Planetary Praxis and Pedagogy

R. C. MITCHELL AND S. A. MOORE 2. PlAneTARY PRAXIS AnD PeDAGoGY Transdisciplinary Approaches to Environmental Sustainability LOCAL TO GLOBAL CONTEXT Our chapter presents a thematic analysis of a large, qualitative dataset collected during a two-year “critical ethnography” (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2005, p. 324), at one Ontario, Canada university campus.1 As social science researchers in a political and cultural context increasingly viewed with skepticism and dismay throughout the world (Ralston Saul, 2008; Suzuki, 2010), we draw upon epistemological, ontological and methodological approaches from across and outside disciplinary boundaries, including Indigenous frameworks, to introduce and understand our study. The investigation focused on “transdisciplinarity” as an organizing principle for both educational reform and building contemporary research partnerships, and a subset of data focusing on “environmental sustainability” is included. Our purpose was to examine and analyze how these concepts were being epistemologically and methodologically defined and deployed at our University. Our approach echoes that of Australian sustainability scientists Brown et al. (2010, p. 4), and their efforts to tackle the wicked problems presented by climate change wherein they propose “transdisciplinarity” as the “collective understanding of an issue [that] is created by including the personal, the local and the strategic, as well as specialized contributions to knowledge”. Open transdisciplinarity, they observe, includes traditional disciplines, but goes further than multi-disciplinarity to include all validated constructions of knowledge, their worldviews and methods of inquiry. Ontario’s population of 13.6 million people comprises nearly 40% of Canada’s latest census, and 44 public universities and colleges have evolved to support the province’s post-secondary education (PSE) demands. As part of a reform agenda in 2012, the provincial Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities requested that each institution submit a Strategic Mandate Agreement (SMA) proposal – an outline in response to “three priority objectives” requiring each institution to avoid duplication of programming under their rubric of “differentiation” (Government of Ontario, 2013).2 These differentiation objectives are similar to many of the goals found in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) educational research, particularly those of the United Kingdom and Australia, as governments throughout the world grapple with fallout from decreased revenues after 2008’s global economic meltdown (OECD, 2014). R. C. Mitchell & S. A. Moore (Eds.), Planetary Praxis & Pedagogy, 9–40. © 2015 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. R. C. MITCHELL & S. A. MOORE Canada’s national association for university faculty members reported that these differentiation agreements represent “one of the most difficult periods since the formation of CAUT in 1951” (Canadian Association of University Teachers, 2012). Within the government’s third objective, for example, through top-down efforts Ontario’s PSE sector is being compelled to “focus on productivity, innovation, and sustainability through differentiation (strengths and areas of excellence), cost management through shared/integrated services, managing enrolment and program growth, improving productivity through teaching, technology, infrastructure, and program and degree organization innovations” (Government of Ontario, 2013, Introduction). CAUT’s outgoing executive director, James L. Turk, sharply criticized the reform policy: In short the Minister is attempting to force presidents to reshape their institutions’ priorities to meet his vision of what universities should be, as laid out in his consultation paper and elaborated in his consultation process. The Minister’s mandatory timeline of doing this over the summer ensures there is not adequate opportunity for proper consultation within each institution nor time for proper involvement of the universities’ collegial governance structures. (CAUT, 2012, para. one) Canada’s national newspaper further reported that the implementation of the differentiation policy framework was Ontario’s “boldest step yet to compel universities and colleges to make hard choices about how they spend their resources…a draft policy designed to stretch limited provincial dollars by narrowing some schools’ missions” (Bradshaw, 2013, para. two). Within our own University’s agreement, the central organizing principle is “transdisciplinarity”, a concept which framed the 2013 draft document through its 24 separate citations, and through the seven that remained in its final iteration (Brock University and Ontario Ministry of Training, College and Universities, 2014, p. 3). Our University has now committed its 18,750 students and 582 faculty members to a “special focus on transdisciplinary research hubs highlighting areas of strength that contribute to the social, economic, and cultural development of the Niagara Region”. Further on, under “Areas of Institutional Strength” the University has pledged to focus resources “on transdisciplinary community-based research with five new transdisciplinary hubs” (2014, p. 7): • • • • • The Brock-Niagara Centre for Health and Well-Being; The Institute for Advanced Bio-manufacturing; The Lifespan Development Research Institute; The Social Justice Research Institute; and The Centre for Sustainability: A Transdisciplinary Space for Transformative Change. The above final new research Centre chosen for “differentiation” from all other remaining PSE institutions in the province is Brock’s ‘Centre for Sustainability’ 10 PLANETARY PRAXIS AND PEDAGOGY (now known as the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre) where we were engaged as founding members from 2010 to 2012. As Freirean educators and researchers interested in taking forward our focus on children, we were initially enthusiastic to contribute to new climate change research by linking our previous work on human rights and transdisciplinary partnerships (Mitchell, 2003, 2005, 2010, 2011, 2015; Mitchell & Moore, 2012; Moore & Mitchell, 2008, 2009, 2011a, 2011b; Moore, Tulk, & Mitchell, 2005). The international intellectual and political scaffolding for these developments actually took shape in December 2002 when the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 57/254 and launched a Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD, 2005–2014 by designating the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as lead (United Nations, 2002; see also Kahn, 2010; Mitchell, 2011; Pigozzi, 2010; UNESCO, 2014a). UNESCO’s mandate for organizing the Decade encouraged member States to adopt new practices that challenge traditional educational hierarchies through promotion of: • • • • • • Interdisciplinary and holistic learning rather than subject-based learning; Values-based learning; Critical thinking rather than memorizing; Multi-method approaches: word, art, drama, debate, etc.; Participatory decision-making; and Locally relevant information, rather than national. Conversely, the same decade witnessed the largest global increase in greenhouse gas emissions ever measured, and as we craft this chapter, the beautiful planet that we humans have unconsciously taken for granted for so long appears to be dying. A spate of recent scientific studies supports this dim view including the U.N.’s own International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2014 assessment arguing that the world’s electricity must be produced by non-carbon energy sources by 2050 in order to avoid “severe, pervasive and irreversible damage” (United Nations IPCC, 2014; Carrington, 2014). They further declare that our inaction will cost humanity much more than the price of timely and concerted actions taken by those in business and government power centres. In his analysis of the innumerable challenges facing post-secondary educators interested in pursuing the U.N. Decade’s goals, Kahn (2008) observes: [L]iving beings and organic habitats are being culled and destroyed in the name of human production and consumption at staggering rates. Tree consumption for paper products has doubled over the last thirty years, resulting in about half of the planet’s forests disappearing… while throughout the oceans, global fishing has also doubled resulting in a recent report finding that approximately 90 percent of the major fish species in the world’s oceans have disappeared. Forty mile-long drift nets are routinely used to trawl the ocean bottoms, causing incalculable damage to the ocean ecosystem. Giant biomass nets, with mesh 11 R. C. MITCHELL & S. A. MOORE so fine that not even baby fish can escape them, have become the industry standard in commercial fishing and, as a result, there is expected to be no extant commercial fishery left active in the world by 2048… Further, such nets are drowning and killing about one thousand whales, dolphins, and porpoises daily, some of the very species already near extinction from centuries of commercial hunting. (Kahn, 2008, pp. 4–5) Another startling yet similar set of conclusions was provided by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and its partners in the Zoological Society of London, the Global Footprint Network, and the Water Footprint Network in their biannual Living Planet Report (World Wildlife Fund, 2014). Measuring more than 10,000 species populations, they highlight the overall global decline since 1970 of more than 50% of total numbers for amphibians, reptiles, fish, birds and mammals. The current Director General of WWF, Marco Lambertini, declares: “Heads of state need to start thinking globally [and] businesses and consumers need to stop behaving as if we live in a