LOCATIONS, TRANSLOCAL AND TRANSNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION RESEARCH IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Abstract

For more than two decades, the Invitational Seminar on Research Development in Environmental (and Health) Education series has provided a unique opportunity for participants from around the planet to discuss critical problems, trends and issues in environmental education research (EER) and environmental education (EE). Using a critical realist/materialist ‘history of the present’ method, this brief commentary outlines some of the key principles and purposes of the Seminar series that helped shape the framing, conceptualization, and contextualization of the 13th Invitational Seminar held in Bertioga, Brazil in 2015. The main theme of the 13th Seminar, posed as a researchable question, was: “What is ‘critical’ about critical environmental education research (EER)?”. There are persistent concerns that the early promise and potential of EE in the 1970s is being diminished as the field develops, diversifies and is absorbed into certain dominant logics and/or prevailing practices. The Seminar series is an attractive alternative for researchers historically committed to a critical praxis of EER that promotes environmental ethics and socio-ecological justices. For the first time in the series, environmental education researchers from Brazil (as an indicator of Latin/South America) were invited to give ‘voice’ to their research efforts. In Brazil, there is an emergent ‘body of knowledge’ that serves environmentally as a ‘location of knowledge’. Possibly, this ‘literature base’ represents a distinctive ‘geo-epistemological’ understanding of the local, translocal, national, regional, and transnational achievements and aspirations of the ‘Brazilianess’ of EER. As an evolving history of the present (and future), this commentary concludes with some basic recommendations for the future local and translocal development of ‘post-critical’ framings of inquiry that highlight the importance of sustaining locations of knowledge production in and for critical perspectives of environmental education research.