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

Universal versus pluriversal education

The significance of education in the pursuit of social and environmental justice is widely acknowledged. However, a lack of involvement of indigenous and other alternative forms of knowledge persists in most national education plans, confining the notion of justice to uniform social models, only differentiated in terms of economic wealth or poverty. The comprehensive universal neoliberal project outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (Weber, 2017) proposes, through SDG4, a broad commitment to ‘quality education for all’ – instrumental for poverty eradication – without recognizing the value of diverse worldviews and knowledges in the creation of a culturally pertinent education, which should incorporate nuanced attention to localized social and environmental challenges, colonized indigenous cultures, and grounded modes of communication when designing curricula. Instead, setting a global standard of quality positions global education and knowledge within the Western ideology of modernization that tends to homogenize cultures into the frame of neoliberal capitalism, which conceives nature as an economic resource, alienates humans from other species and from each other, and informed uncritical conceptualizations of development and progress that disregard the possibilities of being otherwise. These globalizing goals align with Enlightenment thinking, a binary-based schemata according to which education liberates the individuals, without considering the structures in which they are placed, or the social groups and cultures to which they belong. Steaming from the individual-society binary, programmes of emancipation in education are for individual beneficiaries rather than co-created with collective groups, within their own path and in respect of their cultural traditions.

Therefore, while SDG4 strives to support social justice by promoting equal access to education for the most disadvantaged groups, it does not acknowledge the ontological and epistemic diversity existing in the world and, consequently, the need for intersectional justice that must be addressed through alternative forms of learning and knowledge production (Jeong & Hardy, 2023). SDG4 positions Indigenous peoples merely as vulnerable groups needing education through an assimilationist approach (Acharya et al., 2019), and does not make any reference to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) adopted in 2007, stating that ‘Indigenous peoples have the right to establish and control their educational systems and institutions providing education in their own languages, in a manner appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching and learning’ (Art. 14).

The implementation of the UNDRIP in consonant with SGD4 goals thus needs more scrutiny, and the absence of references to epistemic rights that are already recognized internationally reveals the pervasiveness of the coloniality matrix in global institutions (Hohenthal & Minoia, 2022). Scholarly debates have drawn attention to intercultural programmes in education institutions and particularly in intercultural universities, and to their role in elevating epistemic diversity to a core value at all levels of education (Arias-Gutiérrez & Minoia, 2023; McCowan, 2016). Further, the urgency for diversifying the voices and experiences in education – from pedagogical design to strategic implementation – is vital, particularly within the territorial turn (Bryan, 2012; Svampa, 2019), in which education engenders and sustains projects with the potential to resist structural socio-environmental injustices and land dispossessions, and move toward more regenerative futures (Castro-Sotomayor & Minoia, 2023).

An increasing interdisciplinary scholarship has been foregrounding the need to investigate and expand – in theory and practice – a pluriversal education, that is, a kind of education that embraces the plurality of ways of being, knowing, and acting that are historically situated and ecologically embedded (e.g. Baker, 2012; De Oliveira Andreotti, 2015; López, 2014; Mato, 2015; Shultz, 2015). At the core of this inquiry lies an urgency to understand education as a way to grapple with and advance epistemic pluralism, interculturality, and a geopolitics of knowledge that promotes the revalorization of subaltern knowledges (Cervantes-Soon & Carrillo, 2016), of Indigenous cosmovisions and activism (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Rappaport, 2005), and of human, cultural, and land rights (Latta & Wittman, 2012; Schmelkes, 2014).

Pluriversal education owes much to Freire’s pedagogy (Freire, 1995), which has greatly influenced academic-activists and educators for decades. Freirean pedagogy highlights the theoretical inconsistency of an education disconnected from practice and emphasizes the need for cultivating relationships that foster exchanges of critical, grounded, and emancipatory knowledge (Johnston & Goodman, 2006). These relationships are fundamental in multicultural spaces, and become even more crucial in decolonial struggles, especially in situations of settler colonialism (Cannon, 2012). The pluriverse represents a space of coexistence, that may be intrinsically conflictive but also open to foster relationships among diverse worlds, searching for a future free from exclusion, marginalization, and oppression. Embracing the pluriverse entails the fervent recognition of the existence of multiple worlds, which are ‘partially connected but radically different’, and whose realization requires ‘an entirely different ethics of life, of being-doing-knowing’ (Escobar, 2020, p. 27).

