Pedagogies of Collapse - A Conversation with Ginie Servant-Miklos

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Where you can sense a little anger about the education system is that I shouldn't be the one having to inform them of this when they're 20 years old and they come into my class under the illusion that if we just stick a few solar panels on the rooftops and recycle plastic, we can just carry on living as we're living now.

Hi everybody and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notosh. This week's episode is an amazing conversation I had with Dr. Gini Servant-Miklos, who is the assistant professor at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioral Sciences in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Previously, Gini was a senior lecturer in the Humanities Department of Erasmus University College and had a visiting professorship in experimental pedagogics at Tumen University in Russia. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Aalborg University's Center for Problem-Based Learning in Engineering Education and Sustainability under the auspices of UNESCO. Her research focuses on the intersection between pedagogy, identity, and sustainability issues, and her forthcoming book is called Pedagogies of Collapse. Jinny is also the founder and chair of the board of the Fair Fight Foundation, a charity that aims to empower girls and women from underprivileged backgrounds through martial arts.

Hey, Juni, I've been looking forward to this conversation since we first met and spoke, and then I've been reading your book, Pedagogies of Collapse. So thank you, Juni, firstly for being here. It's a huge pleasure.

It's really my, my pleasure to be here also, having listened to some of your previous podcasts.

Great. And obviously with a mutual friend, Lena, Rachel Anderson, and with all the kind of great building things that are going on there in that network, and we're both part of that. So it's great to actually get a chance to talk. But one of the things I found really interesting about the way you framed the book was that it's written for teachers. Is that right?

That's correct.

Yeah. And as a teacher yourself, that's kind of where I wanted to start. And then obviously we'll get into some of the more kind of theoretical aspects of your work, but as much as possible coming, coming back down to the practical lived reality of it, which I think is where you have really positioned it really amazingly. So the first thing was, in terms of the way you see students respond to your course, you say in the book that it kind of hits them like a ton of bricks because they've had this certain experience with education and then they come to, to you in a higher education university context, and then suddenly they have this moment of, of collapse when they're facing collapse with you. So what's your experience as a teacher in kind of holding that space for those young people?

So for those who don't know me, I'm assistant professor of psychology at Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and I've been teaching a course called The Climate Crisis since 2020, I think was the first year I did it. And I started teaching that course after doing a postdoctoral project at Aalborg University in Denmark on sustainability education, because my background is primarily in psychology and education sciences and pedagogy, and the sustainability part came afterwards, after my PhD, while I was doing my postdoc. And when I realized how serious the situation was with regards to climate, biodiversity, resource shortages, then I realized that if we don't address this, then nothing else really matters. So I've been focusing my attention almost entirely on environmental and social justice issues since then. So it's within that context that I've been teaching this bachelor-level course. Which it's called The Climate Crisis, but it covers all the planetary boundaries. It covers the history of climate change, the political economy of the failures of the international legal regime on climate, why fossil fuel companies have so much power, and the challenges of transitioning into a post-growth economy.

And is it, is that situated within multiple different kind of bachelor's courses as an interdisciplinary course? Where does it sit?

Yeah, it's an interdisciplinary course that's currently located in the Liberal Arts College.

Okay.

And I have students really from all different kinds of majors, from life sciences, pre-med, psychology, humanities, business. It's really a very mixed bag, and that's part of what makes this course very lively and interactive. But indeed, my experience has been now that I've taught this course, I think, 4 times, my experience has been that the vast majority of students do not have the proper overview of what is really going on with the planet they're living on. They more or less know that there's a climate problem. They more or less know that we have a biodiversity loss problem. But when they come into my course and get this first lecture on the planetary boundaries, and I follow Johan Rockström's framework here, when I present that to them and how we've gone beyond the safe limit on 6 of those boundaries, it comes as an immense shock to a lot of them. And when I combine that with an analysis of how everything in the world today has been made possible by fossil fuels, and now we're saying, 'And we have to do without,' suddenly the immensity of the issue really hits them and they realize for the first time that life as they know it cannot go on. And it does hit them like a ton of brick indeed, because these are especially students who come from middle classes, upper middle classes. Liberal arts colleges in the Netherlands are somewhat elite institutions, so they charge more than normal university programs. Which means we tend to get people there, to use a sociological term, with a certain kind of habitus.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

That is pretty carbon intensive.

Sure.

And the idea that they have to, to change that, that's a real threat to their identity and everything they know about the world. So they really struggle with it on the cognitive, emotional, and identity level. Like it, it challenges who they are as young people.

Yeah. It's, I mean, it is a, we maybe we'll get onto some existentialism later, but it's definitely, I mean, it's an existential moment for them, right? Facing that, because it's not just a knowledge or a lack of knowledge problem. There's also, as you say, this kind of, it connects emotionally or, and on an identity level, if they see it for what it is.

I do think there is at large in society, and I don't think this is just a Dutch problem. I think this is a problem the world over. There is a knowledge gap. I think most people have heard about the climate crisis. Most people know that there's something going on with the world's insect populations. But I genuinely think that the share of people who truly understand the scale of what's happening to the planet, and the kinds of transformations that are necessary to keep this planet habitable for humanity and other living species, I think that's a very small part of the population who really understands that.

