Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to justify, theorise and contextualise a way to unlearn the binary oppositions of the Anthropocene (e.g. nature<culture). We define unlearning as a disassembling part of the whole of learning involving the realisation and removal of deep commitments to obsolescent learnings. We justify unlearning the binary oppositions of the Anthropocene on the premise that they have failed to represent the genuinely wicked problems of being human. We theorise the unlearning of binary oppositions with a form of monistic dualism, which simultaneously represents the division and unification of ‘opposites’. Finally, we contextualise the unlearning of binary oppositions in relation to the wicked problems of the Anthropocene, including sustainability, education and globalisation. The authors’ hope is that this way of unlearning binary oppositions may help diversify the community of socioecological learners who recognise, and respond to, the Anthropocene.
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Notes
- 1.
We use ‘unlearning’ as a particular type of ‘de-learning’. The prefix ‘de-’ denotes movement from (e.g. decentre) but is also used as a privative meaning take apart (e.g. decompose), remove (e.g. deregulate) or even oppose (e.g. defrost). The prefix ‘un-’ more strongly emphasises the relatively reversing, returning and opposing directions of movement from. We retain this emphasis to acknowledge how far humans have gone in the context of the Anthropocene and the related scale of reversing, returning and opposing needed to move away from this position. Malone’s (2016) reference to, ‘an “unlearning” of anthropomorphic ways of educating about the world’ (p. 187) illustrates our usage and our expanded definition in the context of socioecological learning.
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Adam, R., Whitehouse, H., Stevenson, R.B., Chigeza, P. (2020). The Socioecological (Un)learner: Unlearning Binary Oppositions and the Wicked Problems of the Anthropocene. In: Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, A., Lasczik , A., Wilks, J., Logan, M., Turner, A., Boyd, W. (eds) Touchstones for Deterritorializing Socioecological Learning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12212-6_3
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