In their work on political ecology, Tuomo Alhojärvi and Heikki Sirviö encourage scholars to seek out "opportunities in the present to crack open spaces for agency" (2018). This session reflects upon the classroom as just such a space, examining the extent to which environmental advocacy informs each panellist's pedagogy. It asks how scholars’ experiences of researching and teaching in their respective fields are shaped by their personal ethical standpoints, and invites reflections upon the benefits, challenges, and potential tensions involved in bringing those perspectives into the classroom. Drawing together panellists with environmental studies expertise in fields including animal studies, postcolonialism, visual culture and museology, this session particularly invites reflection on the urgency of politically and ecologically engaged pedagogy at this extraordinarily challenging moment in both the history of higher education and of our planet.
Panellists’ papers will engage with environmental pedagogical scholarship and teaching practices, whilst innovatively expanding the field to reflect on the ethical complexities of classroom advocacy. In order to do so, the session will feature four twelve-minute papers which include case studies and examples from each panellist’s research-led teaching, enabling our prioritisation of time for an inclusive question time during which audience members will also be invited to share examples from their own teaching practice. The panel is committed to audience engagement and will adhere strictly to the twelve-minute timeslot in order to ensure a significant proportion of session time is devoted to discussion and audience engagement. Papers have been carefully selected to include scholars with broad expertise in environmental studies and further specialisation in key interdisciplinary areas of environmental scholarship including animal studies, museum studies and postcolonialism. Kurt Fosso’s paper “‘But, can they suffer?’: Animal Rights, Cultural History and Classroom Advocacy” draws on his life’s work teaching and publishing on animal rights, animality and biodiversity to consider the ethical complexities of introducing students to this challenging literary and philosophical tradition in the university classroom. Angela Dunstan’s paper “Curating Agency: Pedagogies of Environmental Advocacy in Museums and Galleries” draws upon her experiences teaching university students off-campus in some of London’s controversial museum spaces where environmental advocacy is complicated by tensions between corporate sponsorship, curation and activism which often becomes art itself. Valentina Aparicio’s paper “Sustainability under pressure: environmental advocacy and colonial legacies in curriculum design’ considers the challenges inherent in modern universities’ emphases on notions of sustainability despite the environmental and indeed colonial implications of, for example, increasing uses of AI in teaching and learning. And Seth Reno evaluates his experiences teaching Environmental Humanities in his paper "Teaching Environmental Justice in Precarious Times", reflecting on his innovative assessment design which encouraged students to propose solutions to community environmental (in)justices.
The session relies upon a diversity of panellist voices. It incorporates interdisciplinary perspectives from scholars specialising in Romantic and Victorian Studies who also have extensive experience working across periods and disciplines. Further diversity is also ensured by the fact that panellists hail from America, Australia and Chile and work in a liberal arts colleges and universities on different continents (the US and UK), with one panellist also having expertise in teaching in the Global South. The panel’s diversity is further enriched by the presence of scholars from a variety of career stages, two of whom are women. The panel includes three tenured research academics and an Education and Recognition Adviser who is also an independent researcher. Through our targeted engagement with diverse panellists’ expertise and that of our audience members, we hope to create an opportunity in the session itself to ‘crack open spaces for agency’ and emphasise the urgency of politically and ecologically engaged pedagogy.