This paper considers how ESE educators might work reflexively with the theory of laminated totalities and absence offered in critical realism to conceptualise transgressive learning processes in the Anthropocene. In critical realism, change “presupposes absence within a laminated totalities view i.e. the coming into being of new properties or entities and the passing away of previously existing ones” (Bhaskar, 2010), including our epistemological and pedagogical properties or entities (our ways of knowing, teaching and learning). Agency in this process generates what Bhaskar (ibid) describes as an “axiology of freedom” which involves the absenting of constraints on freedoms. Bindé and colleagues (2007) suggest sober engagement with ‘realities’ such as the growing contradictions between e.g. overconsumption, population increase,,and accelerating climate change. They suggest that such engagement are a “vital prerequisite” for combatting poverty, since it is the poorest individuals that are most affected by the challenges that “loom over our planet” and that this involves de-materialisation; creation of new praxis; and ethical re-framing, and that learning is a central process in all of this; ushering in a considered re-engagement with materialsm/s and the ‘real’ in education. What this and critical realism call for in ESE, is a theorising of ‘the material’ and ‘the real’, and an understanding of a materialist, realist, future-seeking as-yet-undefined, discursive, embodied and transgressive ‘ethic of the future’. This expands the range of categories in ESE, to take in absence and negativity, including contradiction, and internal relations to expand the range of questions to guide transgressive learning practices in the socio-material laminated systems in which we are located. The paper deliberates some possibilities of such theoretical engagement/s in ESE research, drawing on case examples of such processes from southern African ESE research programmatic activities and considers emerging transgressive learning processes in agency-centred efforts in the global South.

Bhaskar, R. 2010. ‘Contexts of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity and climate change. In Bhaskar, R., Frank, C., Hoyer, K.G., Naess, P. & Parker, J. (Eds). Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change. Transforming knowledge and practice for our global future. London: Routledge. Binde, J. 2007. Making Peace with the Earth. What Future for the Human Species and the Planet? Paris: UNESCO Publishing / Berghahn Books.