Education and socio-environmental justice in the pluriverse: decolonial perspectives

ABSTRACT

A growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship underscores the imperative to explore and advance pluriversal education – an educational approach that embraces the diversity of ways of being, knowing, and acting, rooted in historical contexts and ecological interconnectedness. Central to this exploration is a pressing need to consider education as a means of promoting epistemic pluralism within spaces of settler colonialism. By contesting a westernized geopolitics of knowledge, a pluriversal education advocates for the revalorization of subaltern knowledges, Indigenous cosmovisions, activism, and socio-environmental justice grounded in human, cultural, and land rights. The paper first debates on fundamental divergences between the concept of pluriversal education, based on principles of decolonial interculturality, and the principles of global sustainable education announced by international mainstream institutions. Then, it refers to concrete experimentations of activism in pluriversal education in various locations illustrated by the contributions of the special issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• interculturality
• pluriverse
• decolonial
• SDG4
• indigenous knowledge

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Articles in the special issue

1. Yafa El Masri. (2022). Decolonizing education in Bourj Albarajenah: cosmologies of a Palestinian refugee camp, Globalizations, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2022.2038832

2. Paola Minoia, Andrés Tapia & Riikka E. Kaukonen Lindholm. (2024). Epistemic territories of kawsak sacha (living forest): cosmopolitics and cosmoeducation, Globalizations, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2024.2308332

3. Johanna Hohenthal & Tuija Veintie. (2022). Fostering Indigenous young people's socio-environmental consciousness through placebased learning in Ecuadorian Amazonia, Globalizations, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2022.2038831

4. Clate Korsant. (2022). A Freirean ecopedagogy or an imposition of values? The pluriverse and the politics of environmental education, Globalizations, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2022.2038830

5. Shannon Audley & Angela B. D'Souza. (2022). Creating third spaces in K-12 socio-environmental education through indigenous languages: a case study, Globalizations, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2022.2038833

6. Leandro Durazzo. (2022). A cosmopolitical education: Indigenous language revitalization among Tuxá people from Bahia, Brazil, Globalizations, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2022.2065049

7. Marina Cadaval Narezo, Georgina Méndez Torres, Angélica Hernández Vásquez, & José Castro-Sotomayor. (2023). Contributions to the pluriverse from indigenous women professors of intercultural universities, Globalizations, 20(7),1144-1162, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2023.2193546

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paola Minoia

Paola Minoia is an associate professor in Geography at the University of Turin (Italy), and an adjunct professor in global development studies, the University of Helsinki (Finland). Her interests intersect the fields of geography, political ecology, and global development studies, with a focus on decoloniality, pluriversal knowledge, socio-environmental justice, and territoriality. She has published extensively on eco-cultural pluralism, epistemic justice, tourism gentrification, and water politics, drawing from field research, especially in Ecuador, Kenya, Morocco and Sudan.

José Castro-Sotomayor

José Castro-Sotomayor is an assistant professor of environmental communication at California State University Channel Islands. He is a research practitioner who designs, applies, and facilitates identity-based participatory communication models for policy development, community building, and outreach and conflict resolution. He is a co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity (2020).