Abstract
Evidence suggests that wider sociological structures, which embody particular values and ways of relating, can make a sustainable living and working problematic. This chapter introduces ideology critique, an innovative methodological perspective crossing the fields of theology, cultural studies and politics to examine and disturb the subtle and hidden ‘spirit’ which is evoked when we engage with everyday objects and interactions. Such a ‘spirit’, or ideology, embodies particular models of how humans relate to other humans, animals and the planet more broadly. This chapter aims, first, to document and demonstrate the subtleties of how the hidden ‘spirit’ can render attempts at sustainable working futile in the context of education, and then, second, to demonstrate how it can be used to intentionally evoke alternative ‘spirits’ which afford new relationality amongst humans, animals and the planet. In a broader sense, therefore, this chapter explores how concepts and political commitments from the humanities, such as ideology critique and ‘spirit’, can help (1) analyse how wider social structures shape our values and beliefs in relation to sustainable learning, living and working, (2) explain how these behaviours are held in place over time and (3) provoke insight into how we might seek to disrupt and change such persistent social structures.
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1 Introduction: The (Ideological) Problem with Pedagogy
In 2005, The United Nation’s launched the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development initiative, which aimed to focus sustainable development efforts in the context of education. In reviewing the achievements of this initiative, Wals (2014) reported that although universities were ‘beginning to make more systemic changes’ (p. 8), ‘profound’ changes to learning processes were ‘still scarce around the globe’ (p. 14). More recently, evidence suggests that the integration of ESD into teaching and curricula is still problematic and limited, and that more needs to be done to realise the potential that universities can make within communities and broader educational systems (UNESCO 2016; Wu and Shen 2016). As such, there are continued calls for a greater focus on the implementation of sustainability in practice contexts and for more applied approaches which are more sensitive to local and cultural contexts (Leal Filho 2011, 2014; Leal Filho et al. 2017; Perrault and Clark 2017; Wall 2017b; Wall et al. 2017a).
Examining the implementation of ESD integration, evidence suggests that other competing imperatives such as ‘efficiency, accountability, privatisation, management and control’ can take precedence over, and thereby limit, sustainability within educational reform (Wals 2014, p. 8). This is reflected in evidence which attributes university administration and management in universities as the greatest obstacle to integrating sustainable development at the organisational level (Leal Filho et al. 2017). Importantly, the enactment of such imperatives are not limited to university administrators and managers, but can be understood as a wider set of sense-making frames or co-ordinates which shape how professionals conceive of and institute educational reforms at any level (Wall and Perrin 2015; Wall et al. 2017a; Wall 2017b), and which shape broader education-organisation structures and strategies (Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang 2015; Wall and Jarvis 2015).
Ideologies are conjured when we engage with everyday situations, interactions and objects, exist beyond direct capture and operate in ways which are likened to an omnipresent and omnipotent ‘spirit’ (Reason 2007; Wall 2016b; Žižek 2000, 2002). They encompass naturalised (taken for granted) social structures which embody particular values and ways of relating to each other, the earth, and its co-inhabitants (Wall and Perrin 2015). For example, Wall and Jarvis (2015) argue how teaching practices in the classroom, assessment criteria and assessment strategies can embody subtle and naturalised individualistic and economically driven notions of thinking, acting and contribution (also see Wall 2016a, b, c). Indeed, the pervasiveness of such individually and economically oriented sense-making frames, or ideologies, has been identified as making ethical consumption in contemporary capitalist societies challenging if not futile (Carrington et al. 2016). As such, even more, knowledge about sustainability is insufficient to change action and may even lead to dissatisfaction with any current sustainability accomplishments in addition to inaction through paralysis (Longo et al. 2017).
