Stefan Bengtsson

This open access book explores alienation not just as a problem to be solved by education, but as a fundamental and productive part of the human condition. The authors examine alienation through various theoretical lenses, viewing it as an essential and productive aspect of human existence that must be acknowledged and lived with, especially in times of ecological and social crises. The chapters cover diverse aspects of alienation in education, from historical perspectives to didactics, policy, embodiment, and ethics. They draw on marginalized theoretical approaches such as psychoanalysis, German idealism, speculative realism, and dialectical materialism to highlight the positive and foundational aspects of alienation. By rethinking and retelling the stories of alienation, the book challenges the prevailing solutionist attitudes in education policies and pedagogies calling for a deeper awareness and sensitivity to the paradoxes and ambiguities of individual and social existence. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Tampere University.

The 21st century looks quite different in reality to the predictions made by science fiction writers. Instead of a world dominated by flying cars and androids, we have found ourselves living in the wake of a global pandemic, experiencing an increasing frequency of natural disasters, battling political turmoil and global refugee crises, all set against the backdrop of the climate emergency and the mass extinction of species, including, eventually, our own. Meanwhile, we send off our kids to school to prepare them for a future that we as grown-ups increasingly come to fear. In this setting, what is the role of education at the potential end of the world? What societal as well as personal role does education play when our hopes for the future may need to be drastically readjusted? Education at the End of Time addresses these questions and explores the role of education in current society not in a limited sense of formal schooling, but rather in terms of what it means to live and engage with a world that is at the brink of collapse. Yet, it falls not into fatalism, but to account for a journey that leads to a (re)discovery of the world beyond the modern notion of development and personal realization. It offers an a journey to open up new perspectives for how to think of education as a way out of a path set towards the end of the world.

Dark pedagogy explores how different perspectives can be incorporated into a darker understanding of environmental and sustainability education. Drawing on the work of the classic horror author H. P. Lovecraft and new materialist insights of speculative realism, the authors link Lovecraft’s ‘tales of the horrible’ to the current spectres of environmental degradation, climate change, and pollution. In doing so, they draw parallels between how humans have always related to the ‘horrible’ things that are scaled beyond our understanding and how education can respond to an era of climate catastrophe in the age of the Anthropocene. A new and darker understanding of environmental and sustainability education is thus developed: using the tripartite reaction pattern of denial, insanity and death to frame the narrative, the book subsequently examines the specific challenges of potentials of developing education and pedagogy for an age of mass extinction. This unflinching book will appeal to students and scholars of dark pedagogies as well as those interested in environment and sustainability education.