Tackling the Polycrisis: Critical Pedagogies for Sustainability Transformation
How can we imagine and enact structural transformation to outgrow the complex web of capitalism-patriarchy-colonialism (CPC), which perpetuates extractivist and toxic relations to living beings and land? Focusing on education, which the project conceptualizes as key to collective change, this interdisciplinary team will develop grassroots, collective, non-hierarchical educational interventions to learn to imagine being human otherwise, within more-than-human communities. To make this happen, this project is bringing together scholars from four Utrecht University faculties, three Pathways to Sustainability communities, as well as several Dutch and international societal partners.
The educational interventions of “Tackling the Polycrisis” will take the form of two “popular schools,” which will mobilize experimental, decolonial, feminist pedagogies of listening and hope together with participants from diverse backgrounds and ages; and a ReadingRoom, in which collective reading will connect the two schools and deepen participants’ team building. As such, these experimental methods will simultaneously challenge the structural limitations of the university and offer feedback to current forms of education while also re-confirming and building the university as an anchor institution for societal change.
Team
- Should you have questions about this project, please be in touch with prof. dr. Birgit M. Kaiser
Non-UU partners
KIT Institute: Mahdi Abdelwahab, MSc, MBBCh
Casco Art Institute: Aline Hernandez and Marianna Takou
Commons Network: Sophie Bloemen
Stichting Het Waterfeest: Stan van Geel
Framer Framed: Emily Shin-Jie Lee and Josien Pieterse
Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Sandberg Institute, research group Urgent Ecologies): Dorine van Meel and Joana Velu
Institute for Postnatural Studies: Yuri Tuma
The Outsiders: Txell Blanco Diaz and Asia Komarova
Incubator Phase
Global challenges cannot be seen in isolation; they cross-affect each other and what we are dealing with is a polycrisis. Real change, i.e. a move beyond extractivist, exploitative global governance, must be systemic change. This interconnected problem seems so enormous and the global socio-cultural, politico-economic organization so resilient, that systemic change sometimes feels out of reach. From that starting point, the Incubator team proposes to focus on three socio-economic, cultural-symbolic vectors that continue to drive and uphold the polycrisis: (racial) capitalism, patriarchy, and (neo)colonialism (CPC). The challenge they want to tackle is twofold: (a) how can these interlocking systems of socio-economic and cultural-symbolic power come into view as intersecting and as perpetuating the conditions for climate collapse? and (b) what obstacles hinder moving from understanding CPC to effecting (policy or behavioral) change beyond CPC? The incubator thereby reverses the question of sustainability: what makes CPC so ‘sustainable’ as a system and enables it to block real transformation?
Meetings
Publications
Six members of the incubator team have collaboratively written a journal article on CPC. It has already been published Open Access (link below) and will be published in print in the summer of 2025, as part of the special issue “Crisis and Power”.
Full article: Power and Polycrisis: on the durability of capitalism-patriarchy-colonialism (CPC)
Incubator Project Team
Website of Martha Maya, artist of the image above: https://anti-materia.org/martha-maya