Such evidence highlights the focal point on the subtle, hidden or taken for granted ways in which the world around (and in) us shape how we relate to that world (and ourselves). Juxtaposed with the aforementioned calls for greater progress in ESD integration, this highlights the need for research into ‘the ideological’ (Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang 2015; Wall and Perrin 2015). An innovative and interdisciplinary methodological perspective, which targets change at these deeper levels is ideology critique (Wall 2016a, c, 2017b). The critical tasks of ideology critique are to (1) examine the ‘spirit’ and its constituent implicit theories of person and task which embody particular ways of relating to other humans, animals and the planet more broadly, and (2) generate alternative ‘spirits’ which conjure alternative ways of relating (ibid).
This chapter aims, first, to document and demonstrate the subtleties of how the hidden ‘spirit’ can render attempts at sustainable working problematic in the context of education, and then, second, to demonstrate how it can be used to intentionally conjure alternative ‘spirits’ which enable new relationality amongst humans, animals and the planet in educational settings. In this way, therefore, and in a broader sense, this chapter explores how concepts and political commitments from the humanities, such as ideology critique and ‘spirit’ can help (1) analyse how wider social structures shape our values and beliefs in relation to sustainable learning, living and working, (2) explain how these behaviours are held in place over time and (3) provoke insight into how we might seek to disrupt and change such persistent social structures.
The chapter is structured as follows. The next section outlines and discusses the conceptual and analytical framework of this chapter, and is followed by a discussion of how this apparatus has been set to work in the methodological approach adopted in this chapter. This, then, provides a platform to examine three vignettes to exemplify the ways in which educationalists have introduced provocative pedagogical practices to disrupt some of the ideologies (‘spirits’) at play. The final section, then, discusses how educationalists can develop deeper provocative educational perspectives to conjure up alternative ‘spirits’, which are more attuned to sustainability.
2 Ideology as Guiding ‘Spirit’
The study of ideology permeates many disciplines including the political sciences (Žižek 2006), media studies (Taylor 2010), cultural theory (Holland et al. 1998), organisation and management studies (Wall 2016c), marketing (Carrington et al. 2016) and education (Brown and Heggs 2011). Ideology refers to the ideas, concepts, beliefs or doctrine (Žižek 2006; Holland et al. 1998) that are activated or conjured when we engage in the world, for example, through conversations or through delivering a pedagogical activity in the classroom. As such, ideology provides a ‘perceptual, cognitive, affective and practical frame of activity’ (Holland et al. 1998, p. 63), which, subtly but deeply, taint how we understand ourselves, the world we participate in and, therefore, how we think we should act. As such, there is an assumed, powerful and unquestionable ‘Big Other’ (Žižek 2014) or ‘social repository of collected and projected beliefs’ (Taylor 2010, p. 73) directing how we think and act. Indeed, research has indicated how the academic frameworks and regulations in universities can take on an omnipotent Biblical status (e.g. ‘The Code’), which subsequently frames the material emotional and physical responses of professionals working in this space (Sparkes 2007; Wall and Perrin 2015). This includes problematic stress responses when the professional believes they are at risk of breaching The Code (ibid).
Ideology exists beyond direct capture and operates in ways which are likened to an omnipresent and omnipotent ‘spirit’ (Reason 2007; Wall 2016b; Žižek 2000, 2002). Indeed, Native American people refer to wétiko as a sickness of the spirit, driven by individualistic gain and greed (Luna-Firebaugh 2010; Crist 2013; Borrows 2016). These ‘spirits’ ‘divide and relate … [through] position or rank’, and as such, embody implied ‘theories of person’ and ‘theories of task’ (Holland et al. 1998, p. 122). For example, the material design of a tack hammer has a small head and handle (making assumptions about the for the delicate tapping task and the respective size of the person doing that task), whereas a sledgehammer has a large head and long, thick handle (making assumptions about a person of sufficient strength and build to be able to hold it with both hands and swing the heavy object from a height) (ibid). Similarly, in the context of education, when academic assignments (the tool) are designed as individual pieces of writing about their personal knowledge of a theory, the individual and their ‘objective’ reproduction of theory are positioned as important, thereby negating or de-emphasising other aspects including: (1) their relationality or connectedness with others, the planet and its co-inhabitants, (2) their role in applying the ideas in practice or changing practice and (3) collective notions of thinking, knowing and learning (Žižek 2006; Wall and Jarvis 2015; Wall 2016b).
