Ecotopian Pedagogies for the Symbiocene

Whither more livable futures?

"Dangerous limits have been placed on the very possibility of imagining alternatives…these ideological limits have to be contested. We have to begin to think in different ways. Our future is at stake” - Angela Davis

'Ecotopian pedagogies for the Symbiocene' is a research and pedagogical project initiated by Dr Heather Alberro (University of Manchester, UK) and Dr Elke van Dermijnsbrugge (NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands). The project received funding (£2,000) from the University of Manchester's 'Teaching Innovation Fund' in 2025 to support a launch event, an interactive speculation session 'Ecotopian pedagogies for the Symbiocene', in June 2025. Below is a description of the project's main critical and imaginative aims:

Education for sustainable development (ESD) has become a hegemonic pedagogical framework in the wake of mounting socio-ecological disintegration (Kopnina 2020). Yet with only 17% of the SDG’s on track and over one-third regressing (SDG Report 2024), a sixth mass extinction, and six of the nine planetary boundaries crossed (Richardson et al 2023), it’s imperative to reflect critically on what it is that we’re hoping to sustain. For critical pedagogical practitioners, SD’s technocratic framing of socio-ecological crises as apolitical problems requiring techno-managerial fixes, is precisely part of the problem. Moreover, Western-capitalist development relies on a socioeconomic model predicated on endless growth and extractivism that is actively fuelling colonial violence and ecological ruination for the many (Stein et al, 2022, p. 277). Thus, Western HE must break free from its ‘straightjacket of economy-centered anthropocentric indoctrination’ (Kopnina 2020, p. 8).

As an alternative response to the gospel of growthism, this project aims to explore the transformative potential of ecotopian pedagogies. The latter draw on diverse pedagogical traditions such as critical (Freire 1996, 2014; Bell, 2022; Hooks 2014; Giroux 2007), eco (Kahn, 2010; Taylor, 2020; Kopnina et al, 2024) and 'utopian pedagogies' (Webb 2013; Coté et al 2007; Firth, 2013; Van Dermijnsbrugge and Chatelier, 2022). First off, what are utopias? Far from 'perfect societies', utopias, which take many forms from literature to social movements, are strivings for better worlds. Utopia, as utopian critical theorist Herbert Marcuse (1969) mused, is a good place that is no place "because it is currently ‘blocked by the powers of established societies’ (pp. 3-4). Many contemporary utopias emphasise dynamic process (Moylan, 2020) over a fixed 'end state'. As Coté et al (2007, pp. 317 -28) succintly put it, utopia is less a place than...

An ethos of experimentation that is oriented toward carving out spaces for resistance and reconstruction here and now…not a place we might reach but an ongoing process of becoming”.

Ecotopian pedagogies aim to bolster educators’ and students’ transformative capabilities for dismantling the ecocidal status quo, and (re)ignite their imaginative skills for building multispecies-just presents and futures. How might we enable students’ sense of pathways of transformative possibility that abound? What teaching and learning methods and activities can further enhance key transformative capacities such as empathy, criticality and imagination (Kwauk and Casey 2021, p. 56), and ecological, rather than instrumental economic, sensibilities? How to nourish hope in a better world which, though never guaranteed, is always possible through collective action?

Hope is..."An axe you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised” - Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold histories, wild possibilities