“What do I stand for?” - A phenomenological account of an identity crisis in the climate classroom

Abstract

This single-participant idiographic study examines the implications of a student’s identity crisis in the climate classroom through the lens of existential phenomenology. The study analyses the ontological sense-making process of a mixed-race, bisexual female student reckoning with the racial dimensions of climate change during an environmental course in a liberal arts college in the Netherlands. By delving into the ontological implications of the participant’s experience of the course, the analysis shows that environmental education can meaningfully impact the mind-body relationship and self-identification of students with marginalized identities. The findings challenge some of the assumptions of popular frameworks for understanding marginalization in environmental education, like intersectionality, and post-humanist perspectives. The authors conclude that attending to human sense-making in environmental education can benefit students with marginalized identities by grounding environmental education in practices that make space for these identities.

Keywords:

• identity
• marginalization
• intersectionality
• phenomenology

Introduction

Living through “unprecedented” and “irreversible” global warming (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2021) and the collapse of life on Earth (World Wildlife Fund, 2022) constitutes a major threat to psychological well-being, particularly among young people. Studies point to a range of painful psychological experiences associated with awareness of environmental breakdown, including anxiety (Burke et al., 2018; Clayton, 2020), grief (Cunsolo & Neville, 2018; Lertzman, 2015), and dissonance (Johnson & Levin, 2009; Servant-Miklos & Noordzij, 2021; Stoll-Kleemann et al., 2001). These areas of concern are highly relevant to environmental education, as they shape students’ ability to engage with ecological issues in the classroom. In particular, these responses may challenge the effectiveness of pedagogies that focus on knowledge acquisition and reasoning skills, while increasing the effectiveness of pedagogies that focus on embodied practices, creative imagination and practice (Lehtonen & Pihkala, 2021; Servant-Miklos, 2022; Servant-Miklos & Noordzij, 2021).

A promising avenue of inquiry in environmental education research concerns the role of identity in shaping student responses to environmental education. Environmental psychologists have studied the way conflicts of identity can inhibit behavioral change and environmental engagement (e.g. Lertzman, 2015). In some cases, knowing more about environmental collapse as a result of environmental education could trigger psychological defense mechanisms related to identity dissonance (Servant-Miklos & Noordzij, 2021). Cultivating “environmental identities” has been proposed as an effective way to resolve dissonance and restore engagement (Clayton, 2003). Clayton defined environmental identity as: “a sense of connection to some part of the nonhuman natural environment, based on history, emotional attachment, and/or similarity, that affects the ways in which we perceive and act toward the world; a belief that the environment is important to us and an important part of who we are” (2003, p. 46). The impact of environmental education on student identity is still not widely studied, but existing research shows a potential positive impact of environmental education in fostering environmental identities (Prévot et al., 2018; Stapleton, 2015).

One area of student identities that is understudied in environmental education research is the impact of environmental education on marginalized identities. By marginalized identities, we mean identification with a racial, sexual, gender, class, religious or other group that has historically been granted lesser access to economic, social and cultural resources, while being subject to forms of formal and non-formal restrictions, including exposure to psychological and physical violence. In the context of Western European societies, where this study was conducted, this includes women (Eurostat, 2022), people of color, particularly from Black, North African and Asian communities (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2017, 2023), people who identify as LGBTQ (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2020), and certain religious groups (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2006, 2021), among others.

Studies that address identity considerations mostly do so from a more-than-human perspective (e.g. Carvalho et al., 2020; Lloro-Bidart & Sidwell, 2020). While there are some empirical studies on the impact of marginalized identities in environmental education (e.g. Miao & Cagle, 2020), the environmental education literature lacks an ontological exploration (i.e. a study of the nature and experience of Being) of marginalized identities in the climate classroom. Filling this research gap could enrich climate classroom practices by making space for these students’ sense of being in the world. We suggest existential phenomenology as a powerful tool specifically designed to explore the ontological underpinnings of identity in environmental education. We chose phenomenology, rather than other experience-based qualitative methods like autoethnography, because of its specific mandate to examine ontological questions (Nazir, 2016). In this paper, we commit to the phenomenological method with an idiographic analysis (refer to methods section) of the identity crisis experienced by a mixed-race, gender-fluid, bisexual student during a climate course in a liberal arts college in the Netherlands. We explored the following research questions:

1. What can we learn from an existential phenomenological analysis of an identity crisis in the climate classroom?

2. What can this teach us about addressing intersectional identity issues in the climate classroom?

This study uses existential phenomenology to challenge and add depth to intersectional and post-humanist perspectives on identity issues in environmental education. We draw conclusions that may support educators in making space for intersecting identities in their classrooms. In choosing phenomenology, we take an existentialist perspective on identity formation, best encapsulated by Giddens’ term “self-identity” (1991), which emphasizes personal sense-making and freedom. This study is positioned within a Western European context, in a faculty of liberal arts, as part of a broader investigation into the first author’s own environmental education practices. Although this study does not claim an Educational Action Research lens, the authors’ Educational Action Research background informed the discussion of the findings, combining the aim of contributing to environmental education research, and improving their own practice specifically. Although the authors do not share the exact identity patterns discussed in this study, their personal experiences as scholars with some marginalized identity characteristics informed the relevance and urgency of the study and method.

Literature review

Intersectionality

The term “intersectionality” is widely used in the humanities and social sciences to refer to the complex intersection of personal characteristics associated with marginalization, such as gender, race, sexual orientation, religion, disability, and socio-economic status, among others. The term was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). Building on the works of Critical Race Theory scholars, Crenshaw investigated the treatment of Black women in the American legal system, focusing on the particular interplay of race and gender in creating intersecting marginalization for Black women that goes beyond sexism or racism examined individually (Crenshaw likens it to a roadway intersection).