In the same way, how humans position themselves in relation to animals can be explored through Christian understandings rooted in the Bible (Clough 2012, 2017). For example, in Genesis 1, God declares all creatures good and assigns a plant-based diet to humans and other animals, but also grants humans dominion over other creatures. Genesis 2 gives humans the role of tending to the earth, and creation material in the Psalms emphasises God’s ordering of creation for the benefit of all creatures. For Thomas (1984), the Christian consensus from medieval times onwards was that humans were entitled to use other animals for food and clothing, but not to cause them unnecessary suffering. However, he also argues that some early modern Christian perspectives saw creation as provided entirely for human benefit. Such positioning can also be witnessed in modern history, whereby Christians in Britain were prominent in successful lobbying for the first legislation against animal cruelty and campaigns to abolish vivisection in the nineteenth century (Li 2000; Preece 2003). The concern for animals has become a much less prominent faith concern in the twentieth century (Clough 2017).
However, though powerful, these ideological forces are never ‘hermetically sealed’ (Holland et al. 1998), and the implied theories of person and task ‘can appear in entirely different light the moment the modality of his/her relationship to the big Other changes’ (Žižek 2008, p. 330). In examining how ‘spirits’ (and the Holy Spirit as an example) acquire and preserve omnipresence and omnipotence, Žižek (2009, p. 60 original emphasis) argues:
the finite existence of mortal humans is the only site of the Spirit, the site where Spirit achieves its actuality. What this means is that, in spite of all its grounding power, Spirit is a virtual entity in the sense that its status is that of a subjective presupposition: it exists only insofar as subjects act as if it exists… it is the substance of the individuals who recognize themselves in it, the ground of their entire existence… something for which these individuals are ready to give their lives, yet the only thing that really exists are these individuals and their activity, so this substance is actual only insofar as individuals believe in it and act accordingly.
In other words, the ideological ideas, concepts, beliefs and doctrine generate material effects in the world, insofar as the subject acts and relates to them as if they exist. As another example, people treat a king with royal treatment because people believe that the king is ‘already in himself, outside the relationship to his subjects, a king’ (Žižek 2012, p. 309). Similarly, the person who trains to be and who then accepts a job as a pest control exterminator is constructed as someone a company can relate to, through payment, as a professional who can efficiently and effectively exterminate animals or insects the company decides to be pests, infestations or simply unwanted (Hindley and Wall 2017, 2018 forthcoming). Although this exemplifies a particular way of humans relating to animals or insects which leads to dominance, such effects can also be seen in terms of how humans relate to each other, for example, students being treated as ‘second-class’ citizens or slaves (Wall et al. 2017c). However, the corollary of the virtual character of the Big Other means that it is possible to conjure alternative ‘spirits’ which evoke different ideological frames which, therefore, position us differently, shift our relationality, and, therefore, generate material effects in the world (Brown 2008).
The intentional conjuring of alternative ‘spirits’ is the imperative of some forms of provocative education (Wall and Perrin 2015; Wall 2016a). Here, engaging a sense of ‘play frees people from the generic forms that govern… actions’ (Holland et al. 1998, p. 237), to be able to notice different and new relationships with each other and the world around us (Wall 2016b). As such, educationalists purposively adopt new and alternative ‘spirits’ as a mediating device to conjure alternative responses (Holland et al. 1998). For example, Ramsey (2014, p. 479) proposes ‘provocative theory’ as a device to reimagine learners ‘dancing’ with theory as ‘a relational process … whereby academic theory stimulates, incites and promotes changed practice’ (Ramsey 2011, p. 469). Similarly, as a rebuttal against a ‘deficit’ view of learners, asset-based ‘reciprocal pedagogies’ have emerged which (1) position every learner as bringing valid assets such as experiences from different contextual and cultural settings to every learning situation, and which (2) position the tutor also as a learner alongside the learners in a learning journey (Wall and Tran 2015, 2016; Wall 2017a, 2018 forthcoming).
