Education in a Time of Social and Environmental Unravelling
Transdisciplinary Responses to the Polycrisis
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Publishing:28th Apr '26
£155.00
This title is due to be published on 28th April, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This book argues that the root of education’s failure to address the complex problems of human-induced climate change lies in the stories we tell.
At once too complex, too simplistic, and overly focused on communicating and accumulating scientific facts, the stories we tell about climate change often reduce the problem to singular issues, such as CO2 emissions while advocating out-of-this-world technofixes. Against this challenge, the term 'polycrisis' has emerged to describe the interconnected environmental and social crises we are confronting in the 21st century. The polycrisis encompasses much more than catch-all terms such as climate change and global warming, connecting issues as diverse as biodiversity and habitat loss, water and food scarcity, pollution, and resource depletion, as well as growing economic and social precarity. Through a series of essays and interviews with scholars, scientists, artists and activists, this volume seeks to articulate existential and educational responses and interventions to the polycrisis. The author presents a terrestrial vision for critical eco-pedagogy, arguing that educational freedom in this time is not unlimited or unbounded, but rather cultivated through an engagement with limits and limitations – most fundamentally, the limits of a planet with limited resources and carrying capacity.
This timely volume will be of interest to researchers and teachers interested in environmental education, as well as posthumanism, decolonizing education, arts-based research methods, and postgrowth theory.
This is a profoundly important and timely book. Cary Campbell offers a bold, unflinching, and deeply humane rethinking of education in an era of polycrisis and planetary unravelling. With exceptional clarity and philosophical depth, he shows how our inherited educational stories, rooted in growth, technocratic solutionism, and anthropocentrism, are inadequate to the challenges before us. Instead, he invites readers into a pedagogy of attentiveness, humility, and existential courage: one that confronts ecological limits, honors land and intergenerational responsibility, and opens pathways for truly transdisciplinary, place-based, and post-growth forms of learning. This book is a rare achievement—rigorous, poetic, and urgently necessary. It will become essential reading for educators, scholars, and all who seek to imagine meaningful educational futures in a time of profound change.
Jing Lin (University of Maryland)
The beautiful thing about an unravelling is that it does not tell us what to do. It helps us recognise what is happening. Cary Campbell has collaborated with William Rees and other key authors to examine the state of the world with eyes wide open. This brave exploration of economic growth and the consequences of extractive capitalism, in the times of polycrisis, will help change the direction of education. From the mundane to the sacred, our students are demanding brave texts such as this one.
Ruth Irwin (author of Economic Futures; Climate Change and Modernity; editor of Beyond the MetaCrisis)
Cary Campbell’s watershed publication, Education in a time of social & environmental unraveling: transdisciplinary responses to the polycrisis, is a tour de force work in education. It carries the voices of the younger generations confronted by the terrifying sight of Polycrisis, The Great Acceleration, and Unravelling. An educational philosopher and curriculum theorist himself, Dr. Campbell sends an urgent call, through his book, about coming to our senses, here and now—to hear, feel, and see what the Earth is saying. But we can’t hear: our senses are chocked by the clamoring of the No-limits-to-Growth fantasy. Can education play an important part in restoring our senses and restorying who we are? Dr. Campbell's answer is resounding Yes.
Heesoon Bai, Professor of Philosophy of Education, Simon Fraser University
ISBN: 9781041108818
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
246 pages