Interculturality and territory

As anticipated, pluriversal education springs from two major concepts, interculturality and territory. As a core component of Indigenous movements in the Andean region of Latin America, interculturality is a decolonial option that offers an-other thinking grounded in border epistemology, creating ways of understanding, feeling, and living otherwise that open transdisciplinary horizons (Mignolo & Escobar, 2010). This notion of interculturality profoundly differs from the one used to address cultural diversity among supranational bodies such as the European Union (EU) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) (Aman, 2015). The kind of interculturality deployed in mainstream institutions is ‘functional interculturality’, which does not question the predominant neoliberal socio-political model becoming, thus, a ‘strategy that favors social cohesion, assimilating subordinate sociocultural groups to the hegemonic culture’ leaving intact the power relations that shape and inform the ‘tensions and conflicts among diverse social groups and movements that focus on socio-identity issues’ (Ferrão, 2013, pp. 151–152). Furthermore, according to Walsh (2012), functional interculturality appropriates diversities and negates them, maintaining structures that racialize, marginalize, and dehumanize minorities, i.e. within the still-present matrix of the coloniality of power. A radical interculturality, on the contrary, actively recognizes the ‘coloniality of power’ as an ongoing suppression and exploitation of racial, ethnic, epistemic, and linguistic diversity exacerbated by the European conquest and colonization (López, 2014; Quijano, 2000); hence, it questions and helps reverse these power relations and is, therefore, necessary for a process of decolonial emancipation. Moreover, a core interculturality principle is that relationships are not limited to social life but rather ‘encompass all life processes, human and nonhuman [and] entail not only human conviviality but rather a conviviality among all beings of nature’ (Gómez, 2017, p. 136). Therefore, within the interculturality frame, notions of culture, self, and community emerge at the intersection between the symbolic and the biotic. This expanded sense of interculturality (Murphy & Castro-Sotomayor, 2020) promotes a politics of identity that thrives in diversity and conceives difference as a foundational element of more inclusive, just, and equitable systems that benefit both humans and nonhumans.

Geographical notions of territory, place/emplacement, and localization are other central concepts to understand pluriversal education. Territory, in a conceptualization offered by Latin American scholars (e.g. Lopes de Souza, 2016; López et al., 2017), is a space defined and delimited by and through power relations, and forms and names a site of grounded cultural, political, and communicative dynamics with the potential to shape education as an emancipatory project to decolonize political spaces and nature (Castro-Sotomayor, 2020b; Escobar, 2010; Ulloa, 2001). Massey (2005) has also argued that place is a relational process, in continuous construction, and open to diverse trajectories; features that are important to avoid the traps of ideas of closed territorialism that could refuse, exclude, or expel specific groups based on intersectional characterizations such as ethnicity, religion, race, and class.

Place and localization are also important in situations of displacement and reterritorialization experienced by urbanized indigenous peoples, refugees, or diasporic communities. In these cases, learning from land memories and recuperated (hi)stories may support communitarian resistance to safeguard cultures, knowledges, and prospects of return from the risk of oblivion and erasure. Within settler colonial context, pluriversal place-based education should take into account all contextual entanglements (of historical experiences, denominations, myths, beliefs, artefacts, infrastructures, non-human beings, etc.) in its attempt to decolonize the mind, reclaim and form sovereign territories, and recalibrate human relations to land (Tuck & Yang, 2012). In light of this, spatial phenomena and territoriality may be understood through more complex and dynamic articulations, thus beyond direct proximity connections, and in terms of multiscalarity and processual rescaling (Minoia & Mölkänen, 2021). It is imperative, therefore, to advance an education that incorporates radical interculturality, to ensure equal representation of diverse epistemologies, knowledges, and pedagogical practices that respond to both local and translocal socio-environmental realities and experiences of connecting to places.

Interrogating what is to be human and how self and groups are positioned in relation to the larger body of the territory, has implications for the design and implementation of education programmes. Considering ecocultural identities emerging from human and more-than-human entanglements requires new forms of governing spaces (Castro-Sotomayor, 2020a; De la Cadena, 2015; Latta, 2014; Milstein & Castro-Sotomayor, 2020), which need emplaced pluriversal education as a seedling of plural voices – human and nonhuman – whose existence may be at the edge of extinction. Telling is the link between the disappearance of a language and the loss of biodiversity (Skutnabb-Kangas, 2003). Concerning then is the lack of attention to the cross-extinction of languages and biodiversity (Danto et al., 2022). Further, the diversity of languages and their regenerative environmental ramifications are oftentimes underestimated within national legislations, despite the fact that recognition to the knowledges, innovations, and practices of indigenous and local communities is essential to safeguard, protect, maintain, and recuperate ecosystems that better respond to in-place ecocultural practices that spring from traditional ecological knowledge. Without a comprehensive understanding of the plurality of knowledges, ways of life and practices, and radical interculturality, well-intentioned educational programmes may end up reproducing models of neoliberal multiculturalism and ideas of primitive otherness, which fail to promote equal relations among cultures and their worldviews.