Yeah, I would agree with that, just from a personal reflection. I mean, I've, I've taught aspects of it in, for example, as part of Geography A-level in the UK curriculum, but even my understanding of it was relatively superficial when I started. I mean, particularly, I don't know if you know Nate Hagens' work. He's been running some really interesting dialogues with different people recently, and I've been watching a lot of those, and there's just a depth to the, an understanding of the issues involved and the interconnectedness of the issues involved that is just phenomenal. I mean, obviously it's phenomenally complex., but it is utterly eye-opening when you start kind of really looking at what that means for the way we live.

It is. And one of the things that I kind of, where I think you can see the rage coming out in me, I don't have a lot of rage, but I think it's also a healthy emotion as part of kind of a grieving process that even teachers go through this as well. I think where you can sense a little anger about the education system coming from me is that I shouldn't be the one having to inform them of this when they're 20 years old.

Yeah.

And they come into my class.

Yeah.

And they've lived the first 20 years of their life under the illusion that if we just stick a few solar panels on the rooftops and recycle plastic, we can just carry on living as we're living now.

Absolutely.

But I think that's why, I mean, of course, the rage and the anger is It's a really important kind of fuel, if you'd pardon the analogy, but particularly chapter 3 in your book is just an amazing articulation of the story behind why that has happened. Because it's not just a knowledge problem, it's not just that we haven't transmitted effectively the information to our young people so they understand those things when they come to you. It's something much deeper and more in the DNA of the way that the education system has been set up. And has evolved and developed over the years that almost prevents the depth of that insight being provided because it, it questions some of the very systems that they're in and the teachers are in and the policymakers are in and, you know, our current institutions and the way they function and the privilege of certain people, as you said.

It's not almost, it's completely. Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, I had to do quite a bit of research actually before I wrote that chapter. And I realized that even though I wrote my PhD on the history of education, I had mostly a knowledge of 20th century education, and I actually had to do quite a lot of digging and reading about 19th century education. And that was quite enlightening actually, to, to go into the origins of the public education system. And that's when I realized that mass public education was built up during the Industrial Revolution. As mainly a tool of social control. Because when most of the children were working on farms and on the commons, the children were needed as farmhands. But then during the enclosure of the commons, when a lot of this peasant class was kicked off their lands and then shipped into cities to be the, the workforce for the Industrial Revolution, this had a tremendous impact well on everyone, but particularly on children. And we know that there were children as young as 5 working in mines and in factories, etc. And then these children were having alcohol problems in childhood and displaying, you know, unruly behavior, unsurprisingly.

Sure.

And as humanity— well, actually, that part of humanity that controlled the capital system.

Yeah.

So mostly white. Almost exclusively male and of the upper classes of Western Europe.

And exactly, geographically very specific as well. Yeah.

Yeah. And they did spread since colonization was starting around that moment as well. And I do describe also the impact of how the system was also tooled for different purposes. So first it was controlling the working classes in, in the West, including in America. Also because we released increasing quantities of fossil energy, which meant that an increasing amount of the work could be done by machinery.

Yeah.

So then it became more convenient to put children in schools, and the purpose of school then was to mold children to be more compliant, to be a more compliant workforce for this growing capitalist machinery. There was always a strong religious also connotation of morality, civics. It was also coinciding with the nation-building projects at the time. So Europe European identities started getting built up around that time, particularly national identities. And you have to remember that Europe before the 19th century was this scattering of principalities and people speaking local dialects. And so this idea of nation had to be built up somehow. Like, for instance, in France there were dialects all over the place. So putting in place a national education system was part of a systemic method for imposing, for instance, French as the language to be spoken. And the one of the books that I used, written by Françoise Meyer, on the history of education in France in the 19th century, it's a very detailed book. But one detail that's, that struck me was that the schools with the timetables were used to teach linear time to a peasant class that up until now had relied on natural cycles to dictate when to get when to go to bed, when to get out on the field or not. And it was very interesting to me how schools were used as the vehicle to impose a capitalist view of time, basically.

Yeah.

And so what I described then, because I had started with the question, how did neoliberal education come about and what is its responsibility for the situation we're in? But I think that's the wrong question to ask because what I realized when looking at the 19th century is that actually the neoliberal turn in education, which happened, as we know, around the 1990s and has been accelerating since, especially with this new public management philosophy, which unfortunately the ideas for that were born and bred here in Rotterdam at the Erasmus School of Management and Erasmus School of Economics, that actually this is simply a retooling of the machinery.

It was already there.

Public education without changing its fundamental goal.

Yeah.

So from the origins, the goals of mass public education have always been to breed compliance with the certain values and visions that the state has for its population, productive integration within the capitalist productive apparatus. Yeah. And breeding just enough civics that, that people can productively function together in society, but the whole democratic aspect, so, you know, joining together and having a stake in the future of humanity, in the future of nations, living together, tackling global challenges, et cetera, with the exception of some sort of revolutionary pockets of education. And I took the example of Bildung in Denmark as one of these revolutionary pockets of education or critical pedagogy, those kinds of things. With those exceptions in mind, the vast majority of public schooling still serves to produce a suitable workforce for the production apparatus. So we shouldn't then be surprised when it is not capable of delivering, let's say, to a problem caused by the very machinery that it's serving.