3 Methodology
The previous section outlined the methodological origins of ideology critique, which ultimately aim to disrupt ideology (or ‘spirit’) in practice settings. As such, it is an openly political form of research, in line with political and critical ‘turn’ research movements akin to forms of action research, which aims to change practice (Reason 2007; Ramsey 2011, 2014; Wall et al. 2017b). This research was prompted by the lead researcher’s dissatisfaction with pedagogical approaches which maintained rather than disrupted social structures in terms of sustainability, informed by action research over the last 15 years. A research project was established with the guiding research question: ‘what pedagogical practices can generate alternative ways of relating in educational settings?’, specifically in terms of relating to other humans, animals and the planet.
Using a convenience snowball sampling approach, the lead researcher identified high-profile practitioner–researchers in the humanities who had developed pedagogical practices relevant to the research question. Practitioner–researchers from theology, education and business and management studies, across three countries (UK, Spain and Sweden) were selected. Then, vignettes of (1) pedagogical practices and (2) the apparent results of such practices were then developed collaboratively with the practitioner–researchers, drawing data from their respective critical reflective practices and any other evaluation research work related to the pedagogic practices (such as surveys and questionnaires).
As such, this research employed a theoretical sampling frame, which focused primarily on selecting vignettes in relation to their salience to the politically oriented research question above, rather than an empirical sampling frame (i.e. based on the frequency of the data per se) (Stokes and Wall 2014; Wall et al. 2016). Therefore, rather than producing statistically valid cases, ideological analyses function to generate provocative prompts to inculcate and entice action in the research stakeholders (Brown and Heggs 2011; Wall 2017b). Indeed, the resultant vignettes and analyses aim to prompt the consumers of research to find their own learnings and insights from the research in a provocative, dialogic fashion (MacIntosh et al. 2017; Wall 2016a). The next section, now, documents and examines the pedagogical practices.
4 Vignette 1: The Cockerel and the Professor
One newly appointed professor, from a department of theology and religious studies, sought to deliver a public lecture on the ethical case against the intensive farming of animals. He was inspired by a personal experience which changed his own relationality with animals—a memory of him holding a single hen in a huge broiler shed of 20,000, aged 17 days old and already halfway through her life. He was struck by how the presence of a live chicken might help those present at the lecture to relate to the issue, so he decided he would ‘co-present’ with a cockerel.
He found a co-presenter with experience of being in crowds of people through a local woman who rehomed caged hens. The woman caring for the cockerel assured the professor that his co-presenter would be fine roaming free at the front of the lecture hall, with some food and water. The professor also borrowed a battery cage from a local farmer of caged hens, as another way of showing the harsh reality of the lives of most chickens raised for eggs globally.
The co-presenters delivered their lecture, and two particular moments give insights into the experience. First, at the start of the lecture, even before the professor had reached the podium to speak, his co-presenter was already on stage making an impact: there were lots of smiles as people watched him strut, flap, eat and drink and—it has to be said—shit. The professor realised that he and his talk had already been positioned in relation to the brute and immediate reality of the situation, and that this contributed to a sense of levity in the audience.
The second symbolic moment happened during the lecture. The small battery cage was on a table on the stage, and midway through the lecture, the cockerel decided to explore it. He flew up to it in a way that made the professor seriously concerned that he was going to deliberately confine himself in it, thereby subverting the point that cages were not congenial places for chickens. Happily, instead, he perched triumphantly on top of it, giving him an improved view of the audience, and vice versa. Symbolically, he was being allowed to explore in his own way, choosing his own path, and make his own statements.
