Epistemic and Existential, E2-sustainability. On the need to un-learn for re-learning in contemporary spaces

Abstract

This paper contributes to a re-thinking, un-learning, and re-learning agenda by interrogating some core ideas and assumptions related to contemporary societal and planetary concerns, including concerns within the research enterprise. Transcending the first step that calls for pausing and re-thinking, this paper troubles universalizing vocabularies that naturalize conceptual framings and ways/waves-of-being in research and educational practices. Furthermore, it illuminates the ways in which scholarship has become complicit in re-cycling and re-creating reductionistic ideas that loop back into educational practices. Its overarching argument aligns with an emergent call within research and higher education for going beyond its universalizing monolithic ethos that has become naturalized in contemporary digital-analog entangled existence. Framed as alternative theorizing that is variously termed post/decolonial/southern thinking, these emergent perspectives are part of the introspection that is critically needed in mainstream academia, in particular in the Learning Sciences. This paper argues that this is needed to contribute to bothEpistemicandExistentialsustainability, i.e.,E2-sustainability. E2-sustainability enables transcending issues of environmental-, economic-, social-, and cultural-sustainability: E2-sustainability assumes and includes these. Marked by alternative conceptual framings and pushed by amobile gaze, this theoretical paper argues that major and minor shifts in thinking are needed for attending to contemporary societal and planetary challenges. E2-sustainability in the scholarly realm has relevance for transcending ethnocentrically framed biases and siloed framings of contemporary education and higher education, including teacher education. Troubling key, taken-for-granted universalizing truths and using the areas of language and educational scholarship as illustrative points of departure, this paper raises concerns regarding the outsourcing of important educational agendas to technologies, including digitalization on the one hand and concepts that build on contentious assumptions on the other hand. It is suchdefaultoutsourcing that is troubled through a curiosity-drivenmultiversalandglobal-centricmobile gaze wherein both northern and southern knowledge-regimes need to be privileged. The theorizing presented in this paper builds on a Second Wave of Southern Perspectives (SWaSP) framing that has relevance for both north-centric and south-centric scholarship, including writing research. Explicitly multi/inter/cross/trans-disciplinary, this work is relevant to Epistemic and Existential sustainability given its non-allegiance to the imaginaries of mono-disciplinarity, nation-state essences, or universalisms.