Harris and Leonardo (2018) describe a long history of intersectional thinking within Black feminism (e.g. Bambara, 1970), including Frances M. Beal’s Double Jeopardy (1971), and bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman (1999). Beal and hooks outlined the interplay of sexism and racism operating against Black women, tying the intersect between race and gender back to Sojourner Truth’s 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman’’ speech. Intersectional Black feminism stresses how race intersects with and morphs the construct of womanhood for Black women in America to create “multi-dimensional discrimination” (Nichols & Stahl, 2019, p. 1256)

In recent years, intersectionality has become a core tool of education research, in studies ranging from K-12 (e.g. Stern et al., 2022) to Higher Education (e.g. Miao & Cagle, 2020). In their meta-analysis, Nichols and Stahl (2019) explored 47 educational studies focused on intersectionality in Higher Education; whilst race and gender were the most cited topics, other aspects of intersectional marginalization such as sexuality, religion, social class and disability also featured. While intersectionality now constitutes a core concept in diversity, equity and inclusion research in education, Carastathis (2016) has suggested that by focusing on individual experience and removing the focus on place and politics, the power and edge of intersectionality as a tool for critical work is dulled.

More-than-human perspectives

More recently, identity has been explored through Indigenous and post-humanist lenses within the more-than-human perspective. More-than-human perspectives aim to shift away from the anthropocentric status quo, toward situating ecology within ecosystems of living beings—including plants, microbes and fungi (e.g. Carvalho et al., 2020; Gruenewald, 2003; Kimmerer, 2013). Sonu and Snaza (2015) outlined the way in which environmental education can change narratives in which humans are removed from their surroundings, toward a post-humanist state where more-than-human subjects retain their sovereignty.

The academic discussion on more-than-human identities has been dominated by scholars like Donna Haraway (1985, 2016), Annette Gough (1999, 2021), Bruno Latour (2017), Anna Tsing (2015) and Karen Barad (2007). Barad’s intra-action framework (2007) suggests a profound interconnectedness of all things in existence, seeing the universe as a space where entities co-emerge through their interrelations, challenging notions of individuality and separation between things. She asked what happens when one decenters humanity from the environmental conversation and works within an intra-action framework to engage with the subjectivity of human and more-than-human entities. This perspective is echoed in the Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (2017), which positions human and non-human entities as interconnected actors within networks, shaping the identities, roles, and interactions of the entities within them. It also chimes with Haraway (2016) and Tsing’s (2015) Entanglement approach, which critiques traditional boundaries of academic thinking, especially those separating humans from nature and culture from science.

Intra-action, actor-network analysis and entanglement are popular analytical frameworks that can broadly be clustered under the umbrella term “post-humanism” (Bonneuil, 2015). These have inspired interesting pedagogies for the environmental classroom (e.g. Carvalho et al., 2020; Dumit, 2014; Verlie, 2020).

It would be unfair to claim that post-humanists have ignored marginalized identities: among the post-humanists, Anette Gough (1999, 2021) noted the overwhelming weight of Cisgendered, Heterosexual White male narratives in global sustainability discourses. White male identity, she argued, is normatively translated as a universal human identity in public discourse, othering alternative voices, including non-human voices. The further a person’s identity characteristics are from the identity characteristics of the assumed “universal human”, the more likely they are to experience complex and intersecting marginalization. However, post-humanism has been criticized for overshadowing traditional Black and Indigenous practices in environmental education, ignoring marginalized voices and co-opting heritage for the continuation and benefit of the dominant group. Taking aim at Haraway (2016) and Tsing (2015), Davis et al. (2019) criticized the way in which their understanding of more-than-human philosophy underplays racial dimensions of environmental oppression: “their multispecies framing minimizes the role of racial politics and leads to a flattened notion of “making kin” that is inadequate for the creation of more just ecologies” (p. 3).

Maina-Okori et al. (2018) discuss the appropriation of native practices by post-humanist analytical frameworks. A number of Indigenous scholars substantiated this critique including Megan Bang (Bang & Marin, 2015; Ishimaru et al., 2018; Warren et al., 2020), Ananda Marin (Marin & Bang, 2018; Takeuchi & Marin, 2022), Sandra Styres (Styres et al., 2013; Zinga & Styres, 2018). Bang emphasizes the need for educational systems that promote equity, sustainability, and respond to historical traumas. She focuses on creating learning environments that integrate a multiplicity of cultural practices, knowledges and technologies, advocating for intergenerational experiential learning to challenge dominant, racialized educational narratives. Ananda Marin intertwines culture with learning and development across personal and professional spheres, re-envisioning cognition and learning to benefit marginalized communities. She integrates Indigenous methodologies to challenge institutional oppression within learning sciences, promoting Indigenous knowledge systems that disrupt the nature-culture dichotomy. Styres explores new methodologies for Indigenous solidarity through field research, aiming to reshape education to reflect Indigenous concerns and restore knowledge lost to colonial trauma. She advocates for a pedagogy of land, recognizing land as a dynamic teacher with the capacity to reveal the interconnectedness of the world.

Despite the valid critiques put forward by Indigenous scholars, post-humanism, particularly Haraway’s work, remains popular in environmental education (e.g. the Journal of Environmental Education published 25 articles inspired by Haraway in the last 5 years, while Environmental Education Research published 38). This introduces the risk of translating “flattened ontologies” (Davis et al., 2019, Servant-Miklos, 2021) into the climate classroom, paying insufficient attention to the impact of marginalized identities on learning.

In the light of this critique, existential phenomenology offers an opportunity for a new angle of research, re-centering the Subject of marginalized identities in the classroom.

