The aim of this presentation is to propose study practices as a way of dealing with the challenges that come with the event of climate change. In recent years, different terms have been coined to grasp our contemporary global condition such as the Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2002), the Capitalocene (Moore, 2016), or the Chthulucene (Haraway, 2016). This presentation, however, follows the philosopher science Isabelle Stengers in understanding what we experience today as the intrusion of Gaia. Stengers (2015) conceives of Gaia as a ticklish assemblage that we have provoked. The intrusion of Gaia is in her view an event which welds together social and ecological issues. In this respect, she refers, for instance, to the people who have lost their houses due to environmental catastrophe of hurricane Katrina.

Utterly indifferent to the question who is responsible, Gaia is not interested in the ways in which we react to her intrusion. Stengers argues that Gaia asks nothing of us, as it is not She who is threatened today – microbes will survive the Sixth Big Extinction. Nevertheless, the intrusion of Gaia comes with a challenge. This challenge has not so much to do with the question how to overcome an ecological ‘crisis’, or how to ‘solve’ a problem (Gaia is here to stay!), as it requires us to rethink our relations towards one another and the Earth. More precisely, the intrusion of Gaia confronts us with the challenge of living together on a damaged planet (cf. Tsing, Swanson, Gan, & Bubandt, 2017).

Therefore, the intrusion of Gaia does not so much require a scientific solution or a political answer. It is indeed not a matter of either knowledge acquisition and dissemination, or action and intervention, but rather requires a specific welding of knowledge and action, the scientific and the political in order to slow down around the specific challenges that come with the intrusion of Gaia. Instead of following either the scientific or the political track, this paper suggests an educational response and proposes study practices as a manner to effectuate such a slowing down and give a specific problematic situation the power to gather a thinking public.  

As such, study practices go through the middle between science and politics. This means that they are more than practices of knowledge production and acquisition, and different from political activism. Study practices make it possible to relate in a different way to issues of common concern and to make thought creative of conceiving of futures that are different from the ones that present themselves as obvious or necessary (Haraway, 2008; Savransky, 2016, 2017; Stengers, 2017). In this sense, study practices weld together processes of inquiry and deliberation in order to trigger events where a becoming-able-to is at stake, i.e. where problematic situations are given the power to gather a public that will become capable of response and make thought creative of the future.

This paper aims to shed light on the particular educational dynamic of study practices and to inquire in what way they allow for responding to the social and ecological challenges that come with the intrusion of Gaia. 

The paper’s approach is in line with the ideas and insight of a philosophical current that goes under the name of speculative pragmatism (cf. Debaise & Stengers, 2017). It has developed in the wake of Stengers’ pragmatic reading of the speculative philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (Stengers, 2011, 2017) and has in recent years gained influence in the fields of sociology (Savransky, 2016; Wilkie, Savranksy, & Rosengarten, 2017), ethics (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017), and architecture (Doucet, 2016). In this presentation, this way of thinking will be brought to bear on the educational discussion outlined above.

A conceptualization of study practices including its particular educational dynamic.

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