Sustainability and Social Justice
Collective hopes in the age of privatised visions - Giroux
This is a cluster of differences with a future-forming orientation in actu. It aims to make the scholarly work of researchers and practitioners, including students and teachers, matter more in the following ways: a) a reconciliation of the different facets of our work on sustainability and social justice; b) a movement of ethical and life principles, not just economic priorities and measures; and c) a pedagogical commitment to renew and preserve ‘educare’.
Within pluralistic practices that have emerged and have indeed become the foundation and legitimising principle of post-structural, post-modern or post-human conditions of educational research and pedagogic knowledge, all research projects and case studies could be represented in their own terms to make a difference. In forming a collective or a commons, we suspend the ontological status of the ‘object of study’ and the epistemological and scholarly value of published work– to shift from what is the pre-conditioned elements of research: aims, methods and outcomes to what is becoming in praxis, achieved through and represented within ongoing action. Therefore, this cluster does three things:
(1) as a live space of commonality, it honours and celebrates with care our differences;
(2) as an scholarly and personal portfolio of identities and initiatives; conversations and commentaries and any other traces of our aspirations and imaginings of the future
(3) as a deliberate act to shift the thrust of educational research and pedagogy with sustainable principles, without having to always appropriate ‘sustainability’ and ‘social justice’ to our ends ‘for the future’
The thrust of the sustainable principles of the work being done by this cluster is to reverse the priority of the status quo as it relates to the dominant form of scholarship and research excellence through publications in journals and books. We, undeniably so, do a lot of things with words and texts both in setting boundaries and creating connections, from our names to our social status and forms of belonging. However, it is more productive and just to reverse the default orientation of scholarship and research excellence to the published text as having the primary position. The members of this cluster undertake research as a form of social action, with the published work following after. This is our sustainable and just stance – to channel our energies as social scientists, educators, community workers and global citizens and our academic resources of intelligence, ingenuity, innovation and hope into creating more future-forming projects in actu.
The logic of impact of the work we do is inevitably inscribed and intently embodied in one of our sustainable principles, a logic of care, in the following actions of change:
Countries where the presence of our actions sustain connections and further actions nationally and internationally include: Nepal, Romania, Denmark, Philippines, Tanzania and the USA.
People
Meet the members of this group.
