This is a part of a travelling conversation

I come from a place of thinking about sustainability and climate change in higher education (HE) and how education can support and enable learners to participate in a world characterised by complex sustainability challenges. Thus, my questioning leads me to the main question of how can universities be places that actively respond to these challenges? This piece is therefore situated around my thinking of Western higher education institutions and their academic cultures.

Care of earth, care of people, return of the surplus – Principles of Permaculture Ethics

My recent thinking around HE has been coloured by my interest in permaculture – permanent agriculture where social and economic, not just ecological, patterns are included in the equation – and in permaculture design principles. Could the principles and ethos behind them help to reimagine academic cultures? At first glance, these principles seem to offer generative ways to think upon what practices could be sustainable in HE academic culture. Permaculture design takes to heart that engaging in and with a complex world is inherently unpredictable. Uncertainty is a basic characteristic of life on our planet. As such, it seems like following a specific recipe or just choosing the right ingredients probably won’t get us so far. Instead, we have to pay attention how things are connected.

At the heart of permaculture design is the idea that ‘when we design to meet our needs, we should do so in a way that supports the ecosystem as a whole’. Long-term sustainability thus comes about by building and maintaining beneficial relationships which one must consciously design depending on our context. And we are all designers. So, as a designer in an unpredictable world, what is the first thing we do?

Slow down. Notice the landscape in which you are interacting. Observe. What are the patterns in space where different systems or media meet and where cooperative relationships are forged and resources exchanged? Use your edge. What are the patterns in time? What other forms of time besides linear time do we notice? Share the abundance. In what ways does sharing surplus help us to rethink our relationships ‘in times that are deeply antiecological, and in many ways anticollective’*? Use your energy where you can affect most change. Where can I contribute most?

At its core, these design practices are underpinned by an ethos of care. This is not a mere application of theory into practice. Care is doing. Care is everything that is done, not just something that we do. A permaculture care ethics means that ‘we are in relations of mutual care’**. As speculative ethicist Maria Puig de la Bellacasa puts it, rather than aiming for a moral disposition this is a vision for the everyday mundane doings of ‘maintenance and repair’ that sustain life.

How then is permaculture generative for thinking about academic culture? In an academic world overrun by the logic of productionism and its respective linear temporality, a permaculture care ethos entails ‘making time’ to get involved in a diversity of timelines (remember we have slow down and observe?). This disrupts the restless and efficient anthropocentric temporalities of technology, allowing ‘unproductive’ and slow experiences that have been marginalized by this dominant futuristic drive to be seen***. A sustainable [academic] culture notices diverse temporalities, the ones involved in relations of mutual care. What academia is thought to be affects the ways in which it is cared for, and vice versa, modes of care have effects in what academia becomes (altered from p.170). If we start to observe, slow down, use our edge, what would that mean for how we teach,
6 how we research, how we engage with communities, how we engage with each other?

There is something in these principles that points strongly to a culture that is regenerative, leaving something better than you find it, supporting the emergence of cultures that care. Modes of care have effects in what academia becomes, and thus acknowledging the relationships of care in which we find ourselves can start to generate caring participation, or regenerative collective caring, in the world of academia.

Sanna Barrineau, written March 2020, published here March 2021

A response to this was published on Tuesday the 16th of March:

Week 11: Slow down and care, Sachiko Ishihara

*Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, p.165

**Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, p.161

***Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, p.177

– A Travelling Conversation

During the Spring of 2020, just when the Corona pandemic was starting to unfold, some of us at CEFO – The Center for Environment and Development Studies Research Forum, started talking about writing something together in a different way. Instead of everyone sitting together or working on the same document to come up with a single voiced narrative – the common approach to co-authoring – we wanted to try something new. If we had a different writing process, would it change the written outcome? How would how we write change what we write? 

We came up with the idea of a “traveling conversation”, inspired by a method witnessed at an Anticipation conference in Oslo recently. Everyone participating would get a common question, in our case “What are sustainable academic cultures?” One person, let’s say A, would start by writing a response to this question, and then pass it on to another person, B. Then, B would write a piece responding both to the overarching question and to A’s response. The third person C, however, will only receive the piece that B wrote, and write a response based on that. The following Person D will only receive what C wrote, and so on. The last person sends it back to A, which A writes a response to, and the circle is complete.  

The rule was to keep the response short, around 1 page or 500 words, and then to write and forward your response quickly, within a week once it’s passed on to you.

Why “sustainable academic cultures”? The exact question had lodged its way into our thoughts by way of a keynote talk topic one of our colleagues (Keri) was invited to give, but had already been floating around in different forms – given the nature of our academic work around climate change, this question proved persistent. As a topic with multiple layers, many ways to approach it, and with the inspiring Anticipation conference fresh in mind, it was a simple exchange between colleagues over coffee that pushed us to engage in this brief and rich writing venture – perhaps something that was not strictly “academic” could enable some generative ways of thinking! 

And so here it is. The traveling conversation is now in your hands. We pass it on to you. What are sustainable academic cultures? What could it be and how could we foster such a culture? Let us know if you write a response.

The texts will be published once a week on Tuesdays:

Week 10: A culture that cares? Sanna Barrineau

Week 11: Slow down and care, Sachiko Ishihara

Week 12: World-making conversations, Isak Stoddard

Week 13: Encounters in Pandemic academia, Lakin Anderson

Week 14: Working with impossibility, Keri Facer

Week 15: Weaving, guts and darkness, Sanna Barrineau