From Progress to Precarity

For much of the 20th and early 21st centuries, many human societies have embraced what some scholars have termed, The Goal of Progress. The Goal of Progress goes something like this: all manner of things can undergo an endless progression of growth, expansion, and improvement. Knowledge, technology, the economy, social systems–and yes, individuals too–are all seen as capable of a never-ending process of upward extension.

Due to an increasing awareness of powerful human-catalyzed phenomena such as climate change, overfishing, ocean acidification, and biological annihilation (as well as other concerns of mine), however, these same scholars are calling The Goal of Progress into question with considerable urgency. There is now a growing, critical awareness that progress is never unaccompanied. To put this in economic terms: for every benefit there is a cost; every affordance gives rise to constraints. And while progress breeds prosperity for some, it simultaneously breeds monsters and horrors for others.

One of the most striking realities of the past 125 years, then, is that societies have focused almost entirely on progress whilst casting aside any serious and/or sustained consideration of precarity. For much of the 20th century, for example, many parts of the Earth were exploited then cast aside as ruins when they ran out of their treasured resources. What was left was forgotten, and people then moved on to the next site of promise, only to leave that one in ruins, and the cycle continued: exploitation, ruin, exploitation, ruin. The feverish pursuit of progress underwritten by limitless growth has even resulted in a proposal for the declaration of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Whereas the late Holocene epoch (the name geologists give to the epoch of the past 11,700 years or so) is best typified by the The Goal of Progress, the Anthropocene epoch is best characterized not only by those deleterious, disruptive effects of The Goal of Progress, but also by The Looming Presence of Precarity.

So what about schools and education?

Contemporary school curricula didn’t evolve in an historical vacuum. Contemporary teaching and learning practices didn’t develop culture-free. Like gravity, context is forever lurking. Curricula and educational practices are artifacts shaped and sculpted by the histories, cultures, and circumstances of the past 125 years, and thus significantly so, by Progress’s goal. But how might education look if shaped and sculpted by Precarity’s looming presence? Is a greater awareness of precarity not a more realistic, more ethical framework to support school curricula and pedagogy of the present and future? Holocene pedagogy, partly but influentially underwritten (as it is) by The Goal of Progress, looks and feels a certain way, but how does an Anthropocene pedagogy look to its participants? How does it feel when co-tethered to, on one hand, The Myth of Progress and, on another hand, The Looming Presence of Precarity?

In this project collection I aim to take up these questions, but in doing so I plan on taking the advice of cultural anthropologist–and preeminent precarity expert–Anna Tsing. That is, I aim to open up my imagination to how pedagogy could look and feel when re-thought with disciplines, theories, concepts, and people refusing to overlook and/or ignore the increasing presence of horrors and monsters in the world(s) around us.

Who knows? If we’re fortunate, we may just find some beauty in our horrors and a measure of comfort in our monsters.

Incipient projects…