Critical Pedagogy and Place

To address potential processes of reconciliation and examine colonial and settler colonial situations, this chapter draws upon the author's role as a professor at the University of Guam within the larger Western-dominant space of academe and as an apprentice to Austronesian seafaring directly connected to cultural networks in the Marianas, Micronesia, and Oceania. They suggest that decolonization and its closely associated processes of demilitarizing involves an ontological shift through which the knowledge, testimonies, and insights of Indigenous populations are actualized in transformation-based practices of critical pedagogy. This chapter highlights ways to approach contemporary learning situations as every form of institutional learning occurs within the classroom setting and the social historical geography of the region. Ultimately, they construct an example of what critical Indigenous performance pedagogy might look like.

Nature Sports: Prospects for Sustainability

This paper articulates a paradigm shift in the adoption of a critical ecopedagogy focused on substantive and systemic change within nature sports. In analyzing the unifying concept of nature sports, we propose an ontological shift towards genuine sustainability, a communion among people and with nature. These activities comprise a group of physical practices that have the potential to challenge participants in novel ways that provide an alternative to traditional sports and the ideological values associated with these dominant sports, such as competition and personal gain. Nature sports inscribe meaning on bodies in motion, with a blurring or erasure of boundaries, as participants become one with nature rather than seeking to exploit or conquer it. These novel and countercultural practices promise the possibility of systemic sustainability, as participants redefine sport in terms of relational equity and ecoliteracy. As a utopian project, this systems approach recognizes the nature-sport nexus as a living framework to honor culturally appropriate practices and traditions in building an ecological movement centered on environmental justice. In this way, nature sports offer an opportunity to reimagine sustainable development through the promotion of a circular, rather than linear, economy—an economy based on re-creation rather than exploitation and waste.

Zombie Disciplines: Knowledge, Anticipatory Imagination, and Becoming in Postnormal Times

This article does three things: first, it explores the erosions of traditional forms of knowledge and how this is impacting the way change is approached and understood; second, it expands on Ziauddin Sardar’s notion that imagination is central to unlocking new ways of being and knowing the world—and in particular, explores Marcus Bussey’s anticipatory imagination further; and third, we address notions of agency and suggest how, through a reimagining, an ontological shift from Enlightenment notions of Being to new notions of Becoming is available to us, which we believe is worth consideration given our postnormal context.

The future is always-already now: Instituent praxis and the activist university

In this paper, we place the issue of university activism in the context of constituent and constituted power. By this we mean the ever-present danger that activists’ demands will be co-opted and concurrently deactivated. To mitigate this risk, we develop a set of conceptual tools that enables thinking about the activist university in terms of instituent praxis; that is, an open process of co-becoming of an institution and its actors through the continuous co-production of rules that drive their actions. Contrary to the view of the university as something instituted, the activist university that we propose emphasises the possibility of sustaining the process of acting and its underlying rules, rather than the result of the act. The activist university is understood here as a crack that leaves the instituted university open every time the self-production of its subject emerges by the self-transformation of the actors in the very course of their activities. We observe a chance for grounding instituent praxis in the ontological shift in thinking the activist university from being to co-becoming, as this will allow for reclaiming the future for the university and its broader ecology.

‘I feel pretty’: beauty as an affective-material process

This article explores the potential of feminist new materialisms and theories of affect for reframing how we might think about beauty and the body. Through an exploration of girls, beauty and the school ball (prom), the article engages with Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action to conceptualise beauty as an affective-material process. This perspective involves an ontological shift in how girls, bodies and beauty are understood; from thinking about beauty and the human as discursively produced, towards a relational approach that conceptualises materiality and affect as co-constitutive forces. The article is interested in how such a framing might invite ways of understanding beauty that avoid binary frameworks, such as good/bad, subject/object and discourse/matter. I consider the potential this might offer feminist analyses of beauty, where the focus is less on what beauty is or what it means, and more on how it comes to be.

