Seminar 7: Dr. Sharon Stein (University of British Columbia, Canada) - Teaching and Learning for the End of the World as We Know It

In this talk, Dr Stein will share some of the pedagogical work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective, which invites people to expand their capacity to face painful realities about the climate and nature emergency (CNE) and its colonial root causes in intellectually discerning, relationally mature, and intergenerationally responsible ways. Education related to the CNE is often treated as an informational problem; we believe that if people only knew the “facts”, they would change their behaviour. But what if the CNE is not the result of a lack of information, but the product of enduring investments in modernity’s inherently violent and unsustainable habit of being? What if we need to disinvest from and mourn the end of that mode of existence so that something else can become possible? What kind of education could prepare us to face “the end of the world as we know it” without throwing up, throwing a tantrum, or throwing in the towel?

Bio: Dr Sharon Stein is a white settler scholar and Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of the book Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education, founder of the Critical Internationalization Studies Network, and one of the co-founders of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective.