From Global Citizenship to Anthropocene Denizenship: The Challenge to Education for Sustainable Development
Ignasi Ribó
Abstract
This article connects instrumental, emancipatory, and critical approaches to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) with the different cultural responses or grand narratives of the Anthropocene: eco-modernist, eco-catastrophist, and eco-socialist. The tensions between these different approaches are explained by ESD’s reliance on the ideals of citizenship and the global, which are also at the heart of the Global Citizenship Education (GCE) curriculum. It is argued that the Anthropocene puts into question both ideals, by forcing us to recognise that humans and nonhumans are denizens with limited rights and expanded obligations, all interconnected with each other through the multiple and complex relations of living-together or cohabitation. In this context, ESD needs to move beyond the humanist and liberal ideal of education as a way to form active and engaged citizens able to deal with the global environmental crisis and pursue instead a posthumanist curriculum for Anthropocene Denizenship Education. This proposal aims to overcome anthropocentric pedagogies and encourage learners to develop an embodied, affective, experienced, relational sense of becoming-together with other co-inhabitants of the Earth by cultivating vulner-abilities, attend-abilities, and response-abilities.