Towards Earthly politics in education: Going beyond national, global and planetary environmental imaginaries

Abstract

Early childhood/educational environmental imaginations transmit national, global and planetary views of the world through texts, visual representations and material objects. These representations produce politics, including nationalism and globalism, and play a part in policy making as well as in how children learn to view and relate to the world. Education, however, needs a new political attractor during anthropogenic climate change that differently orients political engagement with the world for education. In this article, we think with the four political attractors Latour describes: the national, global, planetary and Earth, and Cobb’s notion of the child’s primary relatedness to the world. We explore children’s environmental imagination in their drawings and associated stories to highlight the kinds of politics present in their views promoted by current imaginations. Then, we spin these stories further with speculative experiences our own relation with the world with Latour’s ideas and point to a new political object the Earth and Earthly politics for education.