Postdigital Ecopedagogies: Genealogies, Contradictions, and Possible Futures

Abstract

This paper charts some genealogies, challenges, and directions for experimenting with the utopic postdigital ecopedagogies demanded by our present (post)pandemic reality. These are messianic—rather than prophetic—utopias that exist not as proclamations or programmes for a distant future but as potentialities immanent in the irreducible excess of the present. While their roots most clearly emanate from the Freirean-inspired ecopedagogy movement, we conceptualize ecopedagogies instead as educational forms that emerge from, negotiate, debate, produce, resist, and/or overcome the shifting and expansive postdigital ecosystems from and to which we write and think. These are expansive ecosystems of humans, postdigital machines, nonhuman animals, minerals, objects, and more; ecosystems that are overdetermined by new forms of ontological hierarchies and capitalism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism. By charting some of the potential lineages, directions, contradictions, and challenges—and by proposing potential lines of educational praxis—we lay a basis for reinvigorated fields of inquiry that moves beyond the existing postdigital literature on the current pandemic.