Methodology

As a research instrument, phenomenology takes an idiographic approach to qualitative data (Visser & Smith, 2006), meaning that it focuses on understanding the unique, individual aspects of a specific experience, rather than generalizing findings to a larger group. Idiographic research is defined by attention to subjectivity and context, non-generalizability and conveying richness and complexity. As an idiographic approach, phenomenology is interested in generating a deep, rich understanding of particular instances of ontological significance (i.e. instances that tell us something about the nature of Being). The methodology for this paper takes its point of departure from Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), a research approach pioneered in health psychology by Jonathan Smith (2011, 2017). IPA is a qualitative research method that uses a small sample size and in-depth interviews to provide phenomenological interpretations of salient experiential aspects of the data. IPA always involves a double-hermeneutic, which means that first, participants try to make sense of their experience, and then the researcher tries to make sense of the participant’s sense-making. However, while Smith and colleagues drew inspiration from the transcendental phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (Smith & Osborn, 2007), this paper uses the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945/2014, 1988) and Simone de Beauvoir (1947/2019, 1949a/2018, 1949b/2018). The main difference between the two lies in their understanding of the body-experience relationship. Transcendental phenomenology claims that the mind is the primary contact point with the world, whereas existential phenomenology situates lived experience primarily within the body, the “flesh” from which all experience is possible (Carman, 1999). In phenomenological vocabulary, the body belongs to the situation (De Beauvoir, 1949b/2018), made up of facticities (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2014), which are also called en-sois, or things-in-themselves (Sartre, 1943/1976). All four of these terms refer to past biographical facts one cannot change, such as the place one was born, the skin color one was born to, or historical events that make up one’s past. It is from these facticities that the experience of subjectivity arises, also called pour-soi, being for-oneself, or consciousness (Sartre, 1943/1976). Subjectivity gives one the will and/or capacity to act upon the world with intent. A key phenomenological concept is therefore “intentionality”, which means the lived projection of experience and will-power to act upon the world that emanates from the brute fact of bodily existence (Carman, 2012; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2014). In other words, intentionality is the capacity to direct what one thinks and does with one’s given body and situation. Intentionality gives us the capacity to transcend facticities. Existential phenomenology investigates that process of transcendence.

Phenomenology vs. Autoethnography

Autoethnography, defined as “a research method that uses personal experience (auto) to describe and interpret (graphy) cultural texts, experiences, beliefs, and practices (ethno)” (Adams et al., 2017) has been previously used to narrate culturally situated stories in environmental education research, particularly stories related to marginalized identities. As early as 2013, Manolas et al. combined biography and self-reflection to understand the interplay between environmental, socio-cultural, political, and economic factors that contribute to an individual’s commitment to environmentalism. More recently, Ritzenthaler (2023) used their personal experiences to explore key concepts in conservation psychology, including ecological literacy, and a connection to nature. Mellsop (2022) used autoethnography in their dissertation to explore what makes environmental education effective, based on their personal experience. They focused on the importance of consistent experiences, the distinction between knowing and understanding, and the value of teaching children how to think critically about the environment. It is therefore fair to explain why our paper uses phenomenology rather than autoethnography to explore the experience of a mixed-race student in the climate classroom.

Phenomenology and autoethnography are both idiographic qualitative research approaches suitable for single-person studies. However, there are key differences between the two. Phenomenology uses a double-hermeneutic, meaning the researcher interprets the experience of the participant interpreting their own experience, whereas autoethnography uses a single-hermeneutic, meaning the researcher tells their own story, embedded in their personal understanding of the culture and context they evolve in. Phenomenology focuses on drawing out the essence of phenomena, to better understand where the given world ends and free will begins. The purpose of phenomenology is to draw the bounds of what is specific and situated (facticities) in order to understand what is transcendent among humans (freedom, consciousness). In the words of Merleau-Ponty:

The need to proceed by way of essences does not mean that philosophy takes them as its objects, but on the contrary that our existence is too tightly caught up in the world to know itself as such at the point where it casts itself forth, and that it needs the field of ideality in order to come to know and prevail over its facticity. (1945/2014, p.15)

Autoethnography focuses on narrating stories to provide a situated cultural context for experiences. It doesn’t seek to transcend those experiences to draw philosophical conclusions about the nature of consciousness.

In this study, we aim to shed light on the implications an identity crisis bears upon existential questions of human consciousness and the mind-body dichotomy, a philosophical inquiry uniquely accessible through phenomenology. As will become apparent throughout our analysis, we focused on consciousness and its relationship to the body, not on storytelling or cultural analysis. Our purpose wasn’t to tell the story of being mixed-race in a climate classroom, a task for which the participant herself would have been a more authoritative voice, for which she could indeed write an auto-ethnography. But drawing on the principles outlined by Merleau-Ponty, particularly his assertion that “the field of ideality” is necessary to transcend “facticity”, our analysis concentrates on the essence our participant’s subjective experience within this climate classroom, to identify the points of departure of her transcendence.

Situating the study

Phenomenological research gravitates toward small, purposively sampled homogeneous participant groups (Eatough & Smith, 2017). The choice of participants is not determined by their representativeness of the general population but by the significance of their situation and experience. Significance is always situated within a particular community of practice, informed by the author and participants’ positionality (i.e. the historical, social, economic and cultural position from which each speaks), and understood within the parameters of discourse within that community (Corlett & Mavin, 2018).

It is important to position this study in the context that gave rise to the research questions. The questions emerged from the lived experience of the authors and participant in the climate classroom. The first author was teaching an eight-week interdisciplinary undergraduate environmental course titled The Climate Crisis, in an international liberal arts college in the Netherlands, in the weeks just prior to the first COVID-19 pandemic lockdown (Servant-Miklos, 2022). The course covered bioscientific, historical, political, economic, philosophical, psychological and artistic dimensions of environmental collapse through a critical eco-feminist perspective informed by Science and Technology Studies, Indigenous studies, Black ecology, and heterodox political economy (Servant-Miklos & Van Oorschot, 2020). One of the course assignments was a self-reflection essay in which students wrote about their personal psychological journeys in grappling with climate disaster. To prepare their essays, students were provided with a climate diary template in which they were encouraged to note their thoughts and feelings as the course progressed. Students were invited to voluntarily submit these diaries anonymously at the end of the course for research purposes. One of these diaries was submitted by the participant—a young person of mixed European and African heritage, with a White mother and Black father, identifying as a bisexual cisgendered woman, tending toward gender-fluid at the time of the interviews (pronouns She/Her). She chose to forgo her anonymity and send her diary directly to the first author. The diary raised initial questions about racialized, gendered experiences of the course. The first author contacted the participant, proposing to examine these issues through phenomenological interviews, to which the participant agreed. A consent form modeled on the university’s standard procedures was signed by the participant. Due to the intersectionality of the facticities involved, the first author decided to focus on the particulars of this experience instead of involving multiple participants, making it a single-participant study (e.g. Visser & Smith, 2006; Eatough & Smith, 2017).