Exactly. I mean, there's so many really, really interesting layers to this that I'd love to get into with you. But one of the things, just, just to kind of preface it, the kind of trope of the industrial model of schooling in the kind of people questioning education is so, is such a kind of common trope now. I actually find it quite tired, but the way that you have articulated it, I found it kind of opened it up again. For me, because it's like, oh yeah, we know that it's kind of, yeah, it was modeled on the industry. It was the needs of the workforce and the, you know, but actually there are so many layers to what you've articulated in terms of social stratification, linguistic homogenization, you know, kind of bringing in the indigenous outliers in countries and obviously the colonial project. There are so many layers to the work that the public education system as it was designed was put too. I think it's fascinating, but I suppose one of the things that, because obviously there's a reading that is very critical and kind of more Marxist in terms of, you know, the power structures there. There is also a more, I don't know what you would call it, but a more conservative reading, which is the tools that were available at the time, the best ideas that some people thought they had at the time, they were using to create imagined communities, for example. As a nation. And there was an intention there amongst some people within that, those cohorts of power that were making those decisions that they could use that to bring people together. And obviously I'm not, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, right? I'm not saying therefore that justifies the thing, but I suppose I'm saying that there are, all we can ever do at any point is use the tools that are available within the communities that are allowed to speak. And there were, very few of those communities allowed to kind of be involved in that decision-making at that time. So it, it, yeah, because it's a really, it's a, I find it just a really easy narrative that it's like, well, this was all this, some nefarious project.

The thing is, I think nefarious is a modern day kind of, we read, that's reading the past through the glasses of the present.

Precisely. Yeah.

However, if you are a bit familiar with 19th century history, you'll know that there was really a common view amongst white male elites that the poor, women, and people of color were not really human.

Absolutely.

Yeah. And so the project to educate those three groups were a way to tame them in a way to— so that, that white male Western elites could, could carry on. And this was part of the imperialist project, right? So public education grew up alongside colonization. And indeed, We see the impact of this in the forced kidnapping of Aborigines and Indigenous children in North America and Australia, thousands of which died in these schools. We see it also in the kind of women's prisons, they were called reform, these kind of laundries where women who could not be tamed were sent to work as slaves and die. So I don't think that the men who built up that system thought, you know, Dr. Evil hat on and mwahaha, but when you consider people as not fully humans, then you make decisions based on that worldview, and then you end up with a system that perpetuates inequality, that perpetuates oppression, and that is just a natural consequence of designing a system around the idea that the vast majority of humans on the planet are not actually fully humans.

Absolutely. And we, of course, we know better now. And I don't get me wrong, I don't want to be an apologist for that kind of imperialism. And that, I suppose, one of the things I'm really interested about the way that education develops and evolves is that there's a kind of a movement and like these different opposing forces that are involved in the decision-making all the time. And it's like, you know, we want to, for example, we want to integrate people into a community and we want, we want to have shared values around that. And we want to therefore bring people together in order to teach them what those values are. And that kind of sense of transmitting shared values of a generation onto the following generation. There's that, that thing going on. And then you've got this additional kind of modern concept of a nation. And then there's different kind of agendas at work, not only the economic agenda.

Yes. So the project of transmitting values before the mass public education systems were put in place were mainly done through two vehicles, the family and the Church. Yeah, the Church was actually not overly fond of the idea of a public secular education system because it took power away from them.

Absolutely.

And that's kind of an interesting— that's where you can see the economic forces clashing with tradition and traditional sort of the values that had been driving the world up until that point. It's kind of the battle between the feudal system, the capitalist system that's playing out throughout the 19th century. The feudal system does not at all end with the French Revolution. That's just the beginning of the end. And it carries on through until the First World War, really. And I think the First World War was also the apex of the failures of the public education system because we see in the lead-up to war, for instance, in French schoolbooks, a kind of indoctrination of children to hate the Germans because they stole the Alsace and Lorraine from us. So we see school being used as a kind of brainwashing indoctrination to the specific purpose of the state, which is territorial conquest in Europe, and people who are considered usable by the state as children, then sent as cannon fodder. Yeah, to die in their millions in the trenches. It's a perpetuation of that belief. And I think it's no, it's no coincidence that this is the time that John Dewey publishes his major works on democracy and education, and that people start to have this awakening to, well, actually, maybe education can be used for something better than sending men in their millions to massacre each other in a pointless war of gaining infinitesimally small amounts of territory.

Yeah. Yeah. I think there's also, just kind of going back a few steps in terms of the energy point though, and just kind of the way the system has kind of been almost predicated on that energy surplus that you talk about. I've been kind of playing with this idea because if you start, if you look now at the correlation between GDP and energy use, you know, it's almost one-to-one, right? And then if you look at the correlations between years of education and GDP, it's pretty strong. So, so there's something there around the fact that almost educating people creates more intensive energy use.

It's a little more complicated than that.

Yeah. As you can see, it's not, it's nowhere near a fully formed idea in my mind, but I just Ghislaine, what's your take on that?

