(De)Politicising Education for Sustainable Development: An Ethnography on the 'Margins'

This paper presents the findings of a multi-sited ethnographic study of education for sustainable development conducted in 2016-17 in government secondary schools in Pashulok, Uttarakhand, India and South Durban Industrial... [ view full abstract ]

This paper presents the findings of a multi-sited ethnographic study of education for sustainable development conducted in 2016-17 in government secondary schools in Pashulok, Uttarakhand, India and South Durban Industrial Basin, South Africa. Both of these communities have experienced on-going environmental threats—Pashulok is home to several thousand of the approximately 100,000 people displaced by the construction of the nearby Tehri Dam, while the South Durban Industrial Basin has suffered decades of excessive water, air and soil pollution caused by local heavy industry. Both sites have witnessed long-standing grassroots environmental justice movements that have politicised local populations. The study explores what education for sustainable development means in such sites of political conflict, focusing on the links between local grassroots movements and education provided to children who are witness to, and often victims of, the environmental threats posed to their communities.

Although by some standards, schools like the ones in Pashulok and South Durban Industrial Basin might appear ‘marginal’ in that they cater to the ‘marginalised’ (dispossessed, subaltern populations), I argue that it is precisely places like these that need to be placed at the centre of development imagination of those concerned with educating future generations towards sustainability. Environmental constraints and threats to the sustainability of local communities are not abstract notions in these places; they are everyday reality. What can we learn from the interactions between local political forces and the largely depoliticised school curricula? How do parents, principals, teachers and learners navigate the rifts between their lived experience and government curricula in India and South Africa? What understandings of ‘sustainable development’ emerge in such sites of paradigmatic hybridity? This paper explores these questions using a range of innovative methods borrowed from visual anthropology, ethnographic film and phenomenology.