Towards a terrestrial education: a commentary on Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth

Abstract

This commentary first seeks to situate the broad themes of Bruno Latour’s work by discussing how particular texts and ideas have influenced the author’s thinking about science, the environment, education, and research methods that enable generative approaches towards these phenomena. Latour’s work deftly crosses borders that have long siloed contemporary theories and concepts into disparate disciplinary spaces, and insists that we simultaneously problematize past habits of thinking and reconstruct new modes of ethically relating to our complex shared world. In the second part of the commentary, the author explores his recent text Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime. Finally, this essay turns to the question of how this text helps us think about new approaches to politically engaged education and research aimed at better grasping and responding to climate change and related problems of the present.