Rob O’donoghue
Biographic Data
| ID | 4150227 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rob O’donoghue |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rob |
| FAMILY NAME | O’donoghue |
| SIGNATURE | O’DONOGHUE R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rhodes University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8490-5277 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 13 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Restoring microbial relations and landscapes
Introduction: Biodiversity decline in both external environments and internal human microbiomes indicates disrupted relationships between humans, microbes, food systems, and ecological landscapes. These interconnected landscapes are important for global health and sustainability education, as biodiversity decline reflects disruptions in human, microbial, and environmental relationships.Theory: This study develops a conceptual framework, Living Mi…
Bridging worlds
This article explores how critical realism (CR) can serve as a philosophical foundation for integrating Indigenous and Western scientific knowledge in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Drawing on Roy Bhaskar’s framework, the paper emphasizes the dual recognition that reality exists independently of human perception, while all knowledge is culturally and historically mediated. In postcolonial contexts like Southern Africa, where epistem…
Healthy landscapes, healthy people
This paper explores social-ecological relational dynamics in health knowledge and practices in health education relating to the social practices of government and communities, and how the microbial world could be relationally normalized for better health and well-being of individuals and communities. A case study methodology is operationalized, focusing on cholera in Zimbabwe in response to how human health practices in the ever-changing environm…
A Formative Study Towards the Inclusion of Indigenous Technologies and Knowledge Practices in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) Curriculum Settings
This work on STEAM and education for sustainable development was undertaken across a series of collaborative case studies as formative research on the inclusion of Indigenous technologies and knowledge practices in teacher education. We noted that, despite the current academic imperative to decolonise southern African education, one seldom finds the inclusion of Indigenous technologies and Indigenous heritage practices in the contemporary classro…
Environmental Ethics
This well-constructed, and highly original, sourcebook integrates educational materials for teaching environmental ethics with theoretical reflections. The book is set to contribute immensely to its aim of taking ethics out of philosophy departments and putting it into the streets, into villages, and on the Earth—to make ethics an everyday activity, not something left to experts and specialists. Context-based activities are presented in almost ev…
The development of education for sustainable development. Materials for inclusive education in South African curriculum settings
From an opening standpoint that inclusion implies previous exclusions, this paper reviews the slow emergence of inclusive processes of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the South African education system.It explores how the historical colonising process and modernist trajectories in the emerging nation state were exclusive and driven by interventionist forms of education while there was an uneven provision of education by race and fo…
Navigating non-sense by exemplifying situated life experience and intergenerational heritage knowledge in Education for Sustainable Development learning spaces
The method which people use in acquiring knowledge is functionally interdependent with, and thus inseparable from, the substance of the knowledge they possess, and especially from their basic image of the world. If this image is different, the method they devise for acquiring knowledge is, as a matter of course, different too. (Elias, 1978:64)This paper uses an activity system perspective to probe the related problems of knowledge abstraction and…
Traditional food crops as a source of community resilience in Zimbabwe
This article draws on local narratives and observations of food sustenance practices in relocated farming communities in Sebakwe, Zimbabwe. Local knowledge on traditional food crops and related agricultural practices was proven to be a source of local community resilience, enabling residents to sustain their livelihoods. Local community agency in maintaining, cultivating and processing traditional food crops was found to sustain their culture and…
Participation, Situated Culture, and Practical Reason
Locating the environmental in environmental education research
Memory‐work is a feminist research methodology that is used by research collectives to study socialization within the dominant values that make up a particular culture. The power of memory‐work lies with its potential to interrupt hegemonic ways of seeing and knowing the world. Consequently, it can open up possibilities for individual and social transformation. Intrigued by memory‐work, the authors of this article formed a research collective and…
Towards a better grasp of what matters in view of ‘the posts’
This response to McKenzie suggests that the issues of representivity, legitimacy and politics, inscribed within an institutional continuism characteristic of modernity within the McKenzie discourse, could well be recast within a reflexive view informed by insights derived with developing social theory. It briefly overviews the struggle for human agency that played out within the deconstructive engagements of the posts and probes how perspectives …
Emerging patterns of abstraction in environmental education
The epistemic unconscious is the history of the field. And it is clear that, to secure some chance of really knowing what one is doing, one has to unfold what is inscribed in the various relations of implication in which the thinker and his thoughts are caught up, that is, the presuppositions he engages and the inclusions and exclusions he unwittingly performs. (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 99)
Some Insights on the Gap
In our response to 'Mind the gap' by Kollmuss and Agyeman (2002) we review contemporary pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We apply a social processes vantage point to reveal a blindness to the historical origins of these perspectives. Through drawing on a case in an African context, we illuminate the way in which experts in institutional contexts come to etch instrumental perspectives, and thus we probe the limitations of ins…
Some Insights on the Gap
In our response to 'Mind the gap' by Kollmuss and Agyeman (2002) we review contemporary pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We apply a social processes vantage point to reveal a blindness to the historical origins of these perspectives. Through drawing on a case in an African context, we illuminate the way in which experts in institutional contexts come to etch instrumental perspectives, and thus we probe the limitations of ins…
The development of education for sustainable development. Materials for inclusive education in South African curriculum settings
