As part of the ‘metacrisis’ woven out of a climate polycrisis, we find ourselves not only caught within feelings of fear and guilt about modern norms and practices, but also, as educators, within strong normative discourses about the role of education in relation to ‘sustainability’. Concerns have been voiced that the term ‘sustainability’ is “intellectually empty”, in the sense that it is “increasingly used as a label to place over modes of existence that are neither sustainable nor developmental” (Luke, 2005: 228). Sensemaking around sustainability enters the educational space from multiple disciplinary fields, whose knowledge is fragmented as translated into policies, guidance, practices. Concerns have been raised around this fragmentation in the linking of education to climate issues (Effeney and Davis, 2013). Such an approach confuses our view of a real and pressing concern: without addressing how life on Earth might be sustained from within an understanding of the ways of existing current to modernity, humanity has no future. This theoretical paper proposes a way of speaking in a meaningfully pluralistic way to the concepts of both ‘sustainability’ and ‘education’ and how they currently/hold potential to intersect.

Drawing on Latour’s (2013) philosophical anthropology of the modern world, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (AIME), this paper proposes a new mode of existence: sustainability, designated, in the Latourian tradition of three-letter signs for each mode, [SUS]. In a lecture at Cambridge University in 2012, Latour introduced AIME, detailing how he drew on Souriau: “Souriau’s claim is not that there are several ways to talk about one world, but several ways for the world in its plurality to be addressed” (Latour, 2012, np). Latour makes the case for acknowledgement and explication of different modes of knowing and being in the modern world and the ways they intersect and differ. He implores us to explore how modernity is concocted by (western) Moderns.

In Latour’s project, human existence is explored through fifteen modes through which sense is made of reality. These include law [LAW], politics [POL], morality [MOR], fiction [FIC], religion [REL]. A mode of existence can be grasped by its particular tonality, discoverable in its truth conditions: its ways of ascertaining truth (types of veridiction), what is ‘true’ and what is ‘false’ (felicity and infelicity conditions) and its interpretative key (preposition). In its development partly from Latour’s earlier work (1999, 2005) in actor-network theory (now subsumed in AIME as network mode [NET]), each mode is seen as the product of associative activity between heterogenous, reciprocally inter-related socio-material actors. Tracing patterns in actor associations reveals the shape and character of each mode [PRE]. This is a way of necessarily dissolving the boundaries of the ‘Great Divide’ (Latour, 2013) between human and nature, situating people, nature, things, ideas as implicated within, and reliant upon, the activity of each other for continued existence.

In this paper, I explore the conditions by which [SUS] has developed within the modern world. Crucially, an integral part of the AIME project is to distinguish modes of existence by their ‘crossings’ with other modes: when one mode is brought into contact with, or mistaken for, the other. These crossings can result in category mistakes, which are key to the enquiry (Latour, 2013). Gilbert (2020) has taken this further in describing crossings as plaitings in which multiple modes may interweave in a particular case. This is a notion of particular use to exploring the complexity of what ‘sustainability’ means to different people/domains: how the activity of various disciplines performs into existence normative/ divergent conceptualisation of the term. 

Sustainability is the work of many modes—the work of politics and election campaigns, the work of reference, funding and organisation, the work of social morality and meeting the needs of community-held beliefs or addressing national trends in moral and environmental issues. These crossings, through an inquiry into [SUS], can be sought and described so that research in all fields may recognise in more depth how the current tapestry of ‘sustainability’ is woven and perpetuated. The aim of this endeavour is to begin to describe [SUS], providing an alternative theoretical basis for further empirical and theoretical expansion of the (positive and negative) complexities, trajectories and (mis)directions of this emergent modern mode of existence. After establishing the basis for [SUS], this paper then goes on to argue for educational research focused on the crossing between sustainability and education [SUS-EDU]. There has been growing interest in the relationship between sustainability and education: often, I argue, which presents as prime example of a ‘cruel optimism’ within a liberal society (Berlant, 2020). Education and sustainability cannot be simply linked as one in service of the other, but rather hold a complex and fluid relationship, entangled with ecological and moral imperatives (Stevenson, 2022). This relationship may be better explored through a crossing between [SUS] and what Tummons (2021) has suggested as [EDU]—education as a mode of existence. Through discerning [EDU], we may distinguish the multiplicities and incongruences inherent to what is means to ‘educate’ in our/other societies: the terms of veridiction particular to what is understood as truth in the forms of education we encounter, and the human and non-human beings it leaves in its wake. Tummons’ recent extension of Latourian thought, whilst fairly newly formed and so still in early stages of application in education research, offers much to the field. Through a ‘crossing’ of [SUS-EDU] we may “unblackbox” how the metacrisis plays out in education (Law, 1994), deterritorialising the relationship (Irwin, 2020) to describe how modernity has created the metacrisis— a cataclysm of sense-making —in the spaces between and betwixt the [SUS-EDU] crossing.

AIME explores conditions underpinning each mode and crossings between them. This is of “special relevance to the vast question of ‘sustainability’” (Latour, 2017): by understanding independent and interlinked constituencies of current conventions of thought/action (in policy, education practices and daily life), we may begin to form new, sustainable modes of existence. Describing [SUS-EDU] is a challenging prospect: actors and the networks they form are wayward and far from finite; they are continuously forming and reforming. Nevertheless, an inquiry into [SUS-EDU] offers potential for probing theories and practices of what we mean by ‘sustainability’ and ‘education’ and their current relationship (as a basis for thinking beyond the current state of play). AIME is a way of discerning sustainability and its relationship to education through description of actors, normative and divergent, from all disciplines, and the networked activity that holds them temporarily together. AIME offers the possibility of harnessing, of interrupting, current forms of sustainability and/as education: out of its dynamism, fluidity and the ‘otherness’ which comes to light more frequently in times of increased social uncertainty, AIME may be a form of ‘futuring’ sustainability, education and ‘sustainability education’ from inside its uncertain shadows.

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