O Seminário Conjunto Transforming climate change education through multispecies justice terá lugar no dia 26 de março às 11h, na Sala 3 do ICS-ULisboa e online (Zoom).
Este evento é organizado pelos Grupos de Investigação LIFE e SHIFT, em conjunto com o Human-Animal Studies Hub do ICS-ULisboa, e contará com a investigadora Maria Helena Saari (University of Oulu, Finland) como oradora convidada.
Event Summary:
Despite increased recognition of the importance of education in attending to the climate crisis, educational transformations have been slow and inefficient, noticeably regarding the urgent need to challenge destructive human-centric worldviews and practices that rationalize the exploitation of nature and animals, which is seen as a root cause for the unsustainable trajectory we are on (Lupinacci, 2020; Nxumalo, Nayak & Tuck, 2022; Saari, 2021). The need for educational transformations that “rebalance our relationships with the living planet” have been foregrounded in global educational recommendations (e.g., UNESCO & International Commission on the Futures of Education, 2021). This talk explores how a multispecies justice (Celermajer et. al., 2021) framing could help reorient (climate change) education to better attend to the interdependencies between human and nonhuman life and how it could serve as a promising conceptual tool for the transformations that have been called for.
Bringing theory into dialogue with practice, the talk explores “lessons from the field” from a pilot workshop that was carried out in collaboration with a public school in Lisbon in spring 2023, in which students explored diverse climate change events and war from multispecies perspectives in search for pathways towards more sustainable and peaceable coexistence between humans and animals in the aftermath of disasters. This talk wraps up the postdoctoral research project Multispecies Climate Change Education (2022-23), which worked in collaboration with the Liminal Becomings: Reframing human-animal relations in natural disasters project and was made possible thanks to mobility funding granted by the Biodiverse Anthropocenes Research Program of the University of Oulu.
Dr. Maria Helena Saari is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education & Psychology at the University of Oulu, Finland. She is Co-leader of the Education Work Package ‘Unlearning with other species’ of the Strategic Research Council Project MUST: Enabling Multispecies Transitions. Maria is also Co-leader of the Environmental Education Working Group of the Global Innovation in Teaching and Learning Project ‘Co-designing teacher education that connects theory and practice and is relevant to the needs of diverse society’ between the University of Oulu and University of Namibia, funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture Finland. Maria earned her PhD in Educational Sciences from the University of Oulu in 2021. Her doctoral thesis Animals as Stakeholders in Education: Towards an Educational Reform for Interspecies Sustainability was awarded the Senior Animal Law Researcher Award by the International Centre for Animal Law & Policy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona for its innovative interdisciplinary approach.
She has been invited to lead initiatives, including the Envisioning Sustainability Hub of the Biodiverse Anthropocenes Research Programme, where she serves as Co-leader of the Hub, and to propel the education research strand at the Human-Animal Studies Hub at ICS-ULisboa, where she was a Visiting Scholar and PI of the project Multispecies Climate Change Education (2022-2023). Her interdisciplinary research focuses on animals in education, multispecies sustainability and justice, environmental sustainability education, teacher education, educational policy and governance solutions for planetary sustainability. She coordinates and teaches courses on environmental education and multispecies childhood studies. Prior to her research career, Maria worked in the field of education in teaching and leadership roles.