Yes. So you are correct that we have never decoupled GDP growth from energy use. So increasing GDP has always come at the expense of using more energy. And today, 70% of that energy on Earth comes from fossil fuels. So if we have to stop using fossil fuels tomorrow, we will have an apocalyptic GDP crash because that's 70% of the GDP gone overnight. So that's simply because of what GDP is in economics in terms of the definition of GDP. It's the amount of goods and services produced in a year. And to produce goods and services, you need energy. And you might tell me, well, but, you know, service economy— take Switzerland. Switzerland doesn't, you know, it's banking. What do we need energy for in banking? Well, the thing is, Swiss bankers also eat. And they also need houses. And they also want their cars. And someone's got to produce that. So all the people pointing fingers at China and going, oh, your, your CO2 emissions keep increasing. Who's China producing for? Just because we've taken all our heavy industries and moved it to China, and then we're going, oh, now you're polluting. Well, duh. But the fact is that in a decarbonized economy, Switzerland would have to go back to being a majority of farmers and small craftsmen, because the freeing up of labor power to do other things than grow food and build the basic building blocks of habitability, like building houses and means of transport, etc., that's only possible because there's fossil fuels feeding machines.

Exactly.

Yeah.

That do the work that previously were done by hundreds and thousands of men and women. And if we are serious about decarbonizing in the amount of time that would, you know, allow us to stay below 2 degrees of warming, that would mean that almost overnight— I mean, 10 years is pretty much overnight in historical terms— that almost overnight, a large share of the population would have to go back into agriculture and manual work. The service economy and the kinds of higher education graduates that we produce today only are able to, to do the kind of jobs they do, to have the kinds of career they have, to take their part in the productive apparatus, because that apparatus is run on fossil fuels.

Yeah. But is it correct that, as you said about your students in the liberal arts college with you, that the, in a way, there's a, the more educated they are, the more carbon intensive often their lifestyles become?

Oh, this is, this is really demonstrated by research.

Yeah.

That wealth correlates almost exactly with an increase in, in CO2 and other environmental footprints.

Yeah.

The main factor there is travel. So mobility is the, is the most important factor. So we see that, for instance, when, when the world's extreme poor lifted into the middle classes, the first thing that really increased was meat consumption, meat consumption, particularly beef being one of the key drivers of global warming, and also deforestation and other biodiversity calamities. And then, because the kind of students I have, are already on their fourth or fifth generation meat eaters, having already been lifted out of the working class by fossil fuels and colonization, you know, because they are on the bottom of a chain of progress in inverted commas, because that progress has been borrowed from the future.

Exactly.

Borrowed from Black and brown communities whose resources we liberally took to fuel the Industrial Revolution, My grandparents were factory workers and my parents joined the middle class and, and here I am. So it's not the meat there, it's the air travel, it's the car travel. And that is the one thing my students are more or less willing to entertain, being vegetarian, possibly even vegan, but giving up air travel.

Absolutely. But all of these things that you, you're just articulating is, is just no wonder it hits them like a ton of bricks, right? No wonder it, it prompts this kind of existential crisis moment of what, what do I do when my lifestyle, even the fact that I'm sitting in your class in a liberal arts, a privileged liberal arts college in the Netherlands, is predicated on the coupling of, of of education and GDP and intensive carbon, you know, fossil fuel use. There's such a web of complex kind of interconnections there that it's like, how do I respond to that realization? What do I do? And then that's where I'd love to get into some of the way that you have articulated the response to that, which I think is, is beautiful.

Yeah. So this is kind of me more with my psychologist hat on in researching, looking at the the reactions that students have to learning about these issues in a class that confronted it with it for the first time in this kind of systemic understanding of the problem. And then I like to analyze this from a psychoanalytic perspective because I, I know that there's a lot of research done on the cognitive paradigm with cognitive dissonance and everything. I don't think that for me that gets to the real core, the subconscious issues of why students struggle so much with this. So I start to work at the problem from a psychoanalytic angle and then go into more of an existential kind of way out for the students. And what I see happening there is this unresolved grieving process that students go through. So we, we all know the Kübler-Ross model of grieving, the 5 stages: denial, anger, bargaining, despair, acceptance. And actually Slavoj Žižek has written an interesting adaptation of Kubler-Ross's model in his book Living in the End Times, and I've kind of made a summary of that in chapter 2 of Pedagogies of Collapse. But I added an extra twist to the current modelings on climate grief because climate grief is increasingly something that we can talk about openly. There's been some articles published in Nature on climate grief by Ashley Kunslow, who's an expert on the topic. What I added to this reading was an insight I had when I was reading Melanie Klein's Psychoanalysis: Object Relations Theory. And I had this sudden insight. It was around the time that the first photos came from the new space telescope, you know, these crystal clear, beautiful pictures of the universe. And then Melanie Klein had this theory that children fantasize that they swallow external objects. And that they then become internal objects. And I had this realization that I think we've swallowed the Earth. We have this fantasy, phantasy, that we've swallowed the planet, and we confuse then our internal feelings with the external reality of living on this ball of rock in the middle of a whole lot of empty space. And I see this in my students quite a lot, that they fall into what Klein called a paranoid-schizoid position, where they associate the good aspects of nature with a kind of Mother Earth character, you know, pure, virginal, fragile, caring, warm. And they associate the good things about themselves, their humanity, their compassion, their desire to be good people, with that Mother Earth character. But at the same time, they split Earth into also a bad mother character, a bad sexually promiscuous mother that is destructive and vengeful and raging and throws hurricanes and throws droughts and, and heat waves and raging fires. And then the students associate their destructive consumerist behavior with the bad Mother Earth. And so this is where I introduced the notion of phallic techno magic.