Even years later, participants in the lecture still recall it as their favourite lecture of all time, often reporting how it influenced them to avoid the products of intensively farmed animals. It seems that the non-negotiable presence of the cockerel, and the way he had been positioned in relation to the professor and his talk, opened up the possibility of participants relating differently to animals in a mode beyond the reach of statistics, reasoned argument or rhetoric.
5 Vignette 2: Embodying the Sustainability ‘Spirit’
Educationalists in Sweden and Finland developed a 2 day ESD workshop as professional development for practicing teachers. The workshop utilised a variety of interactive drama processes which used the body in explicit fantasy or play states in the context of ESD (Österlind 2012). This vignette focuses on two linked activities used in the workshop which exemplify the sorts of drama processes utilised in the workshop.
The first activity was a guided relaxation and introspection around global challenges. This process aimed to create an open state for the teachers to become aware of their own relationships with, and understandings of, sustainability. The stages involved the teachers (1) collectively brainstorming global challenges, (2) reflecting on the question ‘what do you feel in front of these problems?’, (3) finding an object (in their imagination) that symbolised their feeling, (4) taking a close look at the object and (5) ‘storing it’ (in the imagination) for later in the day. This process was an individual and silent task which was not disclosed in the group in order to maintain a private and safe space. Then, in small groups, the teachers (6) explored the causes of the problems at a human level, (7) prepared a still image or a physical, bodily statue (using the body as a representation), (8) showed the image/statue to the other groups and then (9) explored interpretations, causes, resolutions and action plans.
The second activity was a role play, where the teachers were asked to contribute to a fictional environmental conference. The teachers choose a role to play (e.g. activist, politician, business leader or researcher), and then prepared and delivered a ‘presentation’ in that role. The role play ends with another guided relaxation and introspection where everyone returns to their object (stored in their imaginations), and agrees on something, no matter how small, that they are able to do for a sustainability problem.
The feedback from the workshop suggested the pedagogical processes brought an immediacy and intimacy of sustainability issue to the teachers, shaping how they related to various sustainability issues, and specifically their role in them. For example, some teachers reported that they became much more aware of their ‘attitudes’ towards the issues, which included some saying they had been ‘closing their eyes’ to planetary issues. As a result, some of the teachers felt that they had gained ‘clarity’ and were motivated to ‘do even more [than] I’m doing now’ and even ‘change my lifestyle for the environment’. These indicated a shift in them becoming part of the issue and resolution. Some even indicated the salience of the still images/statues as a mental imprint to act, for example, one teacher wanted to ‘creep’ into the ‘don’t hear, don’t see, don’t say’ image ‘and stay there, not be aware of this’. Although not as positively charged as others experiences, this form of comment is indicative of a new relationship between the participant and the issues.
6 Vignette 3: Pedagogical Ladybirds
Within the context of business and management, stories are recognised as effective in mobilising people to act, and are therefore applied in a range of learning and change contexts. One (true) story has recently emerged as a pedagogical device related to ESD across various business education learning contexts such as doctoral training and a European project disseminating innovative pedagogical practices in Spain and the UK (Hindley and Wall 2017, 2018 forthcoming). A version of the story is told below by Tony Wall (and involves Ann Hindley), and gives an indication of how the story can initiate an ESD discussion.
“Where have all The Ladybirds gone?”
One day, Ann and I were in my office.
As usual, we were talking about climate change.
We were frustrated: “So many people just aren’t interested!”.
We decided that we needed to do even more.
Just as we were planning planetary salvation, there is a knock at the door.
The door edged open and an unfamiliar face peered in:
“I believe you have an infestation?!” the man asked.
Perplexed, I asked, wearily “Excuse me?”
Still peering intensely around the edge of the office door, he said:
“You have an infestation. You’ve reported an infestation”.
Again perplexed, I wondered what on earth he was talking about.