Interviewing

The first author (who was also the interviewer) and the participant discussed their positionality openly prior to the interviews, with several points to clarify.

First, being the course coordinator, the interviewer exercised a position of power over the participant in the period prior to the study. While the official power differential was terminated at the time of the interview, given that the participant finished the course and received her marks, it was acknowledged that a perceived power differential might persist, and therefore, a non-directive, unstructured interview approach was chosen (Lee, 2011). This means that the interviewer did not use a rigid interview protocol, but had several core themes: personal history, embodied identity, lived experience of the climate classroom, reflections on the future, which the participant was free to explore in her own way. The interviewer interjected with requests for clarification, additional details, to check whether the participant’s intention was understood correctly, and to move the interview forward when a theme was exhausted.

To allow the power differential to dissipate with time, the first interview was conducted six months after the course ended, lasting an hour and a half. The audio was recorded with the informed consent of the participant, and passed onto the author’s research assistant, who transcribed it verbatim, including false starts and pauses. The first author analyzed the transcript and identified the key phenomenological features of the participant’s experience, which were sent to the participant, giving her time to think about a response. A second interview was scheduled three months after the first, to discuss of the findings of the first interview.

Second, while the interviewer and the participant share some characteristics of facticity, the interviewer is White, while the participant is mixed-race Afro-European. It was ethically incumbent upon the authors to invest time and effort grappling conceptually with the racial dimension of intersectionality in preparation for the interviews and analysis, while reckoning with the unbridgeable experiential gap incurred by the racial difference. To support this, the interview process was designed to give the participant agency over her own narrative and the power to enlighten the authors’ interpretation.

To do so, the participant chose the language of the interview. She is fully bilingual in English and French, but chose French, as the language best able to represent her perspective. The authors are also fully bilingual in English and French, so the interviews were predominantly done in French, with English words and phrases used to convey ideas related to anglophone experiences. In the analysis section, quotes are given in the original French, with the authors’ translation on the side. Choice of language is important in qualitative research, as language dialectically builds the relationship between inner and outer worlds. Providing participants with a choice of interview language therefore allows identities to be expressed authentically without forcing the structuring power of academic English onto the conversation (Koulouriotis, 2011).

The participant was given an opportunity to read through the entire manuscript before its submission for publication, giving her a chance to challenge the analysis if she felt it to be missing key elements related to the racial dimension of her experience. However, sticking closely to the phenomenological methodology provided a guardrail against focusing the analysis on racial facticity. Keeping to a strict phenomenological analysis allowed the authors to focus on ontological issues, rather than getting caught up in describing and interpreting experiences, racial or otherwise.

Analysis

Smith and colleagues developed a step-by-step, structured procedure for performing analysis in IPA, focused on several layers of textual analysis, grouping together of text fragments into thematic bundles, and producing superordinate experiential themes (Smith & Osborn, 2007). The simplicity of this approach was designed to appeal to novices but comes with a risk of abandoning the phenomenological project to focus exclusively on psychological analysis (Van Manen, 2018). The author followed Van Manen’s (2018) advice to be guided by phenomenological intuition to get at the ontological essence of the phenomenon, rather than following set steps.

The first author therefore read the transcripts multiple times over a period of an entire year, coming back to them time and again to gain new insights, writing in the margins, re-reading and engaging with de Beauvoir (1947/2019; 1949a/2018, 1949b/2018), Merleau-Ponty (1945/2014, 1988) and Sartre (1943/1976) to test insights against conceptual works. The first author avoided a textual analysis of the transcripts, which is contrary to the purpose of phenomenology. No line-by-line coding was used, instead, whole-transcript reading produced key features of the phenomenon through phenomenological insight. Once these emerged, the first author went back to the participant, thereby enhancing the communicative validity of the study (Walther et al., 2013). This produced a second transcript, after which the original diary, both transcripts, and the author’s experience of the participant as an embodied student in the climate classroom converged into the final analysis. Given that the study describes a transformation, it was decided to order the themes chronologically in the findings section: before, during and after the classroom experience.

The second author came into the process later, as an expert on marginalized identities in education after the initial analysis was completed, to provide context for the literature review and discussion. They also provided an outsider’s review of the data analysis, thereby creating an insider/outsider dichotomy between first and second authors that enhanced the pragmatic validity of the study (Walther et al., 2013).

For the sake of anonymity, the name of the countries of origin of the participant were changed with the participant’s consent to Europe and Africa, instead of the specific countries she mentioned.

Findings

Before the class: L’flou, in search of an essence

During the interviews, the participant revealed traumatic childhood experiences related to her parents’ separation, casting her as a lower middle-class mixed-race child struggling to fit in with her mother’s upper-class White family. Growing up, she was confronted with racism on part of her White family, and sexism on part of her Black family, leading to conflicting sentiments about both families, which she sublimated into conflicting sentiments about her own body. As a result, her body ceased to be a vehicle for being-in-the-world. Rather, it became the theater of conflicting facticities, observed by the participant in an alienated manner. Her body was no longer the situation (la situation, de Beauvoir, 1949b/2018) from which personal projects could be formulated but instead, became disputed ground for defining what precisely the situation was: a Black body, or a White body? A female body, or a male body? She described this confusing experience as l’flou, a French expression that refers to something that does not have distinct contours.

Table

Original French

English translation

C’était assez consciemment, parfois, dans l’flou. Quand… j’pense que parfois, c’… y’a eu des moments où… non, j’me suis jamais identifiée comme Noire, mais, euh, la plupart du temps, je… j’me… j’me… rappelle juste de moments où j’me disais, où j’me disais: “j’en ai marre que les gens essaient… me demandent si j’me voyais plutôt comme Noire ou Blanche”, et j’me disais: “non, j’suis ni l’une, ni l’autre”.