Which is just the best phrase.

I know.

Cowboy billionaires and phallic techno magic.

I just love it.

Because psychoanalysis is very much based upon the kind of mother-father archetype. What do we do about this bad Mother Earth?

Yeah.

Well, we try and find the father to tame the bad Mother Earth. Who's the father? The cowboy billionaires, the Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos. And they're coming to tame the bad mother with their phallic techno magic. And we have this relationship towards Elon Musk and these other crazy megalomaniac, self-absorbed, what I call— they have these grandiose narcissistic delusions about themselves. They see themselves as gods, the omnipotent father who's going to tame the earth by literally penetrating it with machines. You need a lot of lithium to make Teslas. You literally have to penetrate the earth to subdue the bad mother and bend the earth to our will. And the rest of us go along with this delusion, this grandiose narcissistic delusion, because it saves us from having to go through the trouble of processing grief, because the omnipotent father figures have promised us that they're going to save us all with this phallic technomagic.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, I have zero background or understanding of psychoanalysis, so I'm not going to attempt any kind of riposte to any of that. I mean, it's just fascinating, but there is the kind of techno-optimism, just, you know, that's the kind of thing that has been around in general discourse is that we either, we carry on living the way we're living and we, you know, we use technology to solve the problem or we change the way we're living. That's a very kind of general response. I suppose what you're articulating is, is that someone, whoever that is, and whether it's technology, will save us.

Yeah. And so like bouncing off into the existential paradigm, because I think the two work quite nicely together. And the reason I use existentialism as kind of a way forward is because I think psychoanalysis can get very stuck in the analysis of the problem without necessarily offering pathways to resolve it. Simone de Beauvoir, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, which is for me one of the masterworks of existentialism in the 20th century, describes the perfect combination of seriousness and nihilism. So seriousness is an alienation into a kind of fetish, a kind of totemized value or object that somehow comes from the outside. And nihilism is when you realize that there are no externally given values, and so you prefer to burn the world to the ground rather than face the absence of values.

What's the point? Yeah.

And so then she used Nazis as an example of a serious nihilist tandem. So the Nazis had Aryan ideology as kind of the fetish, and Hitler would rather burn the world to the ground than let go. It's, if we cannot have that, we will burn the world to the ground. Luckily, he didn't have atomic weapons. Yeah, ISIS also had a perfect example of a serious nihilist tandem. But I think there is also a serious nihilist tandem going on with the technology prophets. It's either technology will save us or we burn the world to the ground and there is no in-between. So we're not working on a plan B. Either technology saves us or we all die.

Yeah.

And this time we literally do have the means to exterminate ourselves.

So I think, I mean, as we said at the beginning, you wrote the book for teachers, and if I'm a teacher sitting there listening to this, I'm thinking, what, you know, what has any of this got to do with me in my classroom, right, working with young people in this moment where they are facing these kinds of issues? Obviously they're not necessarily aware of the depth of it, but they have some sense, and hopefully an increasing amount of sense if we can improve climate education or whatever we might call it in the younger years., but the thing I thought was just ri— I mean, and I haven't read the full book yet, but the idea of pedagogies of collapse. And so there is a response that's not the only alternative, right? The serious nihilist choice is like, there is something else. And I think there are so many beautiful aspects of what you've begun to articulate there that I'd just love to spend a bit of time with that. So what, you know, because we haven't, we haven't talked about critical pedagogy yet, so maybe you could kind of weave in some of that, because I think that idea of Simone de Beauvoir and Paulo Freire, because many educators are aware of Paulo Freire's work in questioning the kind of banking idea of education. But there is a response within that, that it's not, you know, it's not dismantle the whole system and build a new one, because clearly that's a utopian idea. There's a different response, which is a human response about how do we actually come together in communities to do this work of somehow supporting each other and responding. And that's what for me it felt like was coming out of the pedagogies of collapse.

That's right. So I did spend a lot of time in the first half of the book analyzing the problem, just because I wanted to talk eye to eye with teachers and say, look, let's agree on what's going on. Let's agree on the reality of, let's agree on the psychological mechanisms behind what's going on. Then we can talk about solutions, not really solutions, but ways to work with this, ways to live with this that are not fanciful, but that actually respond to what's going on. And that's why I came up with these 4 principles of the pedagogies of collapse that are inspired by Bildung and the Danish model of emancipatory education that was developed in the 19th century with Grundtvig and Kold, and which I'm sure you spoke a lot about that with Lina. And critical pedagogy, and indeed Paulo Freire was a key source of inspiration for me. I also have spent a lot of time poring over the work of bell hooks, among other critical pedagogues, Oscar Nect, Henri Giroux.

He was a new one to me. I didn't, I wasn't aware of his work.

Very influential in Denmark, very influential school. It's a different school of critical pedagogy. It's the German Frankfurt School of Critical Pedagogy. There was a whole movement there in the 1970s with revolutionary project work The intellectual heir of that movement is Roskilde University in Denmark, and I have been working with and around Roskilde University for some time now, and they still try to carry on that critical legacy. For people who are interested, there's loads of resources on Roskilde University and what they do there. But I think that's kind of the background, kind of some of the pools of ideas that I drew from for Pedagogic Collab. But there are 4 principles that I'd like to go through, if that's okay with you. And the first principle is we need a truthful education. So from an age where children engage with community and have the capacity to make social relationships, which is very early on, actually, we need to be truthful about what's going on. I wouldn't give my, my 2-hour lecture on planetary boundaries to 4-year-olds.

