. This requires cultivating in ourselves and our students the “epistemic virtue” of reflexive critical awareness (Applebaum, 2019, p. 35) that moves us beyond narrowly humanist priorities.

Challenging complicity in structural injustice requires “Working to connect up transformative personal actions with the actions of others” to facilitate coalitions of resistance (Aragon & Jaggar, 2018, p. 455), generating pluralistic friction to disrupt what are inevitably deeply engrained ethico-onto-epistemologies (Applebaum, 2019). It is via our commitment to modeling and teaching critical pedagogies and research perspectives that we can foster pluriversal understandings and aspirations that critique dominant discourses through reconceptualizations and “movements toward more just transformations” (Cannella et al., 2024, p. 4). A useful step in these counter-hegemonic research endeavors is to deliberately shift the “geography of learning” to locate it beyond the borders of whitestream educational institutions, generating alternative emotional and theoretical counter-narratives that emanate from an earth-centeredness, rather than our customary humanist, hierarchical positioning (Amsler, 2019, p. 927).

Pedagogies which foster trust and relationality, thus enabling receptivity to counter-narratives, can entice students to step beyond habitual modes of regurgitative pedagogies that are encouraged in didactic, iterative schooling and assessment. Providing fresh perspectives on troubling histories can offer permissions that enable students to reach beyond their previous complicity. In this orientation toward criticality, students “are invited not only to learn about harmful structures, social relations and subjectivities that have brought us to our present conjuncture, but also to unlearn our investments in these structures, relations and subjectivities” (Amsler, 2019 p. 928). Critical childhood studies scholarship such as the work of Mere Skerrett (2017a, 2017b) and Erica Burman (2019a, 2019b, 2023) signals future directions for disrupting embedded discourses, highlighting new/old alternative imaginaries.

Challenging Broader Institutional Hegemonies

A further layer of current complexity is the disinformation plague whereby Big Tech moguls control disproportionate quantities of resources, and demonstrate an inverse level of ethical awareness, allowing the damaging aspects of social media spaces to be exacerbated by algorithmic AI and bad actor manipulation of democracy (Jungherr, 2023). Critical qualitative inquiry is again called into service to generate counter-discourses to this deliberate mass disinformation and algorithmic exacerbation of social and environmental endangerment by Big Tech’s abdication of responsibility. It is hard to conceive that the master manipulators of social media platforms can genuinely believe that “they are not deliberately promoting misinformation, hate, or tribalism” (Fisher, 2022, p. 340). This wilful “ignorance” enables the manipulation of media and thereby popular sentiment by anti-democratic forces, which undermines recognition of the serious existential threats posed by climate change and pandemics, in order to profit from this disinformation. It is recognized that orchestrated disinformation about climate change has significantly contributed to the delay of climate mitigation by several decades, and furthermore, “It has been estimated that the ‘anti-vax’ online industry accumulates annual revenues of $35 million, and that their audience of 62 million followers may be worth upward of a billion dollars a year for the big social media platforms” (Lewandowsky et al., 2023, p. 2).

The global youth climate justice movement continues to offer inspiration, keeping hope and activism alive. Conversations with young climate activists demonstrate their sophisticated intersectional analysis that links capitalism and colonialism with racism, poverty, social class, gender, and environmental degradation (Ritchie, 2023b; Ritchie et al., 2023). These young people have mobilized collectively, informed one another, and cooperatively challenged the hegemonies that are perpetuated by those who are invested in maintaining systemic privilege. They recognize the need for education from a very young age to foster dispositions of care for our planet, informed by Indigenous cosmologies. They are calling upon us to expand our notions of democracy to include not only their voices, but to extend our conceptualization to one of an “intergenerational, interspecies democracy” (Orr, 2024).

Implications for Critical Qualitative Research(ers)

Scholars have a key role to play in critically exercising our privileges, networks, and skills in fostering the generation of sustainable futures. As David Orr (2024), an ecological educationalist and professor of Environmental Studies and Politics, has recently explained:

It is difficult to envision a transformation to a more decent, inclusive and durable world without universities and educational institutions at all levels stepping up to meet the largest challenges of our time. We need their leadership to repair public institutions and enlarge our vision of democracy . . . We need their creative powers to help recalibrate failing institutions, constitutions, and economies with the way Earth works as a biophysical system. We need their help to equip the young to be citizens in a civic community and in an ecological order—a generation of “radical professionals”; competent dual citizens with purpose, stamina, and vision . . . We need their convening power to bring diverse peoples together to forge a new and larger vision of democracy here and elsewhere. We need their help to imagine a non-violent world, one free of nuclear weapons. We need their gumption to foreground the urgency of the ecological crisis and the need to restore a lively, biodiverse world. In short, we need all of their powers and assets of education, research, convening, spending, investment and reputation harnessed to the task of making a world more fair, just, decent, durable and secure—a world that works for everyone as far into the future as one can imagine. We need educators and educational institutions that nurture a profound yet practical awareness of our interrelatedness in the evolving enterprise of life. (p. 4)

In this era of convergent crises, it is vital for communities to be able to access counter-narratives that enable informed resistance, countering disinformation, and strengthening collective action (Cannella & Perez, 2009). This signals the role for critical qualitative scholars to employ their institutional resources to support communities in gathering and disseminating these narratives in ethical ways that foreground their needs and aspirations. Researchers from dominant backgrounds can serve as allies, being led by Indigenous peoples and others who have been marginalized by colonial and other modes of capitalist exploitation. Being informed by Indigenous ethico-onto-epistemologies is imperative to re-balance the endangerment to people and planet that has been caused by the modernist, capitalist, neoliberal project:

From an Indigenous perspective, inhabiting the varied and diverse life-worlds that sustain us is a journey of re-enacting a “deep sacred connection” and palpable mutuality of being with all that is around, with, as and in us. The crucible of radical re-localisation and dissolution of modern selfhoods will require transformative pathways that carefully and respectfully unravel and then re-braid epistemologies, ontologies, axiologies and temporalities into new storied realities that foster survivance, kinship, attunement and accord with the rhythms of the living cosmos. (Paradies, 2020, p. 446–447)

Finally, critical qualitative scholarship is beginning to address our anthropocentric roots, grappling with ways in which we can learn from Indigenous onto-ethico-epistemologies to adopt approaches of response-ability which address matters of not only social, but cultural and ecological justice. This requires acknowledging our embeddedness within the diverse entanglements of our local and global ecological spaces and therefore exerting leadership to enact collective, inclusive change and reparation within our realms of influence in wider contexts of pluriversal politics (Koro & Cannella, 2024; Koro et al., 2022).