It was quite consciously, sometimes, in a blur. When… I think that sometimes, it… there were moments where… no, I’ve never identified as Black, but, uhm, most of the time, I… I have… I have… I just remember moments where I told myself, where I told myself: “I’m fed up with people trying to… asking me whether I see myself as rather Black or White, and I told myself: “no, I’m neither one nor the other”.

Merleau-Ponty (1945/2014) suggested that speaking is not the translation of fully formed thoughts into words, but a projection of intentionality that congeals thought into action. Here, the participant struggled to project intentionality, fumbling for words, repeating segments of phrases, stopping, and trying another way to birth her intentionality with words. The use of the term “l’flou” suggests that it is the contours of her intentionality itself that lacked definition, while the use of the term “consciously” indicates a paradox: that she intentionally blurred intentionality. This echoes the Sartrian paradox of consciousness: that it “is what is it not, and is not what it is” (Sartre, 1943/1976, p.106).

What this shows is that at the complex intersection of racial, sexual and gendered facticities, the common perceptual confusion between the immanent body (the body as it is in reality) and the habitual body (the body as it is perceived, Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2014, p.112) broke down for the participant, to reveal a Sartrian consciousness, void of content, locked in a search for essence. At first, she sought refuge in Christianity to provide the missing essence, but realizing the seriousness (de Beauvoir, 1947/2019), or inauthenticity of this proposition, had resumed the search for an authentic essence by the time of the interviews. Seriousness is a term used by De Beauvoir to describe alienating one’s freedom in externally given values, for instance, values given by religion, or group belonging. This consists in claiming truth, certainty and rigidity in these external values, rather than retaining the freedom to choose one’s own values in every moment.

Table

Original French

English translation

C’est assez, euh, fluide, dans le sens où parfois, je le vis assez mal, et parfois y’a des moments où j’suis juste comme ça et j’accepte et peut-être ça changera, peut-être que j’vais évoluer vers quelque chose de plus stable, où peut-être que c’est juste la manière que j’ai d’être au monde. Souvent c’est… ouaip, ça, y’a des moments où c’est un peu plus dur, où j’ai l’impression d’être complètement vide. Euh, ‘fin, souvent, je me demande: “what do I stand for”?

It’s just, uhm, quite fluid, in the sense where sometimes, it’s hard to live with, and sometimes that’s just the way I am and I accept it, and maybe it will change, perhaps I will evolve toward something more stable. Or maybe it’s just my way of being in the world. Often, it’s… yep, there’s moments where it’s harder, where I have the impression that I am completely empty. Uhm, well, often, I wonder: “what do I stand for”?

In her quest, the participant pulled on the “threads of intentionality” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2014, p.100) that bind the en-soi (facticity) of her physical body with the pour-soi (freedom) of her habitual (perceived) body. In doing so, she revealed the “subject perceiving the world as perceived” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/2014, p.100). In other words, she became aware of her own consciousness as the source of her perception. She found herself contemplating a Sartrian form of consciousness. When she says she feels “complètement vide” (totally empty), this echoes Sartre’s (1943/1976) central theme of consciousness as néant (nothingness).

In the interviews, she drew a double separation: on the one hand, a separation between her immanent (physical) body and herself as the perceiving subject, on the other, a separation between her blurred intentionality and the prying intentionalities of other people whose sharp incisions into her perceptual space would otherwise shape her habitual (perceived) body.

Table

Original French

English translation

Toute cette question Biraciale, que j’me suis toujours dit, ‘fin, l’idée de “je suis ni Noire ni Blanche”, c’est allé à un point de, j’s’… j’sais même, je suis même… est-ce que j’suis vraiment une femme ou… ‘fin, est-ce que je suis juste là. [laughs] J’existe, mais, mais je sais pas à quoi m’identifier même, et je pense que tous ces clashs à un moment ont juste créé une idée que… j’ai créé un peu une séparation entre ce que mon corps pouvait refléter, donc le fait que j’apparaisse comme une… ce qui est accepté comme l’image d’une femme Métisse et la manière dont je me sentais à l’intérieur, plutôt comme… en perpétuelle question.

All of this Biracial question, I always told myself, well, the idea that “I am neither Black nor White”, it got to a point where I… I don’t even know, I am not even… am I even a woman, well, am I just here? [laughs] I exist, but, but, I don’t know what I can identify with, and I think that at some point, all these clashes created the idea that… I created a separation between what my body could reflect, so, the fact that I appear like… what is accepted as the image of a mixed-race woman, and what I felt inside, rather like… in perpetual questioning.

Rejecting other people’s attempts to essentialise her as White, Black, male or female, it is almost as though she left her immanent body to their unwelcome judgements and intentionally escaped into l’flou (the blur) to protect the radical freedom of her consciousness, thereby escaping the unwanted essentialisation of racism and sexism. In the process, however, she alienated her pour-soi (freedom) from her en-soi (facticity), separating the body from the perceiving subject. She almost spoke the words of Sartre, when she said: “I exist, but I don’t know what I can identify with”. In other words: existence precedes essence (Sartre, 1943/1976, p.613).

During the class: Ebullition, the body in (climate) crisis

When the participant joined the course The Climate Crisis, she experienced, during the very first class, a sensory shock that brough her body back to the forefront of conscious experience.

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Original French	English translation
La première lecture, où je pense que l’impact, euh, qu’il pourrait y avoir en Afrique… et j’voyais tout le pays qui était en zone rouge. J’me disais: “comment ça se fait que j’me rends même pas compte de ça alors que c’est littéralement, ‘fin, pas littéralement, mais alors que mon père vit là-bas”.	The first lecture is where, I think the impact, uhm, which this could have in Africa… and I saw that the whole country was in the red zone. I told myself: “how is it that I don’t even realize this, when it’s literally, well, not literally, but my father lives over there”.

The most interesting aspect of this interview excerpt is that the map used during the class was not red at all. The country she refers to was colored in pale yellow, to indicate desertification. But the way she experienced it, and the way her memory returns the sensations to her, is “red”, the color of alarm, urgency, anger, and distress in Western cultures.

