Climate change is becoming one of the most pressing issues in the social sciences, because the certainty that the future is open and moldable is challenged deeply. Thus, social institutions especially in education are called upon to find new answers to these uncertainties.

In natural sciences, this insecurities were processed through developing the term “Anthropocene”(Crutzen 2002), the “geological age of humans” (Yusoff & Gabrys 2011). This conceptual vehicle is being used to describe how specific natural events (like floodings or forest fires), global warming and its aftermath (like the loss of biodiversity) are intertwined with human activity on earth (Wallenhorst 2023). It has served for conveying the concerns of scientific communities about the fragility of the Earth's habitability, e.g. by identifying tipping points (Rockström et al., 2023). In social sciences, scholars have highlighted the importance of the cultural, social, discursive and political implications of climate change. In this context, we expect the focus on shifting notions of time and space as particularly insightful, as the following arguments have received little educational attention to date:

For the Anthropocene, it was found that an "end-of-the-world" narrative is common in scientific discourse (Dürbeck 2018). This narrative conveys the impression that "our" world will soon come to an end and must be saved. Rooted in a dominant Western understanding of Modern Science, this perspective was firstly criticized in terms of its underlying anthropocentric understanding, which re-actualizes the category “man” and his fantasies of omnipotence over nature. The idea of an educated human subject who rewins control over nature through positive knowledge that brings adequate technical solutions was heartedly taken up also in the field of education, e.g. in theories of sustainable development. Hence, as suggested by feminist and post-human theories (Haraway 2015; McKagen 2018; Taylor & Hughes 2016), there is a need for spatial concepts that de-centralize the human and the notion of a “man” who finds solutions for global problems, putting forward the entanglement of human and non-human beings with nature instead.

Secondly, postcolonial, Black and indigenous interrogations of the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty 2022; Mitchell & Chaudhury 2020; Yusoff 2018) have shown that the perceptibility of climate change has long been part of the present for certain groups of people around the world, who already have been dealing with natural events for some time. In fact, not everyone is equally affected by the consequences of climate change. Rather, social inequalities are perpetuated and consolidated here, particularly affecting people living in the so-called global south and especially children, women and people of color. This notion challenges the end-of-the-world-narrative mentioned above, which suggests that climate change is “suddenly” happening or in the near future yet to come. Hence, dealing with climate change is not urgent because it is increasingly noticeable for people who live in Europe, but because it has been shaping lives all over the world for many years.

As a consequence, there is a need for analytical tools of future-making in education in order to develop notions of hope and creativity instead of apathy. In the symposium, we therefore ask: How can we conceptualize educational spaces in a way that integrates humans, non-humans and nature instead of hierarchizing man over nature? How can climate change be understood as a present and everyday phenomenon that shapes very distinct narratives, educational pathways, spaces and futures?

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