limitless world” (World Wildlife Fund, 2014, online). In another dismal investigation that documents the poaching of African elephants, findings indicate that more than 100,000 of these gentle co-inhabitants of our world have been slaughtered just since 2010, and simply to feed an insatiable black market for ivory in China (Wittemyer, Northrup, Blanc, Douglas-Hamilton, Omondi, & Burnham, 2014). In an investigation from the Harvard School of Public Health by Lu, Warchol, and Callahan (2014) their analysis revealed how two widely utilized pesticides from a new group known as neo-nicotinoids (those stemming from chemicals found in nicotine) were found responsible for 50% of deaths in a large sample of honeybee colonies during the winter of 2012–13 in the United States. Their findings echo research from Germany (and other Euro-states) by Benjamin (2008) that prompted the European Commission to impose a two-year ban on three of these predominantly U.S. imports while further research is carried out and reviewed (European Commission, 2013). Indeed, award-winning Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 2014; Flood & Irvine, 2009) notes how one waggish, US-based complex systems scientist named Bradley Werner presented his version of the climate apocalypse, “Is the Earth F-----d? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”, to 24,000 peers at a 2013 gathering of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco (Klein, 2014, pp. 449–450; Werner, 2014). Klein also cites a group of 21 prestigious winners of the Blue Planet Prize, including former president of Norway Gro Harlem Brundtland whose influential 1987 Report (United Nations, 1987) has provided the world’s most widely referenced definition of ‘sustainability’: development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Yet in 2012, Brundtland’s group suggested that “in the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization” (Klein, 2014, p. 22). In a similarly framed essay entitled “Can we save civilization?”, Lester Brown 12 PLANETARY PRAXIS AND PEDAGOGY of the Global Policy Institute (synopsis from Crone, 2013, pp. 13–20) offers a more hopeful dichotomy than Klein’s or Werner’s, but one that nevertheless serves as a wake-up call challenging to those of us involved in academic research and teaching to do with environmental ‘sustainability’ to do more than simply shuffle the deck chairs while padding our CV’s. Glass Half-Empty 1. Soil erosion and continent-sized dust storms visible from outer space. 2. Falling water tables from massive over-pumping of aquifers throughout the world. 3. Population growth and unprecedented, ensuing destruction of natural habitats. 4. Melting ice sheets with catastrophic flooding anticipated in low-lying areas particularly such as Vietnam and Bangladesh. 5. Shrinking mountain glaciers and the largest threat to food security in history. 6. Destruction of forests everywhere which are shrinking worldwide by 17 million acres per year. 7. Environmental and climate refugees by the advance of deserts. 8. Disappearing species resulting in the 6th largest period of extinction in geological time due to habitat destruction, climate change and pollution. 9. Spreading hunger due to rising food prices spiking to one billion in 2009 with population growth, grain used to fuel cars, and shortages in irrigation water. 10. Failing states including North Korea, Sudan and Somalia – also Iraq, Syria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo – head a growing list. Glass Half-Full 1. Wind power emerges as centrepiece of the new energy economy due to low-costs, abundance and endless capacity especially when compared to oil, gas and coal. 2. Solar power, due to increased production in the U.S., Japan, Germany – now China, Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea – doubles worldwide every two years. 3. Intensifying solar power which is one of the fastest growing sources of new energy due to its use of mirrors to concentrate sunlight – particularly in Northern African nations. Energy from the earth through geothermal resources. 4. Energy from the earth through geothermal sources as the U.S. experiences a geothermal renaissance. 5. Lighting revolution through LEDs which could save enough energy to close 700 of the world’s 2,700 coal-fired power plants. 6. Electrifying transportation as the 21st century world shifts to highbrids, all-electric and high-speed intercity rail. 7. Bicycles are back climbing from 94 million units in 2002 to 130 million in 2007. 13 R. C. MITCHELL & S. A. MOORE 8. Fish farming takes off and (while not without multiple detractors) one example is China’s aquacultural output at 31 million tonnes annually – double that of poultry. 