Contemporary research affirms that we will soon arrive at the point of irreconcilable ecological breakdown. Yet today’s mainstream Environmental Education (EE) research focuses on economic growth with an inattention to the systemic causes of social and environmental injustices. The impact of (mis)education on environmental justice can be profoundly transformative, affecting the well-being and economic prospects of affected social groups. These impacts can be immediate and violent such as factory waste spills in low-income areas, or subtler, overlooked forms of slow violence that go unnoticed for long periods of time (Nixon, 2011). This slow violence is often overlooked because the critical lens of environmental justice is not yet widely applied in the public arena. Education for Environmental Justice is thus confronted with challenging habitual modes of epistemic and methodological approaches to research (Stein, 2019).

The EEJ Reading and Research Collective approaches scholarly thinking through justice-oriented art-making practices and identifies themes in education and environmental justice to co-create research. The collective includes artists who respond to the research, either to further develop, re-interpret, or communicate what the readings and discussions elided and erased. Collaboratively, we interpret the links between art and readings as an ongoing process of research-as-creation. An key objective of this collective is to build a supportive community of early career and established researchers, which we recognise as critical to the sustainability of our collective futures. This proposed symposium engages the interplays between environmental justice and education. We will both explain our methods as a research group and share the way our individual studies connect environmental justice and education. In doing so, the symposium will increase understanding of education's role in establishing (and suppressing) environmental justice in civil society sectors transnationally.

We begin by summarising the ongoing literature review work of the collective emerging from our arts-based practice, then move into individual presentations showcasing the diversity of our work in environmental justice and education. Haley Perkins and Sarah Sharp will open the presentations by proposing that global environmental justice begins with epistemic justice. Using new-materialist philosophies of entanglement and relationality, they make a case for engaging with participatory creative activities using arts-based methods to enact a more just onto-epistemological shift towards sustainability. Next, Shingirayi Kandi and Ceri Holman engage UK-based youth perspectives. Kandi’s presentation will explore the effects, benefits, and challenges of outdoor learning in special schools for pupils with Complex, Severe, Profound, and Multiple Learning Disabilities (CSPMLD), and his ongoing research in primary special schools. Holman’s deliberative place-based pedagogy explores the tensions in Cumbria, England, among fossil fuel interests and the voices of young people in the community. She explores students’ learning and agency through relational positionality. Finally, Rosalie Mathie, based in Norway, will discuss the role of co-creative research methods for environmental justice-oriented education. A collection of examples are brought forward that encourage proactive participant engagement and co-development within academic and educational settings. Our discussant, Maria-Angelika Caceras (recently based in France, but with a history of working in Brazil), will comment on the submissions from the point of view of Indigenous epistemologies. 

The long-term ambition of EEJ is to contribute to transforming education across multiple levels to address the burgeoning and socioeconomically differentiated problems arising from the impacts of what is (problematically) termed the Anthropocene. We hope that by sharing the mission and approach of the EEJ Reading and Research Collective, we can engage with a wider audience and explore the possibilities of such a practice while communicating the urgency of the messages that emerge from the interleaving of questions of environmental justice, art, and education.

Nixon, R. (2011) Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Stein, S. (2019) ‘The Ethical and Ecological Limits of Sustainability: A Decolonial Approach to Climate Change in Higher Education’, Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 35(3), pp. 198–212. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2019.17.