Reflecting on this contradiction in the second interview, she clarified the bodily sensations that accompanied the moment of revelation, where a future shaped by climate catastrophe was unveiled before her eyes.

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J’me souviens plutôt de sensations de, un peu chaleur, juste un peu le corps en ébullition mais c’est, c’est, c’est très interne, pas, pas vraiment par rapport à ma perception du corps. […] Juste pendant le cours, ouaip, des sentiments de, euh, tu vois, quand tu boues un peu à l’intérieur juste d’énervement mais qui, qui se traduit par le corps.	I remember rather sensations of, a bit of heat, just a bit the body boiling but it’s, it’s, it’s very internal, not, not really related to by perception of the body. […] Just during the class, yep, feelings of, uhm, you see, when you boil a bit inside just from anger but that, that translates through the body.

Suddenly, the immanent (physical) body took the center stage of her experience of selfhood, tearing down the illusion of a transcendental, Sartrian consciousness. Her body, boiling with anger from the inside, called her into an embodied dialectic between en-soi (facticity) and pour-soi (freedom), superseding her prior efforts to separate the two. In the climate classroom, she was violently thrown into the situation (de Beauvoir, 1949b/2018), the body calling to conscious attention the ties of flesh (Merleau-Ponty, 1988) binding her to her father’s homeland, but which she had until then rejected.

She described it as a loss of innocence, a moment accompanied by immense guilt, where she realized that the price she paid for living in her own “bubble” was complicity with a colonial, ecocidal Western lifestyle that would condemn her African family and countrymen and women to suffer through global heating.

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J’pense que voir que les problèmes pouvaient toucher une partie de ce qui touche en fait à mon identité, c’est un peu péter la bulle, en me disant: “mais en fait, non. Euh, j’peux pas juste penser comme ça, j’peux pas me rassurer en me disant que c’est déjà bien que je m’y intéresse”, et ça m‘a fait me rendre compte aussi de tous les biais que j’avais eu. […] J’me suis rendue compte que j’étais pas la personne que j’m’imaginais être et qu’y avait sûrement beaucoup plus de problèmes par rapport à mes comportements et mes manières de penser que ce que je voulais bien admettre.

I think that seeing that problems could affect a part of what touches my identity, in fact, it kind of burst the bubble, telling myself: “well, actually, no. Uhm, I just can’t think that way. I can’t reassure myself by telling myself that it’s already good enough that I’m interested in this”. And that made me realize all the biases that I had. […] I realized that I was not the person I imagined I was, and there were surely many more problems regarding my behaviors and my ways of thinking that what I wanted to admit.

In grieving this innocence, she came to terms with the internalized racism of some of her previously held beliefs that had disconnected her from her body. She began to regard her attempts to forge a disembodied Sartrian consciousness as deeply problematic.

After the class: Alien, alienation and reconnection

She experienced the bodily shock of being confronted with climate truth as quiet grief, an alienation from her White classmates, with whom she could not share the experience.

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J’me sentais un peu seule dans mon expérience, où j’avais l’impression que, ‘fin, déjà, j’étais la seule Métisse du groupe, où personne n’avait des origines africaines. Donc j’avais l’impression de toujours ramener évidemment le problème à ça, j’avais l’impression que ça me… ‘fin que ça me touchait énormément. Parfois j’étais vraiment, parfois ça me touchait beaucoup de… de voir les, euh, les problèmes qui existent et qui pourraient encore être pire plus tard et j’avais juste l’impression que ça touchait pas autant les autres.

I felt a bit alone in my experience, whereby I had the impression that, well, to begin with, I was the only mixed-race person in the group, where nobody has African origins. So, I have the impression that I was always bringing the problem back to this. I had the impression that it… well, that it affected me enormously. Sometimes I was really… sometimes it really affected me to… to see the, uhm., problems that existed, and that could get worse later, and I just had the impression that it didn’t affect the others as much.

She therefore took on the task of rebuilding her embodied self in a shielded space, folded in on herself. The first step of her journey was to confront the manifestations of her alienation in her thoughts and behaviors. She confronted her desire to transform into a literal green or pink alien, finding it within herself to reconcile with the existential necessity of the human body as the vehicle for projecting intentionality through time and space.

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Pt’être l’idéal serait que je me peigne en une autre couleur que les humains ne puissent pas prendre… comme du vert, ça serait cool vert et rose peut-être, et du coup, que j’change un peu mes cheveux et tous mes traits en fait, mais que je les rende très inhumains pour euh, éviter ce genre de assumption. Et je me disais, “non mais, euh, tu veux pas non plus te voir comme un alien? Parce que t’es pas un alien, t’es humaine” et euh, beh, tout mon corps en fait a aussi contribué à ma manière de voir les choses et, à qui je suis.

Maybe the ideal would be for me to paint myself another color that humans cannot… like green, that would be cool, green and pink perhaps, and then, I could change my hair a bit, and all of my traits in fact, but I could render them very inhuman to, uhm, avoid this kind of assumption. And I told myself, “no, but, uhm, you don’t really want to see yourself as an alien? Because you’re not an alien, you’re human”, and uhm, well, all of my body, in fact, also contributed to the way I see things, and who I am.

She expressed a physiological urge to reconnect with her African roots, to bind the immanent (physical) body with the habitual (perceived) body. In the interviews, she shared the ways in which, throughout her life, she tamed her immanent body to fit her desired habitual body by using food. Previously, she had deprived her body of food to force the African curves out of it because the way these curves were sexualized in Black communities disgusted her. Now, she cooked and ate African food to literally feed her newly desired habitual (perceived) body into her immanent (physical) body.

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J’ai commencé à acheter, à cuisiner plus de plats Africains aussi, à regarder des recettes, et j’ai commencé à parler plus avec, euh, ma famille en Afrique. Et j’pense que j’avais vraiment besoin de faire cette sorte de reconnexion.	I began to buy, to cook more African dishes, and also to look up recipes, and I became talking more with uhm, my African family. And I think I really needed to have this kind of reconnection.

