Refashioning Origins in the Anthropocene II: Facing Hyperobjects as Pedagogical Practice

Abstract

Educational reform may play an important role in transforming ontological thinking in the Anthropocene. While many critical and environmental pedagogies utilize reflection and writing to bring about a greater ecological awareness in students, dark  pedagogy specifically advocates using these practices to help students explore the partially unseen, non-human “other” in their lived experiences. More than an ecological awareness, dark pedagogy facilitates an intimate understanding of object-oriented ontology and is thought to enhance students’ abilities to face the Anthropocene’s uncanny, disturbing, and frightening qualities. In this follow-up contribution to an Anthropocenes journal Intervention section (Brite et al. 2021), we report on the work of four student authors to learn more about their uncanny experiences through dark pedagogy reflection and writing.In the earlier contribution, five student authors from the Purdue University John Martinson Honors College (JMHC) shared their origin stories to convey their reflections on self, place, and belonging amid global planetary change. The origin narratives in this first set contributed by students were provocative in their affective expression of an ecological awareness disturbed by perceptions of massive material bodies, or ‘hyperobjects’ (Morton 2013). These were described variously as entities that could threaten, erode, alienate, and inure them from modern life as they struggled towards self-genesis and place-making. In this second iteration of the class exercise, four new students from the same course, HONR 39900: The Anthropocene, in the fall of 2022 extended beyond this work by crafting and then re-examining their origin story to explicitly identify and confront their hyperobjects. A post-course writing group was formed that allowed additional time for these students to revise their work, supported by instructor-guided exploration of critical texts selected based on central themes in their writing. In this second iteration of the classroom exercise, the outcomes were significantly more directed by the students themselves; the students selected the order in which the narratives are presented, and they collaborated in weekly discussions to reflect upon and finalize the meanings they derived from their activities. An instructor-authored introduction frames the pedagogical approach, and a concluding section considers its outcomes in furtherance of developing classroom practices for the Anthropocene.