(Eco)critical sustainability (OPEN UNI)

Content:

The course critically examines the assumptions that underpin concepts such as sustainable development across different disciplines. After an introduction to critical thinking principles, participants explore ecocritical, multispecies and more-than-human approaches and how they apply to their own fields. Participants will also distinguish and compare power relations within sustainability narratives, how sustainability knowledge is constructed, and reflect on their own positionality. Topics for discussion will include comparing anthropocentric with ecocentric approaches; whether there is a need to decolonise sustainability thinking; and what ecocritical sustainability might mean in practice.

Pedagogically the course is participatory and student-centred. Participants are encouraged to suggest relevant topics and questions for discussion and will have the opportunity to investigate and compare critical approaches to sustainability across different disciplines.

Key questions the course aims to explore include:
• What does it mean to think critically about sustainability? How do we distinguish it with counter-cultural thinking / resistance to mainstream thinking / conspiracy thinking?
• What assumptions underlie the three pillars of sustainability: environment, social & economic? • How human-centred (anthropocentric) are current sustainability narratives?
• What power-structures and value-hierarchies underpin sustainability knowledge(s) in various fields?
• How is the concept of sustainability influenced by dominant Western industrial culture (especially modernity)? Do we need to decolonise sustainability?
• What might genuinely transformative sustainability education look like?

Contents:
• Critical thinking: key principles, concepts and issues and how they apply to sustainability.
• The three pillars of sustainability (environment, social & economic): critical tensions and assumptions.
• Anthropocentrism in sustainability: ecocritical, multispecies, relational and more-than-human approaches to sustainability narratives and human-nature discourses.
• Western modernity & decolonising sustainability: decolonial critiques of sustainability and the reproduction of power inequalities in sustainability discourses.
• Transformative / critical sustainability: putting transformative sustainability ideas into practice; transformative sustainability education.