9. India leads the world in milk production increasing five-fold since the 1970s. 10. Localization of food production driven by desires for fresh, safe and the smaller carbon footprint of local sources (also cited in Mitchell, 2013, pp. 511–512). In light of our analysis so far, it’s worth re-emphasizing Callicott’s ontology of interconnectedness from our volume’s Introduction since we agree with his basic premise that all humans “are as vortices in a flux of energy and materials, distinguishable only as ephemeral structures in that flux. We cannot – that is, we should not – conceive of ourselves as in any way independent of the natural environment” (UNESCO, 2012). Could there be additional evidence for optimism that reflects both the paradigm shift in critical thinking and the concomitant need for new behaviour regardless of the lateness of the hour? Using Brown’s “glass half-full” analogy, our short answer is ‘yes’. One significant domestic example was initiated in British Columbia in 2008 where the provincial government established North America’s first-ever carbon tax, pricing fossil-fuel emissions within a revenue neutral scheme by taking in fuel taxes while lowering personal and corporate levies – all without the sky falling on anyone’s head. Through a comparison of changes in fuel consumption, legal research from the University of Ottawa’s Sustainable Prosperity Institute (Elgie & McClay, 2013; SPI, 2013) finds that British Columbia’s “per capita consumption of fuels subject to the tax has declined by 19 percent compared to the rest of Canada”. Enacted mere months before the global markets plunged, and with an economy that draws upon fewer than five million residents, Elgie and McClay (2013) report that the province has nonetheless “kept pace with the rest of Canada. British Columbia’s experience mirrors the European experience with carbon tax shifting, and should inform the federal debate on climate change policy” (p. 1). The New York Times has observed how key stakeholders in the U.S. are also giving greater urgency and legitimacy to critical frameworks for thinking about environmental sustainability and climate change research (Smith, 2013). A global U.N. summit held in New York in September, 2014 was a watershed event if only for its hundreds of significant public demonstrations and announcements indicative of this shift. Perhaps the most significant of all declarations from that week came not from the tired delegates of the General Assembly, but from a Global Investor Statement with signatories representing 361 investors and $24 trillion in assets. This group not only recommended divestment from carbon-producing fossil fuel corporations, but took concrete steps to do so (International Investors Group on Climate Change, 2014). While these events may be too little and too late for many observers, in an unexpected twist of fate one of the main players in crafting the Statement was the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, whose Asset Management group announced they have divested nearly U.S. $1 billion in holdings from fossil fuel companies – a move that must have their forebears in the founding family of Standard Oil turning in 14 PLANETARY PRAXIS AND PEDAGOGY their graves. The divestment movement could rightly be described as student-led with a gathering momentum on more than 300 campuses over the past couple of years alone, with participants encouraging college and university endowment funds – including Harvard University (2013) – to uncouple their significant holdings from fossil fuel businesses to avoid further profiting from the release of carbon into Earth’s shared atmosphere. Such campus-based movements are one of numerous academic research/civil society partnerships, and such student-led activism has now led directly to hundreds of North American faculties reviewing their holdings and divesting from oil and gas related industries, including members from the University of Victoria Faculty Association (2014) in British Columbia who recently voted two to one to divest their pension funds. As a postscript to the U.N.’s Climate Summit, U.S. President Obama and President Xi of China signed the first climate change agreement between the two nations, and signalled a sea-change in the debate particularly for the Canadian government. One popular Internet blog from The Daily Energy Report (Esguerra, 2014) notes: After several months of negotiations, the U.S. and China have acceded to fight carbon emissions in what could lead to a global pact next year. President Obama promised broader U.S. cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and China will for the first time set a target for capping its carbon emissions. Obama is setting a new target of greenhouse gas emission reduction to 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, up from the current target of 17 percent by 2020. Xi committed China to begin reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, with the intention of trying to reach the goal sooner. (para. 1; see also Parlapiano, 2014) In the ‘glass half-full’ tradition then, we present this