Feeling environmental justice

Pedagogies of slow violence

Bibliographic Data

ID8079079
AuthorsKate Cairns (0000-0002-6889-8545, Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey, USA, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume51
Issue5
Pages522-541
Publication date2021-10-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCurriculum Inquiry (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0362-6784 • E-ISSN: 1467-873X
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/03626784.2021.1985925
OpenAlexW3205291082
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited33

This paper contributes to scholarship exploring the affective politics of environmental education. Building on Nixon’s (2011 Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) conception of slow violence, I argue that the slow violence of ecological destruction presents not only a representational challenge but also a pedagogical one: how to confront violent systems that degrade and harm particular people and places without reinscribing this damage? Drawing on qualitative research with youth-focused environmental organizations in Camden, New Jersey, I explore two very different responses to this challenge. In an effort to shield youth from the affective injuries of confronting slow violence, pedagogies of immediacy mobilize feelings of personal accomplishment through immediate action in the local environment. By contrast, pedagogies of excavation interrogate the historical and structural underpinnings of environmental injustices and channel associated affects into collective visions for more just futures. My analysis interrogates the racial, scalar, and affective politics at work in these pedagogies and considers the implications for feeling environmental (in)justice. While pedagogies of immediacy are framed as well-intentioned efforts to counter territorial stigma and generate good feelings through individual impact, I argue that such efforts ultimately reinscribe the very deficit perspectives they seek to challenge. These pedagogical differences have material implications in an inequitable and racialized funding landscape, where environmental organizations must compete for resources and may find themselves beholden to the very corporations that perpetuate ecological injuries

Criminology · Environmental education · Environmental ethics · Environmental justice · Environmentalism · Epistemology · Feeling · Harm · Immediacy · Pedagogy · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology · Social Psychology

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