From an opening standpoint that inclusion implies previous exclusions, this paper reviews the slow emergence of inclusive processes of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the South African education system.It explores how the historical colonising process and modernist trajectories in the emerging nation state were exclusive and driven by interventionist forms of education while there was an uneven provision of education by race and fo…
Navigating non-sense by exemplifying situated life experience and intergenerational heritage knowledge in Education for Sustainable Development learning spaces
The method which people use in acquiring knowledge is functionally interdependent with, and thus inseparable from, the substance of the knowledge they possess, and especially from their basic image of the world. If this image is different, the method they devise for acquiring knowledge is, as a matter of course, different too. (Elias, 1978:64)This paper uses an activity system perspective to probe the related problems of knowledge abstraction and…
Some Insights on the Gap
In our response to 'Mind the gap' by Kollmuss and Agyeman (2002) we review contemporary pro-environmental behaviour research and perspectives. We apply a social processes vantage point to reveal a blindness to the historical origins of these perspectives. Through drawing on a case in an African context, we illuminate the way in which experts in institutional contexts come to etch instrumental perspectives, and thus we probe the limitations of ins…
Emerging patterns of abstraction in environmental education
The epistemic unconscious is the history of the field. And it is clear that, to secure some chance of really knowing what one is doing, one has to unfold what is inscribed in the various relations of implication in which the thinker and his thoughts are caught up, that is, the presuppositions he engages and the inclusions and exclusions he unwittingly performs. (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 99)
Towards a better grasp of what matters in view of ‘the posts’
This response to McKenzie suggests that the issues of representivity, legitimacy and politics, inscribed within an institutional continuism characteristic of modernity within the McKenzie discourse, could well be recast within a reflexive view informed by insights derived with developing social theory. It briefly overviews the struggle for human agency that played out within the deconstructive engagements of the posts and probes how perspectives …
Locating the environmental in environmental education research
Memory‐work is a feminist research methodology that is used by research collectives to study socialization within the dominant values that make up a particular culture. The power of memory‐work lies with its potential to interrupt hegemonic ways of seeing and knowing the world. Consequently, it can open up possibilities for individual and social transformation. Intrigued by memory‐work, the authors of this article formed a research collective and…
Participation, Situated Culture, and Practical Reason
Traditional food crops as a source of community resilience in Zimbabwe
This article draws on local narratives and observations of food sustenance practices in relocated farming communities in Sebakwe, Zimbabwe. Local knowledge on traditional food crops and related agricultural practices was proven to be a source of local community resilience, enabling residents to sustain their livelihoods. Local community agency in maintaining, cultivating and processing traditional food crops was found to sustain their culture and…
Navigating non-sense by exemplifying situated life experience and intergenerational heritage knowledge in Education for Sustainable Development learning spaces
The method which people use in acquiring knowledge is functionally interdependent with, and thus inseparable from, the substance of the knowledge they possess, and especially from their basic image of the world. If this image is different, the method they devise for acquiring knowledge is, as a matter of course, different too. (Elias, 1978:64)This paper uses an activity system perspective to probe the related problems of knowledge abstraction and…
The development of education for sustainable development. Materials for inclusive education in South African curriculum settings
From an opening standpoint that inclusion implies previous exclusions, this paper reviews the slow emergence of inclusive processes of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the South African education system.It explores how the historical colonising process and modernist trajectories in the emerging nation state were exclusive and driven by interventionist forms of education while there was an uneven provision of education by race and fo…
Environmental Ethics
This well-constructed, and highly original, sourcebook integrates educational materials for teaching environmental ethics with theoretical reflections. The book is set to contribute immensely to its aim of taking ethics out of philosophy departments and putting it into the streets, into villages, and on the Earth—to make ethics an everyday activity, not something left to experts and specialists. Context-based activities are presented in almost ev…
A Formative Study Towards the Inclusion of Indigenous Technologies and Knowledge Practices in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) Curriculum Settings
This work on STEAM and education for sustainable development was undertaken across a series of collaborative case studies as formative research on the inclusion of Indigenous technologies and knowledge practices in teacher education. We noted that, despite the current academic imperative to decolonise southern African education, one seldom finds the inclusion of Indigenous technologies and Indigenous heritage practices in the contemporary classro…
Healthy landscapes, healthy people
This paper explores social-ecological relational dynamics in health knowledge and practices in health education relating to the social practices of government and communities, and how the microbial world could be relationally normalized for better health and well-being of individuals and communities. A case study methodology is operationalized, focusing on cholera in Zimbabwe in response to how human health practices in the ever-changing environm…
Restoring microbial relations and landscapes
Introduction: Biodiversity decline in both external environments and internal human microbiomes indicates disrupted relationships between humans, microbes, food systems, and ecological landscapes. These interconnected landscapes are important for global health and sustainability education, as biodiversity decline reflects disruptions in human, microbial, and environmental relationships.Theory: This study develops a conceptual framework, Living Mi…
Bridging worlds
This article explores how critical realism (CR) can serve as a philosophical foundation for integrating Indigenous and Western scientific knowledge in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). Drawing on Roy Bhaskar’s framework, the paper emphasizes the dual recognition that reality exists independently of human perception, while all knowledge is culturally and historically mediated. In postcolonial contexts like Southern Africa, where epistem…
Sociology (11 works) · Pedagogy (9 works) · Environmental ethics (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Social science (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Environmental education (5 works) · Environmental Education and Sustainability (5 works) · Engineering (4 works) · Engineering ethics (4 works)