Grounded projects in pluriversal education

Education is essential to advance the pluriverse as an intellectual and political project. In tandem with pluriversal social movements, schools have an incredible potential to drive change within the communities in which they are located, and this happens through the work of activist educators who ‘actively engage with ongoing territorial struggles and the politics of ecocultural identity by (re)positioning the more-than-human world as essential to the process of sense-making and the elaboration of non-anthropocentric conceptualisations of voice and agency’ (Castro-Sotomayor & Minoia, 2023, p. 105). This active engagement entails designing and deploying decolonized/ing pedagogical strategies bounded to spaces of coloniality where the state systematically controls labour, nature, bodies, and minds through various forms of epistemological and political violence – legal, military, or geographic (Gómez-Barris, 2017). Within these colonized spaces, a pluriversal education seeks to advance a radical project on (intercultural) education that reflects the principles of relationality among lands, beings, and knowledges (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018).

This Special Issue aims to advance the reflection on and practice of radical intercultural education projects, and their role in advancing socio-environmental justice as a central way to moving towards the pluriverse. Featuring a range of geographical and historical locations and transnational networks, from the Ecuadorian Amazonia to a Palestinian refugee camp, to Indigenous people in Brazil and Mexico to inclusive initiatives in the United States and Costa Rica, the empirically grounded strategies compiled in this Issue go beyond critique and resistance. They introduce concrete practices addressing place-based pedagogy (El Masri; Hohenthal & Veintie), land reclamation (Minoia et al.), gender-inclusive interculturality (Cadaval Narezo et al.), interspecies empathy (Korsant), language revitalization and epistemic disobedience (Audley & D’Souza; Durazzo).

Conceiving pedagogy as a vehicle toward social justice, human and more-than-human well-being, and ecological sustainability, requires understanding the effects of educational policies and institutions on hampering or promoting indigenous cosmologies, languages, and ways of knowledge production. Hohenthal and Veinte show the limits of the current intercultural bilingual education in Ecuador. Their participatory research with upper secondary schooling in Pastaza province discusses place-based learning, and identify and analyse the diverse learning spaces in the everyday lives of the Indigenous youth. These grounded observations allow them to engage with diverse knowledges on socio-environmental issues explicitly connected to the local impact of extractivist industries’ operations on their territory. Their research shows how standardized (imposed) pedagogies approach and discuss social environmental issues mostly as detached global phenomena and argues for school to be a decolonial space where unappreciated or non-dominant epistemologies set the stage for pluriversal understandings.

The institutional constraints play also against the academic development and inclusion of indigenous women. Cadaval, Méndez, Hernández, and Castro-Sotomayor’s account shows how gender informs indigenous women professional, political, and community trajectories within Mexican intercultural universities. They advocate for elevating Indigenous women’s academic contributions as essential to support epistemological diversity and advancing the decolonization of thought by building connections between academic theorizations and local practices. This experience speaks loudly about the relevance and increasingly urgent inclusion of indigenous languages into universities’ curriculum (Walter & Guerzoni, 2020).

The meaningfulness of place in knowledge coproduction subsists also in places of displacement, where design and implementation of pluriversal pedagogical strategies are part of resistance. Yafa El Masri walks us through the labyrinthic streets of Bourj Albarejenah, a refugee camp in Southern Beirut, to show how Palestinian refugees develop a camp-pedagogy that utilizes art and creativity to maintain alive the memory of Palestine, their homeland. Through autoethnography and interviews, the author navigates spaces that are created outside the form of standard schooling offered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and based on the national Lebanese curriculum. This format, while providing essential educational services, limits and hinders Palestinians to recall their specific history and territorial grievances. In the process of decolonizing their education, educators use the camp walls as learning spaces. Through graffiti, posters, names of shops, and other signs recalling Palestinian histories and geographies, they have developed a place-based pedagogy that provides children with education that acknowledges their story, and responds to their unique livelihood as a displaced community. In this way, pluriversal education is political as pedagogy can be interpreted as a way of resistance.

The political dimension in education is also central to Minoia, Tapia, and Kaukonen Lindholm’s argument, as their reflection on living forests (kawsa sacha) demonstrates how the Kichwa indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Amazonia have negotiated their cultural and political participation in the country’s intercultural education initiatives. Political negotiation, Minoia et al. state, requires land attachment and pedagogical practices involving direct immersion in the forest, exercising observation in nature, and participating in rituals and daily livelihood practices under the guidance of shamans, to foster engagement in environmental protection and community cohesion. This marks a radical shift towards a pluriversal educational model that acknowledges the remnants of the culture, the voices of the ancestors, spirituality, colonial history, and the land; a model that reacts against national education strategies promoting cultural assimilation into urban lifestyles, sustained financially by extractivism.

