Young People and the Promise of Sustainable Futures: Rethinking Learning in/for the Anthropocene

Prominent posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti (Posthuman knowledge. https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/rosi-braidotti/. Accessed 24 Feb 2020, 2019) argues that the humans and non-humans that occupy the biosphere are ‘currently situated in a posthuman convergence between the Fourth Industrial Age and the Sixth Extinction’. A convergence ‘between an advanced knowledge economy, which perpetuates patterns of discrimination and exclusion, and the threat of climate change devastation for both human and non-human entities’. This convergence is little recognized or named in this way in ‘official’ discourses on what education in the twenty-first century might look like, what its purposes are, and what young people need to learn, the ‘skills’ that they need to develop in order to be productive, creative, and enterprising. In these discourses education is imagined as being best able to equip, to develop, to ‘make-up’ populations of young people who can successfully navigate the challenges, opportunities, and crises of the twenty-first century by learning about/for ‘21st century skills’, ‘education for sustainable development’, or ‘enterprise skills’. Drawing on a number of examples from current research projects in the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne, and the regional city of Geelong, in Australia, and from the example of the School Strikes for Climate (SS4C)/Fridays for Future movementFridays for Future movement, we will introduce a variety of theoretical and methodological tools to tell research stories that unsettle and trouble the limits of what young people’s education in/of/for the Anthropocene might look and feel like, and what the ‘promise’ of that education, the ‘promise’ of learning must be at the convergence between the fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Mass Extinction.