Lost for ideas, but sensing a tense pressure to reply to the hurried man, I gambled on whether he was talking about the three communities of ladybirds that co-inhabited my office… the ones that lived at each of my two windows and in the corner.
“Are you talking about the ladybirds?” I asked.
“Yes, do you want them removed or not?” he said, in a rush to do his job.
“No…” I said immediately “…are they creating any damage?”
The man says “No” and swiftly walks away, closing the door behind him.
Ann and I finish our meeting and we both leave.
Moments later, when I return from running a short errand, I notice three puddles:
one at each of my two windows and one in the corner.
I felt physically ill. The ladybirds had been killed.
Once the story is told, aspects that are relevant to the learning context are explored. For example, one common discussion relates to the alternative ways in which Tony and the man at the door relate to the ladybirds—co-inhabiting communities versus an infestation, and killed versus removed (or exterminated). The story also highlights the material effects on the individuals of relating in this way, for example, the physical manifestation of feeling ill when co-inhabiting communities have been killed, versus, the frustrations of not getting permission to do one’s job to remove the infestation. The learners who have engaged with the story so far have reported that they have (1) shared it with their wider family and work networks, leading to additional information, resources and networks being actively shared, (2) become aware of the problematic ways in which we can relate to wildlife in and out of work contexts and (3) become involved in more sustainability and responsibility work and research.
7 Discussion
Counter to Wals (2014) findings, and in line with Leal Filho’s (2011) call for more applied sustainability work, the vignettes highlight how educationalists are delivering forms of education which aim to disrupt deeply held conceptions, beliefs and ideas (or ideology). The vignettes also document the ways in which educationalists purposively conjure alternative ‘spirits’ which activate alternative ways of relating to each other, the earth, and its co-inhabitants. A theme that drives the vignettes appears to be ‘spirits’ or ideological ideas which bring a new awareness, and more specifically, new potentialities to ways of living with and alongside others. There is a shared shift in these ‘spirits’ to move away from individualistic, separated and perhaps human domination over the planet and wildlife, towards a more collective and holistic perspective which positions humans (or the learners more specifically) as connected and equal: as a co-presenter or a co-inhabitant.
These provocative educational forms seem to generate a shared socio-materiality in that the ‘spirits’ shape how we think we should act, and thus generate feelings, motivations and actions in context: they can call us to buy more ethically produced poultry (vignette 1), they can call us to change our lifestyles (vignette 2), and they call us to share information about and love for ladybirds (vignette 3). These reflect a counter response to the predominantly economic framings of education, which dominate contemporary educational activity (Carrington et al. 2016; Wals 2014; Wall and Perrin 2015). However, they can also call us to ‘close our eyes’, as the ‘spirit’ has given us a newfound awareness, which says we are not doing enough. In this way, and reflective of Longo et al.’s (2017) findings, there is still the possibility for paralysis to occur, albeit from a different source, that is, one’s relationality in the world, rather than increased sustainability knowledge.
The possibility for conjuring up ‘spirits’ through reflective practices is both the potential of ideology critique and provocative education but is also the problem. The potential of ideology critique to disrupt an educational system and envision new forms of education stems from its use in teacher education contexts (Brown 2008; Brown and Heggs 2011), where it is used to challenge reflective and narrative accounts of experience. However, the problem is that it is possible to create new supposedly provocative forms of education which, only when resultant behaviours are examined, continue to embody the originally prevailing guiding ‘spirit’. For example, if we assessed the learning of the fictional conference contributions (vignette 2) through individualised and knowledge-related outcomes, this conjures the ‘spirit’ which was seemingly creating some of the sustainability issues in the first place (Carrington et al. 2016). Žižek (1994, p. 6) refers to this as a cynical mode of ideological engagement, where as soon as we think we are ‘stepping out of (what we experience as) ideology is the very form of our enslavement to it’. This highlights the salience of noticing the behavioural responses to new forms of provocative education as an indicator of the ‘spirits’ being conjured (Wall and Perrin 2015; Wall 2016c).
