This talk is the keynote lecture for the Environmental Futures in Asia Network's 2025 Durham Workshop. EFAN is an APSI initiative to engage scholars interested in exploring how critical research practices can contribute to the collaborative effort to deepen understanding of shared environmental agendas and for pursuing a more sustainable and equitable world. The network emphasizes the essential interconnectedness of academic disciplines, research methodologies, and regional knowledge.
About the talk: How can our pedagogies prepare those we teach for roles in the wickedly complex, power-riven scenarios of environmental harm that we research? I have leaned into this question for many years, committed to responding to the environmental disasters I study through my role as an educator - seeing teaching as important a mode of scholarly communication as books and articles.
In this presentation, I'll share what I've done and learned, working with many different kinds of students, drawing in theoretical insight from many directions (from Vygotsky and Winnicott to Freire, Spivak and the many teachers I've taught alongside).
I'll highlight ways students can be drawn into concern about environmental harm through thick, underdetermined descriptions of how harms have unfolded in particular places, and what can be learned from environmental data, "data divergence," and knowledge politics. I'll also highlight how EcoEd can give students a conceptual language and suite of tactics for environmental sensemaking that can travel with them as they move into the everyday work of environmental care.
Most importantly, I'll highlight the need to continually reboot and elaborate EcoEd in ways responsive to emergent environmental and political disasters, and their tight imbrications. This will take all of us, so I'll end with a call for collaboration.
About the speaker: Kim Fortun is a Professor in the University of California Irvine (UCI) Department of Anthropology, Director of UCI EcoGovLab, and member of AirUCI. Fortun's research and teaching focus on environmental risk and disaster, experimental ethnographic methods and research design, and the poetics and politics of knowledge infrastructure. Recent writing has examined the praxis of diverse environmental advocates, and reads the Anthropocene as a call for new kinds of collaboration and knowledge infrastructure.
