Creating Aesthetic Encounters of the World,or Teaching in the Presence of Climate Sorrow |
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| Authors: | SHARON TODD |
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| Institution: | Correspondence: Sharon Todd, Maynooth University Department of Education, and the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland. |
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| Abstract: | This paper explores education as a context for facing what Susie Orbach has termed ‘climate sorrow’ and asks: what ‘relations to the world’ are we imagining might help youth stay with difficult feelings about the future by enabling them to develop a living relationship to the more-than-human world in the present? By way of response, the paper offers a conceptual shift from ‘relations to the world’ to ‘encounters of the world’. I draw on the work of David Abram to reframe our relations as sensory encounters and on the work of Bruno Latour to reframe the world as a living multiplicity. What both authors enable is a complex understanding of the temporality of our living in and with our environment. To explore this further, I offer a reading of Olafur Eliasson's climate artwork, Ice Watch. Consisting of 24 blocks of melting glacial ice outside the Tate Modern in London, the installation holds two temporal dimensions together through the kinds of encounters it makes possible: chronological time (chronos) and living time (kairos). In the final section , I locate the time of environmental teaching at the juncture of chronos and kairos as a way of creating encounters of the world that educate about the climate emergency while also giving time for climate sorrow. |
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