critical ethnography at a time of intense neo-liberal reform efforts in our provincial PSE sector while observing how similar efforts are being mirrored in institutions of higher education throughout the world. CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND PLANETARY CITIZENSHIP As we have noted previously (Mitchell & Moore, 2012; Moore & Mitchell, 2009), myopic uni-disciplinary worldviews and their narrow research agendas have been significant contributors to the current tenuous times for modern democratic states as world society drifts rudderless towards an apparent neo-liberal capitalist collapse (see also Giroux, 2010; Giroux & Searls-Giroux, 2004; Hyslop-Margison & Thayer, 2009; Luhmann, 1986). In one of his many seminal texts, Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy, Kincheloe (2010) emphasizes how “we live in an era of disinformation – self-interested data distributed by those with the most power and resources” (p. vii). “Critical pedagogy”, he contends, “is a complex notion that asks much of educators and students who embrace it … critical knowledge seeks to connect with the corporeal and the emotional in a way that understands at multiple levels and 15 R. C. MITCHELL & S. A. MOORE seeks to assuage human suffering” (Kincheloe, 2010, pp. 8–9; also Kincheloe, 2008, 2001). He argues “[c]ritical educational knowledge emerges neither from subjects nor from objects but from a dialectical relationship between the knower (subject) and the known (object)” (Kincheloe, 2010, p. 29). The values espoused by Kincheloe are those of world-renowned Brazilian educator and 20th century intellectual Paulo Freire, and his writings now take our discussion into a pedagogy of sustainability – the “ecopedagogy” movement noted by Bowers and Apffel-Marglin (2008, p. viii), Kahn (2010) and others, and for which the coming generation will be held to greater account than the one departing. In their trenchant critique of Freire, Bowers and Apffel-Marglin remind us that in his final written work, he urged educational reformers to fully understand the implications of the environmental crisis. They also warn us that “it is even more important to understand that he did not recognize that the Western cultural assumptions that are the basis of his classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed cannot be reconciled without addressing the cultural roots of the ecological crisis” (2008, p. viii). The major limitation with Freire’s ideas, claim these authors, is being “reproduced in the writings of his followers” and as such they argue some of the blame for the current planetary crisis must be placed at his own feet (ibid.). Their wholesale jettison of Freire’s half-century of anti-capitalist critique seems a bit of a stretch though since the ‘Western’ assumptions about education and capitalist expansion upon which his body of critique was founded had been readily transported and redeployed for some time previous to his work. It should also be pointed out that each re-deployment has either ignored or expunged altogether the ontological assumptions present in Indigenous cultures noting how all humans, those in the east, west, north, and south – along with all other living creatures including plants and microscopic entities – draw from the same web of life for our brief temporal journeys (Albrecht, Freeman, & Higginbotham, 1998; Apgar, Argumedo, & Allen, 2009; Arabena, 2006, 2010; Holmes & Gastaldo, 2004; Callicott, as cited by UNESCO, 2012). While Freire is rightly remembered as the “leading theorist of an ecopedagogy” by Gadotti (2000, p. 8), Kahn (2010), and others, his critical analysis of the abuse of educational power as the midwife of capitalist oppression stands out in our mind for both clarity and constancy, as it implicitly includes the underlying oppression and abuse of our planetary ecosystems. Similar to those theorizing the interconnected dimensions of human and global complexity cited above, Kincheloe and McLaren (2005) observe that in order to “expose the various structures that covertly shape our own and other scholars’ research narratives, the bricolage highlights the relationship between a researcher’s ways of seeing and the social location of his or her personal history” (p. 316). This process allows for the development of new epistemological and political tools, and new ways of seeing how to apply older ones. In our own context, bricoleurs move into this domain, and the research bricolage exists out of a profound respect for complexity in the lived world, and the inherent complications of power relations. One dimension can be illustrated by explicating the relationship between research 16 PLANETARY PRAXIS AND PEDAGOGY and domains of social theory, they further suggest (2005, p. 317) while contending that when one appreciates “research as a power-driven act, the critical researcheras-bricoleur abandons the quest for some naïve concept