Transformative learning at the community-university-land interface: A political ecology of knowledge, education and health

Abstract

As awareness grows of the catastrophic implications of global environmental change, multiple scholarly fields addressing health-environment relationships have advocated 'transformative' educational strategies. Holistic Indigenous health-environment models inspire and inform many such efforts, but related land-based learning initiatives involving universities are often impeded by the competitive processes of academia. In this article we report on a community-university partnership – Pedagogy for the Anthropocene (P4A) – aimed at developing transformative educational responses to pressing global crises, inspired by land-based approaches. We integrate political ecologies of health, education, and knowledge to understand the troubled production of pedagogical knowledge in P4A, participant experiences in the resulting educational programs and the role of health and bodies in both. We first trace the production of knowledge as shaped by macroscopic and localized institutional forces; organizational and occupational dynamics; interacting knowledges and individuals; and material factors. Next, we explore participant experiences in the resulting educational programming. In both steps, affect-laden bodies of academics, trainees and community members reveal entanglements with human communities and more-than-human elements, shaped in variable ways by institutional forces such as settler colonialism and university neoliberalization. One key finding involves the role of universities in relation to land dispossession at home and abroad; another includes the challenges of pursuing transformational community-university research within contemporary universities. Tracing such entanglements yields implications for future land-based learning efforts in university settings, and broader praxis for environmental justice in the shadow of higher education's complicity with settler colonialism and globally extractive neoliberal capitalism.