Ecological Catastrophe

Abstract

This chapter considers how higher education is entangled with ecological damage and elaborates on how this entanglement plays out in relation to responsibility, privileged irresponsibility and responsiveness. The first part of the chapter considers the contribution that the notion of responsibility in feminist new materialist and care ethics ideas has made towards critiquing taken-for-granted notions of the Anthropocene and sustainability discourses and rhetoric which are prevalent in higher education. The second part of the chapter examines how colonialism and the current ecological crisis are deeply entwined and how privileged irresponsibility is important for understanding this entanglement. The third part of the chapter considers a number of response-able practices that higher education may make to dismantle the mechanistic worldview that has been inherited from colonial modernity and racialised capitalism. This section provides examples of three such experimental practices in higher education that are ways of coupling colonial ecological damages with reparation. The final part of the chapter thinks-with relational ontologies of Black and Indigenous worldviews such as critical animism and considers how they intersect with feminist posthumanism, new materialism and care ethics to develop alternative practices in academia.