of realism, focusing instead on the clarification of his or her position in the web of reality” (ibid., p. 316). In her review of Kincheloe’s (2001) earlier, clear-headed analysis of this notion, Lincoln (2001) observes: [The] bricoleur is far more skilled than merely a handyman [as its definition implies]. This bricoleur looks for not yet imagined tools, fashioning them with not yet imagined connections. This handyman is searching for the nexuses, the linkages, the interconnections, the fragile bonds between disciplines, between nodes of knowledge, between knowing and understanding….it is “boundarywork” taken beyond the extreme, boundary-work beyond race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class. (pp. 693–694) In the same review, Kincheloe’s sometime co-author Peter McLaren observed how “Joe’s quest for transdisciplinary rigor in the spirit of his ongoing concern with working class struggle, social transformation, and social injustice in contemporary capitalist society” might preclude an inherent danger “of the bricoleur in the thrall of deep interdisciplinarity lapsing into a form of epistemological relativism” (McLaren, 2001, p. 701). To our minds, Kahn’s (2010) ‘boundary-work’ towards the liberation of all forms of eco-systemic oppression, including that being waged against the animals of the planet, is another example of Kincheloe’s quest for ‘transdisciplinary rigor’ to address humanity’s myriad problems in an uncertain time. In an age of unsustainable transnational capitalism, the democracy project then becomes one of planetary citizenship. But what is the nature of this citizenship? Are we simply extending the figure of the human in its humanist guise to the ends of the earth through a rubric of sustainable development? While it might be possible to argue that even this is more of an emancipatory political and educative vision than is presently being offered by global neoliberals…it is not clear how a global paedia [upbringing of children; related to pedagogy and pediatrics] serves to monkeywrench the anthropological machine. To my mind, planetary citizenship as imagined by the ecopedagogy movement demands the retooling of this machine as a necessary, though not clearly sufficient condition, for ecoliteracy in a time of planetary crisis. (p. 46) Kahn’s cogent argument for the growing recognition of our shared planetary citizenship is echoed by Australian Indigenous scholar Kerry Arabena (2006, 2010) in her expression of “universal citizenship”. As an academic of Merriam descent from Murray Island in the Torres Strait between Australia and Papua New Guinea, Arabena envisages a framework for transforming citizenship that connects “Indigenous philosophies with ecological perspectives to underwrite strategies for living into the twenty-first century” (2006, p. 36). In so doing, she recasts 17 R. C. MITCHELL & S. A. MOORE “successful Indigenous peoples as the teachers and leaders of society by contesting contemporary depictions of indigeneity” since “many ecological agendas have been marginalized in the pursuit of a global modernity” (ibid.). She interprets this agenda for “Universal Citizenship as an unfolding systemic framework in order to synthesise the relationships between Indigenous and ecological knowledges, place, and sustainable citizenship” (ibid.). Perhaps most importantly for our project and its investigation of transdisciplinary sustainability research, she emphasizes “all knowledge is Indigenous” (2010, p. 260; also Mitchell, 2015). Kahn’s (2010) work also highlights the need for “organizational transformation” within the systems related to sustainability knowledge production. While also reflecting on the U.N.’s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, he derides the processes related to “greening the academy” (p. 103), and the hiring of lower-level technical administrators as sustainability managers whose task it is “to document for presidents and provosts how their campuses are fiscally responsible users of cutting edge sustainability technologies, even when the truth is often something other” (ibid.; Mitchell & Parmar, 2010; Mitchell, 2011). Moreover, he argues that programs related to PSE environmental studies (such as the object of our study herein), will often have little or nothing to do with post-colonial and feminist critiques of “Western modern science and white male science” (Kahn, 2010, p. 104, emphasis in original). Congruent with Kahn’s (2010) and Kincheloe and McLaren’s (2005) analyses, we were fully aware of our need to understand the variety of complex ways that power operates to dominate and shape individual and collective consciousness, “a set of tacit rules that regulate what can and cannot be said, who can speak with the blessings of authority and who must listen, whose social constructions are valid and whose are erroneous and unimportant” (ibid., p. 310). Power, these critical theorists