Don't Dream it's Over

A few weeks ago our RMIT Planetary Pedagogies working group launched a new position paper as part of Planetary Civics Inquiry.

The paper is a means of thinking-through what it means to teach and learn under a planetary framework – and by extension, what is the role of the Universities in a state of climate crisis. Specifically, it’s part of a process of working through what this might mean for RMIT: a relatively young, relatively applied, relatively progressive institution located in a settler-colonial context, operating on unceded Aboriginal land.

Since the launch of the original paper my colleagues and co-authors have released a series of short ‘pulses’ reflecting on the paper and its themes – there are more to come. For myself, I’m interested in the role of creativity, imagination, and art - in resisting hopelessness and cynicism, in connecting people, in opening and keeping open a space for the ineffable.

The crises pile up, the chances of saving the world we love seem ever fewer and more remote. We must continue yet how to continue: to get up in the morning and brush your teeth and see your child off to school and walk to work to engage in the great, shining project that is higher education. But is it still shining, in light of the times? We say yes - it may need recasting, but it’s still luminous.

The university has always been a convergence of worlds – like frogspawn: clustered, fragile, and held together by proximity. Inside every cluster, more worlds – each a microcosm, recursive to infinity.

I’m thinking about the role of art in holding cynicism at bay, as a point of entry to another’s world, a convergence of one life with others. This offering of subjective experience might be a soft form of resistance: perhaps small, perhaps weak, certainly contingent. But those things are the point: affirming the value of radical specificity as a counter to abstraction and despair, an alternative to nihilism and paralysis, a way of coming together in sorrow and hope. Convergence is also experiential, personal, lived, subjective, affective. It speaks of nearness and inseparability, the proximate, the ineffable.

In an earlier paper in this series Wendy Steele wrote that ‘Creative and collaborative work– whether real or fictional – helps us regenerate.’ Later, Julian Lee responded that ‘educators should seek not only to critique, but also to enable students to participate thoughtfully in change-making action.’

In the spirit of planetary pedagogies, I offer subjectivity and embodied experientialism as forms of resistance – tiny ones, to be sure - to totalisation.

Photo credit: Tiia Monto, Frog spawn along the Multamäki nature trail, Laukaa https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frog_spawn_2.jpg