Recent research within the field of environmental sustainability research has highlighted the need to re-engage with education philosophy and the ontological assumptions informing these philosophies in the context of what is labeled the Anthropocene (e.g. Sjögren & Hofverberg 2022, Clark & McPhie 2020a). A common concern is the anthropocentrism of common education thought, where alternative entry points are drawn up often appealing to (neo)materialism (Payne 2016, Clark & McPhie 2020b) and posthumanism (Malone & Young 2022, Weaver & Snaza 2017) to expand notions of subjectivity and agency in education.

Drawing on the loose classification of speculative realism, as it was coined by the seminal workshop with the same title, at Goldsmith the University of London in 2007, this symposium aims to differentiate a return to realism as a partially overlapping but also distinct entry point for rethinking education and instruction in the Anthropocene. What this symposium aims to focus upon is the critique and abandonment of correlationism (Meillassoux, 2009) in education thought, that is that when we think about education that we always already have to assume a mutual correlation of thought/practice/experience/discursivity and world. The symposium engages with realism, as an invitation to break this correlation and the reduction of the world to processes of human learning and formation (Bildung), without claiming access to this world as in classical or ‘naive’ realism or again reducing the world to its correlation to thought/practice/experience/discursivity. Accordingly, the symposium is to offer a venue for speculative education thought that is to engage with questions such as: How to re-think education and instruction once we break with correlationism?

The symposium is to open up a space that is often forbidden or withheld in the engagement with education as science, that is a return to the underlying ontological questions and positions of thinking education and its associated ambitions and limits. This space is opened to exactly not reduce education science to epistemology (i.e. what we can know about education and its processes/outcomes) but to return to ontology as means to speculate and engage with that what remains beyond or withdrawn in education. This return to ontology and speculative realism is to open up alternate entry points for engaging with anthropocentrism and education in the Anthropocene, raising speculative questions and answers to how to think and engage with education beyond the confines of correlationism.

The papers incorporated into the symposium are written by scholars in the field of environmental education and the philosophy of education who, in their previous, work have been engaging with speculative realism. It is a joint symposium of the environmental and sustainability and the philosophy of education networks (30 & 13) of EERA and aims to initiate a dialogue among these fields as well as representatives from philosophy. Discussant Dist. Prof. Graham Harman from the Southern California Institute of Architecture is one of the original presenters at the Goldsmith workshop on speculative realism and provides a critical reflection on how philosophy and educational sciences might nuance an engagement with the challenges the Anthropocene can be seen to impose.

Clarke, D. A. G., & Mcphie, J. (2020a). New materialisms and environmental education: Editorial. Environmental Education Research, 26(9–10), 1255–1265. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2020.1828290 Clarke, D. A. G., & Mcphie, J. (2020b). Tensions, knots, and lines of flight: Themes and directions of travel for new materialisms and environmental education. Environmental Education Research, 26(9–10), 1231–1254. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2020.1825631 Malone, K., & Young, T. (2022). Retheorising environmental sustainability education for the Anthropocene. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 0(0), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2022.2152327 Meillassoux, Q. (2009). After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Bloomsbury Publishing. Payne, P. G. (2016). What next? Post-critical materialisms in environmental education. The Journal of Environmental Education, 47(2), 169–178. https://doi.org/10.1080/00958964.2015.1127201 Sjögren, H., & Hofverberg, H. (2022). Pedagogisk forskning i antropocen: Pedagogisk forskning i Sverige, 27(3), 4–11. https://doi.org/10.15626/pfs27.03.01 Weaver, J. A., & Snaza, N. (2017). Against methodocentrism in educational research. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(11), 1055–1065. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1140015