Yeah.

It has to be age-appropriate. Yeah, but we cannot be telling children— and I see this because my, my daughter's 5 and she's already getting the notion that recycling plastic is the ultimate environmental virtue. Yeah, that's not the kind of environmental education I want her to get. I want her to know what fruits and vegetables grow where, when. I want her to know how to regenerate soil. I want her to know what to do in case of heat wave to protect plants from wilting and dying. I want her to know how to build habitats for hedgehogs and other animals that need to hibernate over winter. Like, those are critical age-appropriate environmental skills, not recycling plastic. Because let me tell you, most of our plastic ends up in Ethiopia when you put it in that nice, you know, plastic recycling container. Well, actually, in Holland we do burn quite a lot of it for energy,, but that does emit CO2. So the best plastic is the plastic you don't use, not the plastic you recycle. And so it's kind of tragic to me that we have this education system that from primary school perpetuates the techno magic narrative. And so we owe an education of truth from the younger stage. And I think that if students came to me having received this knowledge of how nature actually works, how to create regenerative processes, then what I'm telling them, one, would not come as a surprise to them.

Yeah.

And two, they would be much more able to absorb it because they would have developed an environmental identity.

Interesting. Yeah. And there's, I mean, there, there are so many layers to why people won't do that. And, you know, and there are even just the idea of contested versions of the, I mean, the idea of truth is not a straightforward one, right? Whose truth are we teaching our young people, right? But I mean, I completely agree that there is a kind of, how do we find the best way to have young people meet with reality as it is, not in this kind of fantastical way that we'd like it to be and we tell them. But at the same time, in the balance of that, I don't know. I mean, one question when I was thinking about this came to mind of like, how young is too young to start addressing that idea? Because there's a practical skills element, but there's also something you're talking about, which is Understanding why you're learning how to, you know, regenerate soil, for example. There's a, there's a need to do that because we're preparing for something.

Yeah.

And to be honest, I don't think that that's any more terrifying than the narratives we used to tell children about hell and heaven.

Fair point.

Yeah. When my daughter was 3 years old during the lockdown, she would take her books and read to the plants outside because I have a little permaculture garden. And this is all the makings of an environmental identity, which I think enables us to be more resilient in the face of what's coming. But I agree with you, there needs to be concrete, actionable, something that gives students agency over the situation, because my own research has shown that knowledge alone breeds depression, which is not surprising if you think about it. But that's why the second principle is we cannot go straight to thriving. I see all this, this work being published about thriving, a thriving economy, all this prosperity without growth. Oh, hold your horses. Before you thrive, can we please guarantee that we survive? That's coming. That means we need to get people working with their hands as soon as possible. People are going to have to relearn real fast how to grow food, how to repair things, how to build things with their hands, because we are going to either willingly or because we wait until there's a shortage on fossil fuels, we are going to be needing a lot more human muscle power. A decarbonized economy is one in which, which the vast majority of us have to go back and do some form of manual labor. And now I understand, as someone who is kind of functionally disabled through fibromyalgia, I understand that that sounds quite terrifying to a lot of people with, you know, chronic illness who are not very fit, etc. But actually there's a lot of joy to being outside. I do think that for a lot of us, even those of us who suffer from chronic illness and chronic pain, etc., being outside is actually one of the ways to manage some of these conditions in a lot more healthier way than popping pills and being sat in front of a computer the whole day. Yeah, and that's why we need communities.

Exactly.

Yeah, some people will not be able to contribute as much as others, and some people will have different skill skill sets. And we're still going to need a lot of doctors, a lot of nurses, a lot of masons, a lot of electricians, people who repair things. And basically, I said something in Chapter 3, which I stand by, which is that collapse will not be very kind to the manually inept. And I was thinking here of my lovely but somewhat confused gender studies and politics and IR. I say this as a former politics and IR graduate. So with a lot of love for the students who have followed in my footsteps, but a politics, international politics and IR degree is not super useful in a collapsing world.

Not going to help you very much. But I think just to your point about community and the idea that different people will have different things that they can offer. Into that space of collaboration, you know, for surviving and then hopefully thriving is, I think your concept of imperfect solidarities that really stuck with me. And I'm just, I just think that's such a powerful idea because we are, and I've heard you talk about this elsewhere, sometimes we are in a mind of we want solidarity, but only with people like us or who share our idea, you know, the kind of the different groups who are are like-minded and will work together, but then put me in a, a kind of messy local context where I've got to interact with different people with vastly different political views or of different ages of, you know, different social backgrounds. That's messy and not very attractive to me, but that's going to be the reality of this kind of rooted, imperfect solidarity that you're going to have to be able to build. And that's deeply local and it's nicely clean that it will only be with people that you kind of choose to be with and like and agree with all of their views.

