Education, anthropocentrism, and interspecies sustainability: confronting institutional anxieties in omnicidal times

Abstract

Deborah Britzman’s remarkable question, ‘What holds education back?’, appears more urgent than ever in a world of accelerating environmental crises, climate change, and what has been described as omnicide–the annihilation of everything. What, then, holds education back from initiating radical change under these urgent conditions? This paper introduces the notion of ‘institutional anxiety’ as a consolidating force and explores how it may condition possibilities for resistance. Bringing examples from ethnographic fieldwork and experiences of course development in conversation with psychoanalytic and schizoanalytic thought, a key catalyst of institutional anxiety is discussed: Anxiety related to ‘the question of the animal’ as a threat to human exceptionalism in educational practice and research. Confronting these anxieties could open new modes of being and acting in academic space and give interspecies ethics, justice and sustainability a chance to develop in omnicidal times.