contend, is extremely ambiguous and demands detailed study and ongoing analyses. We also agreed with their sense of the emerging consensus among criticalists that power, as the basic constituent of human existence, also works to shape both the oppressive and productive nature of many human traditions. Indeed, “we are all empowered and we are all un-empowered” since we all possess abilities and “we are all limited in our attempts to use those abilities” (ibid., p. 309). However, Kincheloe and McLaren (2005, citing Carspecken, 1993, 1999) emphasize that rather than relying on… perceptual metaphors found in mainstream ethnographic accounts, critical ethnography, in contrast, should emphasize communicative experiences and structures as well as cultural typifications…critical ethnography needs to differentiate among ontological categories (i.e., subjective, objective, normative-evaluative) rather than adopt the position of “multiple realities” defended by many constructivists…research orientations should not determine research findings, as much as this is possible. Rather, critical ethnographers 18 PLANETARY PRAXIS AND PEDAGOGY should employ a critical epistemology; that is, they should uphold epistemological principles that apply to all researchers. (2005, p. 327) This chapter, and indeed the entire collection in our volume, utilizes similar Freirean principles that have been aimed at reforming and re-crafting sustainability science in higher education as more than the research assistant for multi-billionaire “extractive industries” decried by Klein (2014, pp. 79, 121, 133), Kahn (2010), Ralston Saul (2008), and Suzuki (2010). Along with Arabena (2006, 2008), Kahn (2010), and our contributors, we are suggesting that Freire’s prescient final contribution to a “pedagogy of the Earth” may actually be on the verge of being manifest “for the creation of a new planetary citizenship – one that is based on a ‘unifying vision of the planet and a world society’” (Gadotti, 2000, as cited in Bowers & ApffelMarglin, 2008, p. viii). THEORIZING SUSTAINABILITY THROUGH TRANSDISCIPLINARITY The ethnographic study drawn on to frame this volume and the data texts utilized in this chapter were built upon student-led initiatives previously completed at our campus3 that were also aimed at contributing to the U.N. Decade of Education for Sustainability. A pilot project had been conducted by one of us in partnership with a campus-based and pan-Canadian student’s organization known as the Public Interest Research Group within the scope of the University’s Sustainability Coordinating Committee (Mitchell, 2011; Mitchell & Corman, 2009; Mitchell & Parmar, 2010). While such efforts may be legitimate, many similar efforts noted by Kahn (2010) and Ralston Saul (2008) are actually half-hearted attempts to ‘green-wash’ academic facilities in order to attract ever-growing populations of new students interested in an institution promoting its environmental credentials (see also Potstra, 2008; Wallace, 2009). Similar projects have been ongoing on thousands of university and college campuses at least since 1990’s Talloires Declaration made by university presidents in France (University Leaders for a Sustainable Future, 1990; also Council of Ontario Universities, 2009; Victoria University, 2014). Our own campuswide movement was taken forward by an inaugural carbon footprint measure, and apart from the emissions data, the key finding of that investigation was the policy and research intersection with our geographical location within a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve (UNESCO, 2014b). While this local to global connection had been fundamentally overlooked as a scholarly, teaching, funding, or branding framework (Mitchell, May, Purdy, & Vella, 2012; Van Dongen & Mayer, 2009; Van Dongen, 2011), related developments since then have generated broad, international recognition for the institution – the most prestigious to date the announcement of a UNESCO Research Chair in Community Sustainability4 (Brock News, 2014). Kahn (2010, p. 104) notes that university-based programs built upon environmentalism and sustainability studies are most frequently housed and developed within natural 19 R. C. MITCHELL & S. A. MOORE science departments who then interpret these concepts “whether due to practical necessity in chasing grant funding or ideological biases” as opportunities “to teach a curriculum of general environmental science with a small smattering of supportive ethics thrown in for good measure”. Increasingly though, transdisciplinarity is the á la mode international framework being adopted by problem-focused educators and researchers operating within environmental studies, climate change and complex systems scholarship (Lawrence & Després, 2004; Brown et al., 2010; Klein, 2004; see also Apgar et al., 2009; Krasny & Dillon, 2013; Kueffer et al., 2012; Leavy, 2011; Robinson, 2008; Wainwright, 