Powered by assemblage: language for multiplicity

Assemblage is one way to examine complexities in today’s world. In Deleuzian thinking, assemblage refers to both the act of assembling diverse elements and the arrangements of these elements for a specific purpose. Importantly, it is the interaction between elements that allows the assemblage to become more than the sum of its parts. Applying this concept to long-term research on Cold Rush – the transformation of the Arctic commons into commodities – I argue that examining the boom, bust, and buzz around the commons can be fruitfully conceptualised and studied with assemblage. This approach brings with it an ontological shift from binaries into multiplicities and multiple temporalities. Assemblage also sheds light on the role of discourse in these transformations and shows how language gains its productive force only in collaboration with other elements.

Silent cities, silenced histories: subaltern experiences of everyday urban violence during COVID-19

The public health containment measures in response to COVID-19 have precipitated a significant epistemic and ontological shift in �bottom-up� and �action-oriented� approaches in development studies research. �Lockdown� necessitates physical and social distancing between research subject and researcher, raising legitimate concerns around the extent to which �distanced� action-research can be inclusive and address citizens� lack of agency. Top-down regimes to control urban spaces through lockdown in India have not stemmed the experience of violence in public spaces: some have dramatically intensified, while others have changed in unexpected ways. Drawing on our experiences of researching the silent histories of violence and memorialisation of past violence in urban India over the past three decades, we argue that the experience of subaltern groups during the pandemic is not an aberration from their sustained experiences of everyday violence predating the pandemic. Exceptionalising the experiences of violence during the pandemic silences past histories and disenfranchises long struggles for rights in the city. At the same time, we argue that research practices employed to interpret the experience of urban violence during lockdown in India need to engage the changing nature of infrastructural regimes, as they seek to control urban spaces, and as subaltern groups continue to mobilise and advocate, in new ways.

Interculturality, Identity, and Decoloniality

This paper focuses initially on the findings of research undertaken by colleagues-researchers from different countries. Then, the authors explore the postcolonial intercultural challenges from the Abya Yala point of view. The relationship with aboriginal and ancestral peoples is very relevant for understanding power and knowledge in historical processes. The contemporary globalizing world faces new challenges intensified by international connections, by sociocultural movements, and now, by pandemic context. These circumstances of greater interconnectivity and interdependence require each group to reflect and consider their own limits and thresholds in intercultural relationship with others and ecological priorities. The concept of “thought bordering” is discussed outlining its ability to interrogate the modern idea of culture as unique and universal. While greater interconnectivity offers the opportunity for multiple paradigms to emerge, it can also close off chances for mutual recognition and for solidarity if approached without thoughtful engagement. Thought bordering offers us the opportunity to facilitate different ways of being–feeling–thinking–acting, thus promoting an ontological shift that will enable respectful engagements with communities, societies, and ecologies. In this perspective, one is learning from the ancestral peoples about “well-living,” cultivating reciprocity, integrality, complementarity, and relationality in social and ecological relations.

El Antropoceno/Capitaloceno y sus implicancias ontológico-políticas: escenario de la pandemia actual

RESUMENEl presente artículo vincula el actual escenario de la pandemia con las implicancias ontológico-políticas advertidas en los debates sobre el Antropoceno/Capitaloceno. En este sentido, los recientes análisis ontológicos en relación a la inauguración de una nueva época geológica dan cuenta de la necesidad de responder a la coyuntura de nuestros días desde propuestas epistémico-políticas en la que prime el abandono de la ontología moderna dualista. Se argumenta que pensar el mundo post-pandemia implica analizar críticamente la ontología dominante y contribuir a un desplazamiento ontológico, que posibilite responder a la urgencia de los tiempos mortíferos del Antropoceno/Capitaloceno.Palabras claves: Antropoceno. Capitaloceno. Ontología Dualista. Giro Ontológico. Pandemia. The Anthropocene/Capitalocene and its ontological-political implications: scenario of the current pandemicABSTRACTThis article links the scenario of the pandemic with the ontological-political implications analyzed in the debates on the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. In this sense, the recent ontological analyses about the inauguration of a new geological epoch show the need to respond to the current situation from epistemic-political proposals in which the abandonment of modern dualistic ontology prevails. It is argued that thinking about the post-pandemic world involves critically analyzing the dominant ontology and contributing to an ontological shift, which makes it possible to respond to the urgency of the deadly times of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene.Keywords: Anthropocene. Capitalocene. Dualistic Ontology. Ontological turn. Pandemic.