In one sense, these findings exemplify the kinds of educational practices that Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang (2015) call for, to conjure ‘spirits’ towards more collective and holistic notions of education (and life). However, it also extends it by highlighting that although educationalists may want to conjure more collective and holistic ways of being in practice, such practices will always be held in a wider ideological system which might trick us into believing our practices are provocative and disruptive. For example, Longo et al.’s (2017, p. 14) recommendations for overcoming paralysis included ‘the organisation of more ‘inner transition’ workshops, aimed at sharing positive and negative experiences’. Without conjuring alternative ‘spirits’ through the subtleties within this form of educational activity, such ‘inner transition’ endeavours might simply reproduce the sorts of paralysis that it aimed to abolish. Nonetheless, the vignettes presented here are evidence that new ‘spirits’ for sustainability can, and are, being conjured across different pedagogical traditions, and that they are creating new ways of relating in the world.
8 Conclusions
This chapter responds to calls for sustainability research to take a more applied focus and to examine the implementation of sustainability projects and pedagogies. There are three key lessons from this chapter. First, in a broad sense, it highlights that there are omnipresent and omnipotent ideological structures, or ‘spirits’, that are conjured in and through practices and that these can render efforts towards ESD, as well as sustainable living and working, problematic. Second, and more specifically, ideology critique can help examine and disturb this ‘spirit’ and thereby offer alternative ways of relating to other humans, animals, and the planet more broadly. Educationalists seeking to conjure alternative ‘spirits’ for sustainability can consider a number of prompts when considering their practice: (1) what are the implied theories of the person here? (2) what are the implied theories of the task here? (3) what assumptions are made about how the person and task relate to the earth and its co-inhabitants? (4) what alternative theory of the person or task do I want to conjure? (5) what might I do which embodies this alternative theory of person or task? (6) what am I noticing in others’ behaviours in relation to? (4) However, and finally, even though we think we may be conjuring an alternative spirit, it may be the same spirit in disguise, so it is important to observe how others behave in response to the provocation (it is possible that it might produce no change in behaviour).
This study demonstrated the possibility of implementing provocative pedagogies across different disciplinary traditions and countries and exemplified how educationalists deploy them to conjure alternative ‘spirits’ for sustainability and the related socio-material effects through cognitive, emotional and physical responses of learners in these settings. However, there are a number of limitations to this study: (1) it engaged a theoretical rather than empirical sample frame, which means there are other concepts and perspectives in humanities which will generate additional understandings and insights into ESD and sustainability; (2) it sampled the application of concepts in a limited range of disciplines, which means there will be other perspectives with more or less efficacious outcomes in different disciplinary contexts; and (3) it referred to only one period of time (2015–2017), which means that the nature, reach and impact of the pedagogies may not be fully explored as yet.
The future prospects of research in this area are, therefore, fertile ground for further and deeper exploration. There are three areas that would be fruitful to explore: (1) research across, between and above disciplinary boundaries and cultural contexts (Wall et al. 2017a), as each cultural context will have different ‘spirits’ evoking different relationalities, (2) research into the behavioural changes associated with the provocative pedagogies over longer periods of time, as some practices may have more or less efficacious outcomes and (3) research the experiences of the educationalists who seek to disrupt wider structures, given that such politically disruptive work can be emotionally and personally challenging. Although this chapter has begun to explore the links between humanities and sustainability, these future prospects provide landscape for greater innovation, more ‘profound’ pedagogic and ESD work, and in turn, more sustainable futures.
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Wall, T., Clough, D., Österlind, E., Hindley, A. (2019). Conjuring a ‘Spirit’ for Sustainability: A Review of the Socio-Materialist Effects of Provocative Pedagogies. In: Leal Filho, W., Consorte McCrea, A. (eds) Sustainability and the Humanities. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95336-6_17
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