Yeah, that's, that's right. And that's the fourth principle of Pedagogies of Collapse, which kind of follows on from the third, which is having the space to grieve and remember. Having these explicit processes to grieve and remember allows a kind of emotional processing of trauma, because I think that a lot of the quests for perfect solidarities and for these kinds of identity politics. And actually, I dedicated the whole of Chapter 4 to this. But this quest, I think, is a response to trauma. And these can be personal childhood traumas, but also, I think, compounded by the trauma of living through these very difficult and uncertain times. And to me, American identity politics— and I say American because they come from America, but I know, I'm aware that they're spreading globally very rapidly because they're a very powerful fight-flight response from trauma. The quest for moral purity and for performative allyship and solidarity that is something that you say rather than do, and where you spend more time saying the right things, giving the right markers of belonging, rather than actually taking action, because action is by definition imperfect. It's messy. You have to make compromises. There's going to be misunderstandings, especially if there's different cultures and different intentions that, that come and clash in that space. So it's, it's a lot cleaner to have this quest for perfect adherence to intersectional, you know, identity, belonging, whether that's gender, race, socioeconomic background, etc. And Ultimately, I think the function of identity politics and the kind of what I see in certain social justice movements, I also see this in the environmental movements, groups that I have been in and around in the environmental movement. It's almost a kind of, it reminds me of the Catholic Church. Well, I say this because that's my religious background. So this is what I know, but I think it reminds me of the kind of cult-like behavior in churches where we are asked to surrender our bodily and kind of our agency to these externally given values without too much critical thought. And then we have to confess our sins. I mean, the Catholic Church is big on this whole confession thing, but I have the impression that what goes on in the social media sphere around these social justice movements that are lived online mostly is this kind of confession-like behavior, confessing your environmental sins. Confessing your racial sins, confessing your gendered sins, and then promising to educate yourself. And that reminds me a lot of the confession process at the Catholic Church. And the fact is, nobody goes to confession to stop sinning. You go to confession so someone can wipe the slate clean so you can go and do it again and then come back.

Well, it's like recycling, right?

Yeah. So I think that this kind of quest for perfect solidarity functions as an outlet for subconscious guilt that allows people to never be held accountable or take action.

Right.

They're always having to educate. There are hundreds of thousands of books that you can spend your whole life educating yourself and you'll never be done. And I'm not against reading. I read obsessively. But at some point you have to get off the floor and go and do something.

Exactly.

The problem isn't even just that, you know, if somebody feels like they don't have it within them to do something, that they prefer to sit and read. Okay, but it's the rage that they then— the fight reflex then kicks in against the people who are actually trying to do something and who by definition will make mistakes. And that is deeply unhelpful. There have been a couple of articles in the New York Times about how social justice movements in America are tearing themselves apart over this right at the moment where we need solidarity to overcome these issues. And so Who benefits when social justice movements tear each other apart? The people who just want to see the system continue as it is. The people who are benefiting. I mean, I saw today that the CAC 40, which is the, like the NASDAQ, the biggest companies in France have made the biggest profits in their history last year. They've profited from war, they've profited from inflation, they've profited from COVID And we're all sitting here bickering amongst each other when really We need to go and stop these people. And that's, that's what, like, this is something else that I'm someone who's very involved in with the Fair Fight Foundation, with the work I do in communities here in Rotterdam, with my education practices. I'm in the action. I'm all about really making concrete, messy, imperfect differences. And I make mistakes all the time. Yeah. So I get criticism for it. But, but being in the action is more important to me than keeping my moral slate clean.

100%, because that purity narrative that you were talking about, I think, and as you said, it just, it disperses all the energy into these other spaces of infighting and, you know, actually being in a place building imperfect solidarities through, for example, the Fair Fight Foundation, which you're doing, that is the work, right? I mean, yes, we need to kind of understand the problem and all the things we've talked about in this conversation, but ultimately, We need to do the work of just getting our hands dirty, literally in the soil with other people, you know, connecting, building. And I just think that the idea of imperfect solidarity, I'm just going to carry that with me for a long time because I think—

Well, it's the main theme of the Pedagogies of Collapse. So I'm glad that that's the main idea that you've gotten from this. And I think a lot of people ask me how, you know, why Karate? Why did I start a foundation with with karate schools? Because surely there's more important issues out there. People have literally asked me, like, what are you doing teaching karate to girls in Zimbabwe, Zambia, India, and soon Rotterdam, uh, when, you know, climate crisis and biodiversity loss? Well, first there's the kind of effectiveness argument that empowering girls is one of the best things we can do to manage the crises that are upon us and coming. But then there's really the, the learning aspect. What I find so beautiful about the martial arts community, having been a martial artist myself for 20 years, is that it's a place where all kinds of very different people get together, from university professors to a tradesman to, to people with PhDs to people who didn't finish school and to people who vote conservative, people who vote green, people who don't vote at all. And we all all have to share this physical space, the dojo, and there are codes and values also determined based on what color of belt you're wearing. And that is something that you have to earn. You cannot be born with a black belt. Yeah, you have to earn it. And that has allowed the kinds of— I keep people on my social media timelines that have very differing political views to me, and I treasure that because they're part of the martial arts community and I don't agree with them. And sometimes I don't think that their racist and/or sexist jokes are funny, but it's very important to me not to be in an echo chamber. It's very important to me to be able to still speak to those people. And also, based on the background where I come from, my family was very conservative. My parents have always voted conservative. My father is, you know, small business owner, very steeped in values of, you know, Christian conservatism. And as someone who transferred out of that, and I definitely would accept the qualification of Marxist and definitely someone—

