Infiltrating the Academy through (Anarcha-)Ecofeminist Pedagogies

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn this manuscript I hope to clarify my use of a pedagogy that is sensitive to social and ecological struggles by reflecting on my personal teaching trajectory, ethnographic experiences, and theoretical reservations to feminism, anarchism and anti-/de-colonial struggles, because these can effectively inform students that we are tied to one another in biospheric knots by histories of domination and structural violence in ways that cannot be ignored. Any institutionalized, essentialist, corporate-driven teaching content cannot be challenged without a mutual synthesis of teacher-student knowledge, critical formulations of social and political realities through praxis, action and place-based environmental pedagogy. To me, this has been the first and most vital reason for the development of an anti-authoritarian pedagogy that is sensitive to (indigenous) people-environmental relations. Different sections of the manuscript focus on disciplinary boundaries around geography, anarcha-ecofeminist and de-colonial philosophical trends, my adopted philosophies and methods of human geography instruction. I conclude by emphasizing the ecosocialist orientation to human geographies because the real world is not divided into silos and disciplines, but is connected, complex and untidy. Hence, my intervention in support of the urgent need to bring sustainability, indigeneity, interdisciplinarity and intersectionality into the curriculum of the discipline in which I find myself, i.e. human geography.