Conclusion

In the concluding chapter, the lessons learned from urban agriculture and the ecovillage are summed up. Radical sustainability is at once socially and ecologically transformative—dismantling hierarchies toward total liberation—and regenerative—healing and restoring the health of people and the planet. A radical sustainability is informed by transformative and regenerative tools, such as a care narrative, community care, radical collective healing, community capacity assessments and building, skill sharing, and network building with other communities and organizations. This final chapter offers practical, community-oriented solutions to socioecological crises for people who cannot implement urban farming or intentional community. It is a call to arms for people to organize and begin creating grassroots solutions to local problems. It also examines the capacity for large-scale structural change and the possibility of collapse.

Healing, Community, and Humanity: How Students and Teachers Want to Reinvent Schools Post-COVID

Understanding the experiences of students and teachers during pandemic schooling is vital to educational recovery and building back better. In the spring of 2021 as the school year was coming to close, we conducted three research exercises: 1) we invited 200 teachers to interview their students about the past year and share their findings, 2) we interviewed 50 classroom teachers, and 3) we conducted ten multistakeholder design charrettes with students, teachers, school leaders, and family members to begin planning for the 2021-2022 recovery year. Rather than a "return to normal" or the targeting of a narrowly-conceived "learning loss," the students and educators in our study emphasized themes of healing, community, and humanity as key learnings from the pandemic year and essential values to rebuilding schools. We recommend that in the 2021-2022 year, schools create structures for community members to reflect on the pandemic year, celebrate resilience, grieve what has been lost, and imagine how the lessons learned from a tumultuous year can inform more equitable, resilient school systems for the future. We provide guidance on four reflection protocols to use in school communities to advance this work.

Applying Religion

Anthropology has long been interested in religion. The emergence of modern social anthropology in the late 19th century included a fascination with the decidedly Victorian assumption that the stories people told about their origins, interactions with non-human entities, the ways these stories were ritualized, and the material goods, ideas, and places to which they assigned meaning as symbols were primitive stops along the path toward sophisticated civilization. Shifts in the anthropology of religion include expanding the notion of religion beyond Eurocentric distinctions between the sacred and profane, real and superstitious, pure and syncretic, primitive and civilized, true and naïve. With these shifts came creative and collaborative approaches to understanding systems of meaning beyond the exotic Other. These shifts also include recognizing global movements, the ways that ideas and practices travel, their interactions with local cosmogonies, the ways that proponents of particular movements impact, influence, and shape local discourse and practice, and the creative ways that systems of meaning coalesce, intentionally or by chance—often a bit of both—into meaningful social practice. Anthropological approaches to the domain of religion and its relevance for and within communities are of particular importance for the communities within which they interact, particularly in areas of health and healing, community development, climate change, and sustainability.