With her body reestablished as the source of her intentionality, she felt able to reconnect with her Black family. She was able to open herself again to the subjectivity of others (de Beauvoir, 1947/2019, p.81) to secure her ontological claim to Blackness.

Toward the future: Imaginer, existential ambiguity

The crisis experienced by the participant in the climate classroom could easily have led her to seek refuge in Black seriousness (i.e. alienating one’s freedom by claiming allegiance to Blackness as truth and certainty with rigid values), just as she had previously sought refuge in White, and religious seriousness. From an existential standpoint, all forms of seriousness are equally inauthentic. The participant acknowledged that Black seriousness was a tempting proposition.

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C’est pas vraiment en y croyant, ou en y croyant pas, mais juste en m’imaginant, en m’disant que déjà, imaginer quelque chose, c’est un premier pas, et qu’il faut, il faut juste pouvoir imaginer pour pouvoir commencer. […] J’pense j’avais vraiment besoin, j’pense, d’imaginer ce scenario de “et si l’Afrique se fermait sur elle-même et juste se développait”?	It wasn’t really a matter of believing in it or not, but just to imagine, to tell myself that already, imagining something, it’s a first step, and it should, it should just be possible to imagine in order to be able to start something. […] I think I really needed, I think, to imagine this scenario of “what if Africa closed in on itself and just developed itself”?

In this excerpt, she reflected on her final essay for the course, in which she imagined her country cutting itself off from the world, developing into a technologically advanced nation hidden from the White gaze “a la Wakanda”, as she put it (Wakanda is a fictional technologically advanced African land ruled by a superhero King, the Black Panther, from the Marvel comic book series The Black Panther). She needed to withdraw from the world to birth her African reconnection. At the same time, despite the physical sensation of pain (she says “ow”) she experienced throughout the Climate Crisis course, she decided against demonizing Western culture, because her experience of Black culture was also fraught with difficulties regarding her gender and sexuality.

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J’pense que ça, en quelque sortes, ça a eu un aspect positif que y’ait eu tous ces clashs, et que j’ai moins idéalisé que c’que j’aurais pu faire, surtout au début où j’étais en mode “ow”. J’aurais pu me dire: “non, mais, la culture occidentale, c’est non, c’est nul, euh, les occidentaux ont foutu la merde partout”!	I think, in some ways, that there was a positive aspect to all of these clashes, and that I idealized less than I could have, especially in the beginning when I was in an “ouch” phase. I could have told myself: “no, well, Western culture, it’s a no, it sucks, uhm, Westerners spread shit everywhere”!

Therefore, once she felt replenished in her African identity, the participant espoused an ambiguous ontology, thrown into the world by mixed racial, bisexual, and gender-fluid facticities, consciously projecting into the world as a European and African person, essentialising neither.

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J’ai moins besoin de ces barrières, parce que j’ai pris le temps, euh, déjà, j’ai pris d’autres cours, j’ai eu Multiple Modernities, euh, j’me suis juste aussi renseignée, aussi juste au niveau artistique et culturellement, j’ai écouté juste, euh, plus de musique Africaine, euh, j’ai lu, aussi. J’pense que le fait de m’être rapprochée […], ça a fait que mon sentiment de culpabilité a baissé. […] J’suis plutôt dans une attitude d’essayer de, de pas essentialiser, de moins essentialiser, euh, et de moins idéaliser.

I need these guardrails less, because I took the time to, uhm, already, I took other courses, like Multiple Modernities, uhm, I also gathered information, also just, on an artistic level, and culturally, I just listened to, uhm, more African music, uhm, I read, as well. I think that the fact that I got closer […], it worked to reduce my feelings of guilt. […] I am rather in an attitude of trying to, to not essentialise, to essentialise less, uhm, and to idealize less.

She no longer felt that she needed inauthentic “guardrails” to keep herself from falling back into a Sartrian consciousness. She was no longer empty. Rejecting serious essentialisms, she “willed there to be being”, in the words of de Beauvoir (1947/2019, p.17). For de Beauvoir (1947/2019), this means that ambiguity comes with the fraught acknowledgement that the quest for an essence will fail, because consciousness is fundamentally free and therefore essence-less, but that the purpose of living as a human is in the project or process of revealing being (searching for an essence), regardless of the outcome. That’s what being authentically human is, in de Beauvoir’s thought: looking for something we’ll never find, but becoming fully human in the process of looking for it.

Discussion

The purpose of this study was to examine the ways in which an existential phenomenological analysis of an identity crisis in the climate classroom could shed light on the impact of classroom practices on marginalized identities in environmental education.

Implications for intersectionality and post-humanist frameworks

Our study revealed that a marginalized identity is more complex that the sum of intersectional facticities that constitute its situation. The identity examined in this study was dynamic and moving, with a fluid ontological process of sense-making. When confronted with the climate crisis, the participant tussled between the temptation of seriousness on the one hand, and existential nothingness on the other. An existential analysis of this complex and fluid process adds nuance to the generalizing structural analysis present in some intersectional literature (e.g. hooks, 1999; Nichols & Stahl, 2019). Based on this, we would like to address Carastathis’ (2016) claim that individual focus removes the power and edge of intersectionality as a tool for critical work. Based on our findings, we would argue that shedding light on the inner formation of a critical climate consciousness among people with marginalized facticities enables a deeper, richer connection between personal experience and critical political work. This process is reminiscent of C. Wright Mills’ sociological imagination (Mills, 1959), which asks us to reflect on the ties between our personal experiences and History as the sum of our collective experiences. Intersectional critical theory operates by examining social reality in the light of the intersection of socially constructed categories (e.g. race, gender, religion) (Crenshaw, 1989; Nichols & Stahl, 2019). This gives it explanatory and transformative power, in the public sphere and in the classroom. However, it also comes with a risk of smothering individuals with a deterministic view of the impact of their marginalized facticities on their personal sense-making and individual moral, social and life choices. Our findings show that existential phenomenology can counterbalance this tendency to some extent by connecting individual ontological development with intersectional issues of climate, race, gender and sexuality. Our findings enrich existing empirical studies like Miao and Cagle’s (2020) investigation of the impact of race and gender on the development of environmental identities by providing an ontological angle that digs deep into “memories, thoughts, feelings, intuitions” in ways that other methodologies do not (Nazir, 2016, p. 187).