I'm glad you admit, yeah. But if I could just say, because the other thing I think about the martial arts, I don't do martial arts myself, but a reflection on that and just even going back to the idea of this development of the education system. The majority of it, I mean, obviously there, there are strands and, and stratas of it, which are vocational and practical and embodied, but a lot of it is a kind of, has been this neck up, you know, brainbound propositional education. And, and some of the things you're talking about, this kind of online constant negotiations and arguments about virtue signaling and purity codes and all of these different things. That are often just propositional exchanges, right? We are embodied beings and actually we need to kind of get out of some of this disembodied space or disembodied arguments and actually just be in a place physically with other people that it kind of smells and it's, you know, it's hot or, you know, it's like that, that is a really important part of something I think we need to kind of reconnect with in different ways. And as you say, it's, it's a leveler. Socially, but it's also this kind of reconnecting somehow, not in some kind of hippie way, but just like a reconnecting with the fact that we are deeply embodied beings and a huge part of our learning and growing is done through the physical, the interaction with our environment. And I, I think that's not an insignificant aspect of what's going on.

No, surely. And the reason that I started the Fair Fight Foundation and the idea behind it was actually initially as a toolkit for girls to be able to better process trauma, to be able to, to re-enter their own body, to be able to, to regain that sense of agency over their physical being, which may have been taken away by patriarchal systems. If we're talking about India and Zimbabwe, that definitely means something else than here. I mean, sure, there is patriarchy and there is sexism here, but it's something else in India and in Zimbabwe. And it came from kind of that perspective. But what we've noticed is that there's a special bond, a special relationship builds between the girls and their senseis, the girls and the patrons of the clubs that we work with. And for instance, Nyombe, who is our head coach in Zambia, she has really built this mentoring relationship with the girls there, many of whom have gone back to school or gone to school for the first time thanks to a joint sponsorship between the Kwok Mewa Foundation, which is a UK-based charity, and the Fair Fight Foundation. And the girls are only able to go back to school because they have that caring, loving support and ability to process it through their body, this demanding intellectual work. So 3 times, 4 times a week, they're in that dojo space getting it out of their system, and then they go back to school.

And amazing.

I'm not saying, you know, dismantle the system, as you said, although I do think that we see so many teachers in burnout. We see so many teachers giving their lives to this crumbling conveyor belt to collapse that is the current public education system. And I would call on those teachers to simply resign because the system does not— you do not owe your life to that system. You, you do not owe your sanity to that system. And that is what I realized when I quit my own research career. I just realized that I'm going to forge my own path here. And that's when I say teachers revolt, resign. What I'm saying is we don't have to do this. We don't have to keep the conveyor belt going. And what Naomi does is she's gone and done her own thing on the side, and she makes it possible in a way for the girls to go to the traditional, you know, get their stamps so that they can then go on a bit higher. You know, like we still need those necessary. Yeah, we still need those things to move forward. But she's gone outside the system and gone, I'm going to create community here where the girls can be safe, where they can develop as humans. It's a building ethos.

Of course. Exactly. Amazing. I mean, so I feel like there is more to discuss. I mean, we were kind of, we're out of time now, but I think there's more kind of pedagogical work that we haven't touched on, which I think maybe would, you know, if you're open to it, maybe an interesting another conversation because I think teachers just kind of coming back down to being in a, in a room or in a space in community with young people doing that work of of being the pedagogue, you know, that, that teachers are there for, and that is what they got into the profession for. And yes, they're being abused and, but at the same time, there's this thing that they are there for. And there is that trying to understand and articulate how to do that better in a human way. And I think that's, that's really nice.

That's the, like the final part of the book, chapters 5 and 6 are about trauma-informed teaching practices, how to be a guiding light for students in times of collapse. And finally, how to have your own life philosophy. And I talk about love as a kind of— I do follow bell hooks there in certain regards, a more general human emotion that's not— that like unbounding it from the capitalist invention of the nuclear family and awe, having awe again about things that are beautiful, things that take our breath away, and to make space for that, to make space for for just how truly amazing it is to be alive at all and to have the opportunity to, you know, I'm here because of modern medicine, my daughter's alive because of modern medicine, and not to fall in this trap of saying, well, the system's broken, so everything about it is bad. Yeah, it's part of the grieving process and the healthy grieving process to be able to, uh, what Freud says is we have to let our love for the objects we've lost overcome the hate and anger we're feeling about their loss. And I think that's where I'm going to towards the end of the book, is reminding people that there's so much to love in this world.

Am I right that there's a Simone de Beauvoir connection as well with the idea of authentic love?

Absolutely. Generous love. Passion généreuse is the term that she uses in The Ethics of Ambiguity. But yes, Simone de Beauvoir was the first existentialist to realize that existential freedom can only materialize in generous love with other humans.

That's imperfect solidarity, right? Isn't it?

That's absolutely what it is. More on that, uh, more on that later.

Come back for part 2. Amazing.

Thank you, Julia.

Thank you very much.

Good stuff.

All right.

Bye.

Bye. Bye.

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