Can gene editing and agroecology be complementary? Various formulations of this question now animate debates over the future of food systems, including in the UN Committee on World Food Security and at the UN Food Systems Summit. Previous analyses have discussed the risks of gene editing for agroecosystems, smallholders, and the concentration of wealth by and for agro-industry. This paper takes a different approach, unpacking the epistemic, socioeconomic, and ontological politics inherent in complementarity. I ask: How is complementarity understood? Who (...) is asking and defining this question? What are the politics of entertaining the debate at all? I sketch the epistemic foundations of science and technology that organize different notions of evidence used in agroecology and genetic engineering. On this base, I offer 8 angles on the compatibility question, exploring the historical contradictions that complementarity discourses reveal and the contemporary work they do. I work through questions of (1) technological neutrality, (2) “root cause” problems, (3) working with nature, (4) encoding racism, and dilemmas of (5) ownership and (6) access. These questions, I argue, require a reckoning with (7) ontologies of coloniality-modernity, which help us get underneath—and beyond—the complementarity question. Finally, I offer (8) a framework for thinking about and working toward technology sovereignty. (shrink)

This article is a reexamination of the author’s understanding of pedagogy, aimed at developing an increased awareness of the provinciality, limits and blind spots of the pedagogy and knowledge systems of colonial modernity. It engages with particular Indigenous epistemological theorisations of non-human agency, with Haraway’s notion of multispecies entanglement, and with the Australian Great Barrier Reef in an inquiry aimed at noticing absences and hauntings of pedagogies of modernity, including the absence of ways of knowing and being without separability and (...) determinacy and the damage that has come of this. This opens space for contemplating separability and determinacy as ontological difficulties contributing to socio-ecological crises of our time. The article is intended as a move by the author toward developing greater capacity to stay with the trouble of educating and living on a damaged planet that is fast becoming uninhabitable. (shrink)

Two recent lines of inquiry that have emerged in educational philosophy and research are the turn to affect theory and the call for decolonising education. Although there have been some efforts to bring these two lines of inquiry together and inform educational philosophy and research, there is still important conceptual work to be done, especially in the context of peace education, our focus in this paper. To initiate this work, we consider the concepts of affective atmospheres and atmospheric attunements that (...) have been discussed within the context of affect theory. Drawing on these two concepts, we argue that fundamental to any attempts to decolonising peace education is elucidating the coloniality of affects. This is a necessary step towards dismantling the colonial affects that permeate peace education praxis and are maintained through perceptions of peace and conflict embedded within a Western, Eurocentric frame. The paper analyses the theoretical insights emerging from bringing these concepts together to bear on the decolonisation of peace education and discusses some political possibilities that are also enabled. (shrink)

In this article, we address the limitations of sustainable development as an orienting educational horizon of hope and change, given that mainstream development presumes the possibility of perpetual growth and consumption on a finite planet. Facing these limitations requires us to consider the inherently violent and unsustainable nature of our modern-colonial modes of existence. Thus, we propose a shift from “education for sustainable development” to “education for the end of the world as we know it.” We contend that the predicament (...) we face is not primarily rooted in ignorance and thus solvable with more knowledge, nor primarily rooted in immorality and thus solvable with more normative values; rather, it is rooted in denials that stem from harmful desires for and investments in the continuity of the securities and satisfactions promised by modernity-coloniality. Faced with these denials, we emphasize a collective need to “grow up” so that we might “show up” differently to do the work that is needed as we face unprecedented global challenges. (shrink)

Education-migration, or the multi-step recruitment and retention of international students as immigrants, is an increasingly important component of both higher education and so-called highly-skilled migration. This is particularly true in Canada, a country portrayed as a model for highly-skilled migration and supportive of international student mobility. However, education-migration remains under-analyzed from a social justice perspective. Using a mobility justice framework, this paper considers COVID-19’s impact on Canada’s education-migration system at four scales: individuals, education institutions, state immigration regimes, and planetary geoecologies. (...) It identifies ethical tensions inherent to Canada’s education-migration from a systems-level and suggests that a multi-scalar approach to social justice can both usefully complexify discussions and introduce unsettling paradoxes. It also stresses that the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to reimagine rather than return. (shrink)