Our findings also have implications for more-than-human frameworks in environmental education, particularly in their popular post-humanist iteration. As we have seen, post-humanist scholarship has a tendency to “flatten” ontological considerations (Davis et al., 2019), placing the ontological sense-making of spiders on par with that of horses and humans (e.g. Haraway, 2016). In the climate classroom, several empirical studies have shown that flattened ontologies do powerful work in connecting students with the living world (e.g. Carvalho et al., 2020; Dumit, 2014; Verlie, 2020). However, echoing the critique levied by Indigenous scholars in their own community-based empirical studies (Bang & Marin, 2015; Marin & Bang, 2018), this comes with a risk of discounting unique features of marginalized human experiences, particularly the racial and gendered dynamics in play in climate breakdown. Our critique takes a different, perhaps complementary angle to that put forward by Indigenous scholars: we highlight a uniquely human capacity to reflect on and own one’s sense of being in the world in times of crisis. We examined important features of ontological sense-making for persons with marginalized facticities, including the bodily impact of climate education as a vector for ontological questioning, and the temptation and resistance to seriousness (inauthenticity) in response, that has until now been overlooked in the debates amongst different perspectives on more-than-human frameworks.

Implications for environmental education

Our study examined the impact of classroom practices on the identity formation of students with marginalized facticities. Although this study does not take an Action Research lens, as scholars steeped in an Action Research background, we pay special heed to the implications of our research findings for our own practice. As phenomenologists, we also attempt to draw out the implications these findings may have on increasing the inclusivity of environmental classrooms for other educators, focusing on transferability rather than generalizability.

First, the identity crisis experienced by our participant was intense. She needed space, time and resources to process her experiences and work on her ontological sense-making. As climate educators, it would be beneficial provide all three, with particular attention to students with marginalized identities. From our own practice, we have found that space can be offered in the form of personalized asynchronous reflection practices (e.g. journaling), office hours for student who prefer to process with their teacher in a confidential space, literal space by leaving the door open and allowing free movement of students in and out of the classroom, and allowing for quiet, reflective participation in class rather than enforcing spoken participation as a method of assessment. Within the scope of what is allowed by the academic rules and regulations, time can be offered by spacing out and reducing assessments, offering more generous extension policies for assignments for students, with particular regard to marginalized students, and offering climate education in semester or yearlong courses rather than courses condensed over a few weeks. Resources can be offered in the form of diversified reading and viewing lists (literature and films) that can help marginalized students situate their experience in its historical and social context, with space for students to suggest their own reading and lecture topics.

Second, our findings invite the inclusion of existential phenomenological questions in the climate curriculum, enabling students to reflect on the embodied impact of difficult environmental topis on their ontological sense-making. Reflection tools such as journals can be scaffolded to include existential phenomenological prompts drawing attention to the body, the sense of being, consciousness and identity. Existential dimensions of being in times of environmental breakdown might usefully be included in classroom materials.

Third, from an intra-action perspective, our findings echo Verlie’s (2020) empirical findings: the impact of climate classroom discussions for marginalized students have the potential to move beyond academic discourse, to become real, tangible and tie into their sense of self and belonging. When that which is discussed in class connects directly to students’ lived experience, particularly when this relates to difficult realities, negative emotional reactions are likely. As such, climate educators need to ensure that marginalized students are not treated as teachable moments. For example, African students should not be expected to perform the emotional labor of explaining life with droughts to White students—but must be given the opportunity to do so if they so wish. Those in positions of power (i.e. teachers) within the climate classroom can ensure that students with tangible connections to climate disaster are encouraged to share as much or little as they wish, while being supported through emotional reactions within the classroom.

Conclusion

In response to our research questions, we learned from an existential phenomenological analysis of a marginalized identity in crisis in the climate classroom that we can understand ontological sense-making and identity formation as a complex, fluid process of negotiating the ambiguity between seriousness (being bound up in facicity) and nothingness (freedom). This nuances intersectional and post-humanist frameworks for environmental education by focusing on the inner processes of students with marginalized identities. These findings invite us to consider reflective and educational practices that leave space, time and resources for those students to focus on their personal sense-making.

Our study comprised several limitations. First, the depth of analysis in our study comes at the expense of breadth and generalizability. As such, further research might usefully examine the themes raised in our study within a broader population with different categories of facticities. Second, our study was conducted in a Western cultural context—even though our participant is part-African, she was socialized in a Western culture, as were both authors. This comes with the risk of blind spots regarding African and Indigenous perspectives on questions of being and identity. It might be interesting to pursue these questions for further research with African and Indigenous scholars. Third, this study operationalized an existential phenomenological research framework which requires significantly more knowledge of phenomenology than the original interpretive phenomenological analysis method of Smith (2017). Therefore, while it gets closer to the heart and potential of the phenomenological project, it comes with a heavy use of complex terminology, making it more challenging to translate into classroom practice.

We suggest that existential phenomenology can be used as one of an array of qualitative approaches, to enrich and bring new insights into existing themes within environmental education scholarship. Whereas we focused on ontological sense-making, further research might instead focus on situating participant narratives in their cultural context, using ethnographic and auto-ethnographic designs. Likewise, future research could fruitfully investigate the concepts of place-identity and place attachment in the context of environmental education. This could be particularly relevant for individuals who hold multiple conceptions of “home” around the world. Such research could examine how diverse, transnational experiences of “home” inform individuals’ environmental identities. The field of environmental education research stands to benefit from diversifying research approaches used to investigate the relationships between environmental education and student identities.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the assistance of Anouk Rialan in preparing the transcripts for this study, and Nuria Mainer Millán in proof-reading and preparing the revisions to the literature review.

Disclosure statement

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