Education today is challenged to address the climate crisis, biodiversity loss and migration, intensifying shifting patterns of settlement and a growing diversity all over the globe. The words “sustainability” and “diversity,” in this context, had become standard public, organizational and policy injunctions and a normative call in academic research. The ubiquitous use of the terms “sustainability” and “diversity” signals also ways in which social heterogeneity and environmental changes are problematized and governed, especially in the Global North. In consequence, the terms of “sustainability” and “diversity” became increasingly flexible and plastic, besides becoming notions through which or in the name of which to govern, regulate and educate, “something that needs to be understood, managed, acted upon, celebrated, considered, rethought…” (Matejskova & Antonsich, 2015, p. 2.). This symposium seeks to highlight first, the flexibility and plasticity of these terms as they appear in various early childhood and continuing education curricula as well as in children’s understanding of the world, reproducing notions of the “other” and human exceptionalism. Second, we pay special attention to how these notions intersect with ideas of the nation, nature and childhood, highlighting the oddness, contradictoriness and de/politicization of these terms in policies, curricula and the prescribed practices they produce.  In general, this symposium returns to the classical sociological question as to how current challenges, environmental and societal conditions, result in specific educational policies, ideas and processes (Weber, 1921; cf. Becker, 2019). 

The three papers are tied together with their specific focus on the nation-state as the prime organizing political and social force (Gans 2003) and nationalism as an effort to create commonality in a group of people by promoting national subject formation and inculcating the aspirations of citizenship. A focus on the nation helps us to question current national education discourses in light of diversity and sustainability, levels of inclusiveness in society and how responses to these national discourses can and do occur, and how debates about diversity and exclusion take shape (first and second papers). It also helps us to highlight how intersections of nation and nature, on the one hand, contours national subject formation through nature, and how through the curricula attachments to the national land or ‘nature’ are being shaped. On the other hand, we show the contradictions between nature and nation discourses within the frames of sustainability and diversity (second and third papers). 

Historically, the state’s interest in children and its citizens has always been about a nation’s future (Millei & Imre, 2016). Today, the multiple existential threats that we have brought upon ourselves question the very possibility of a future for humanity. This necessitates education to be reimagined and reconfigured beyond the nation and stewardship for nature (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020). The heterogeneous relations included in diversity needs to be expanded to include “more-than-human socialities” (Tsing, 2013). Social justice expanded to ecological social justice that pertains to ‘how we live in the world’ and ‘how to create conditions for life’ in an interdependent manner with other-than-human companions. Education enlivened with these kinds of worldly relation making entails “the recommunalizing, reconnecting, relocalizing, de-individualizing, in short, re-realizing ourselves otherwise” with this new politics of relationality (Escobar, 2021, p. 8). Agency in this politics of education radically reconfigures the nation as a more-than-human sociality, expands solidarity, and replaces exceptionalism – human or national – with terms of a radically inclusive and interdependent world.

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