The plurality of worlds goes in parallel with the diversity of languages whose differences spring from the places from/within which they are part of and whose vitality is symptomatic of biodiversity. With emphasis on curriculum and language, Leandro Durazzo investigates the process through which the Tuxá people, from Rodelas, in the Brazilian state of Bahia, are revitalizing their native language, Dzubukuá. His case study demonstrates how language preservation and survival contribute to the preservation of a plurality of cosmologies as language goes beyond the linguistic realm to encompass a cosmopolitical vision that includes ancestrality and territoriality enacted by their communication with supernatural beings, the encantados.

Clate Korsant explores environmental education in rural Costa Rica. Using concepts of ecopedagogy, he engages with Paulo Freire’s work in his ethnographic work in the Osa Peninsula and demonstrates how pedagogical practices such as theatrical and playful embodiment of endangered species decentres the human and offer ways toward interspecies empathy. While limited by the standards of international aid and non-governmental development agendas, Korsant reminds us that education has the potential to generate ecological awareness and create sustainability-minded citizens in a region that is shifting away from agrarian economy towards one of (eco)tourism and conservation-minded land management.

In a different context, in the traditional Abenaki land in northeastern United States, Audley and D’Souza present an example on how pedagogies could render settler colonialism visible while dialoguing across pluriversal perspectives to address the current environmental crises. In a classroom of non-indigenous students, activist-teachers question the structures of knowledge proposed by the standard curriculum, that has eliminated any type of local Indigenous knowledge and maintain students detached from the land. Hence, together with environmental science teachers, they engage with ‘epistemic disobedience’ through a cultural project of rehabilitation of the language of the land on the land, starting by learning the Western Abenaki language (although formally considered extinct) from indigenous teachers. Meanwhile, teachers have also started actions of cultural appreciation and gardening, in collaboration with members of the Abenaki community.

Conclusion

During the past few years, various international organizations have developed global education programmes as a means to promote global citizenship among new generations and to foster cooperation and peace across cultural differences. However, cultures are often depicted within the framework of national states, overlooking their extraordinarily diverse richness and the challenges faced by minority cultures striving for survival. While we argue that those projects are aligned with principles of functional interculturality, in contrast, through this special issue we aim to demonstrate some experiences of pluriversal education led by activist educators allied with members of minorities’ communities seeking recognition for their epistemic and territorial rights in the face of official state policies.

Decolonizing curricula demands to restore subaltern cultures and challenge and rectify prejudiced views against ancestral local knowledge, often perceived as hindering (neoliberal) progress within a (racialized) nation. Conversely, the endeavour for pluriversal education signifies preserving the diverse cultural identities of oppressed populations who are in a battle for their very survival. Pluriversal education programmes emphasize linguistic and cultural fortification, along with fostering a connection with the land and territory, which instils a sense of responsibility in new generations for environmental preservation and shielding against ongoing destruction. The case studies in this volume offer a way to rethink the relationship between the local and the global, highlighting local nodes of struggle. The local/global duality contributes to a global perspective in understanding the dynamics shaping the geopolitics of knowledge. Together, contributors to this volume offer a hopeful glimpse on how education otherwise looks in different areas, if we decisively embark on shifting paradigms of education, development, and globalization towards a broader, more inclusive pluriverse.

Contributing authors, which include indigenous scholars, illustrate examples of activist struggles, ranging from those in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon to those in indigenous territories in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the United States. In some cases, there have been programmes coordinated with the state, albeit mostly dysfunctional, while in others, they have been independent experiments, mostly carried out by activists despite the non-collaborative nature of school institutions, like those in the United States or in Costa Rica, or Lebanon. In these latter cases, the effort is significant, and the programmes implemented are often fragile, requiring solidarity support.

At this very moment of great tensions and wars, it is not easy to maintain hope for support towards cultural and socio-environmental justice, and the very survival of many oppressed people. Palestinian people, in particular, are enduring an unprecedented level of military and colonial violence leading to more than 26,000 deaths, many of which are children. Besides various forms of collective punishment by Israel against the entire population, particularly in Gaza but also in other areas, in response to the atrocious attack to Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023 perpetrated by specific groups (Hamas), some donors have declared their intention to defund UNRWA (Micinski, 2024), an organization that Yafa El Masri has presented in her article. The operational blockade of UNRWA would lead to the cessation of many essential services to the Palestinian refugees, including schools in the occupied territories and refugee camps. We hope the international community will not abandon the Palestinian people in this time of extreme humanitarian crisis. This project of discontinuation of the assistance provided by UNRWA shall be rejected, and the humanitarian work be strengthened.

All efforts need to go to support equal justice and democratic coexistence of all peoples in multicultural and plurinational countries. Decolonisation and epistemic freedom are the ONLY routes to a just peace, freedom for all and a habitable planet. (Decolonising Development, 2024)

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

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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).