2010). We also note that most European scholars writing within the tradition of transdisciplinary studies have travelled some distance from where we find ourselves in a medium-sized Canadian university, particularly in terms of evaluation and funding of such research (Brock University Trans-disciplinary Centres, 2014). While not overtly signifying their espousal of open transdisciplinarity, one such example is housed within the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (2014), in a consortium of three German universities known as UA Ruhr which embodies similar principles associated with complexity and deep interdisciplinarity, particularly within their Climate and Culture research projects. Transdisciplinary studies have taken root primarily as a global reform movement in higher education, and in the foreword to an edited text by Romanian quantum physicist Basarab Nicolescu (2008), arguably the most widely referenced author in this discourse, the term is defined and delimited by Montuori (2008). Transdisciplinarity is an emancipatory project, he argues, one that is also inquiry-driven, not discipline-driven, since it recognizes we are living in an uncertain and pluralistic world and so provides us with ways of organizing knowledge and informing action to assist in tackling that complexity. It is not multidisciplinary since it does not approach problems solely from the perspective of a number of different disciplines, neither is it inter-disciplinary which involves using the methods from one discipline to inform another discipline (Montuori, 2008, pp. ix–x). U.S. based sociologist Patricia Leavy (2011) has also defined the notion in a basic primer entitled “Essentials of Transdisciplinary Research: Using Problemcentered Methodologies”: Transdisciplinarity is an approach to conducting social research that involves synergistic collaboration between two or more disciplines with high levels of integration between the disciplinary sets of knowledge. Transdisciplinary research practices are issue- or problem-centred, and prioritize the problem at the center of the research over discipline-specific concerns, theories or methods. Transdisciplinary research is responsive to public needs, and methodologically it follows responsive or iterative methodologies requiring innovation, creativity and flexibility often employing participatory research designs [and] has the potential to greatly enhance public scholarship. (p. 9) Finally, as child and youth studies researchers, we also appreciated how common ground for our human rights research could open up new ways from the entrenched 20 PLANETARY PRAXIS AND PEDAGOGY “tower of babble” we had experienced, and where children’s research is so often absorbed (Moore & Mitchell, 2009, p. 30; see also Moore & Mitchell, 2008; Mitchell & Moore, 2012; Mitchell, 2015). Arguing in a similar vein, Freirean theorists Giroux and Searls Giroux (2004) observe: [T]he cultural studies emphasis on transdisciplinary work provides a rationale for challenging how knowledge has been historically produced, hierarchically ordered, and used within disciplines to sanction particular forms of authority and exclusion. Transdisciplinary work often operates at the frontiers of knowledge, and prompts teachers and students to raise new questions and develop models of analysis outside the officially sanctioned boundaries of knowledge and the established disciplines that control them. (p. 102) Such approaches, Giroux and Searls Giroux (2004) contend, stress both historical relations and broader social formations “while remaining attentive to new linkages, meanings, and possibilities” (ibid.). They argue that while educators may be forced to work within academic silos, “they can develop transdisciplinary tools to challenge the limits of established fields and context the broader economic, political, and cultural conditions that reproduce unequal relations of power” (ibid.). McGregor and Volckmann (2011, pp. 13–14) acknowledge the huge challenges that exist in traditionally-oriented and hierarchically managed post-secondary institutions attempting to promote such activities on their campuses. The practical necessity of integrating disciplines within the academy while at the same time integrating academics within civil society partnerships poses many challenges, not the least of which are attempts to: 1. Secure tenure, promotion and reappointment 2. Obtain grants for scholarship that spans disciplines and embraces civil society; and, 3. Engage in scholarship that intentionally zigzags back and forth among comfortably siloed disciplines, each with their own departments, library holdings, professional associations and scholarly dissemination venues. Canadian scholars Somerville and Rapport (2002) emphasize that transdisciplinary approaches to science, politics, education, and cultural studies of media and the arts are fundamentally “associated with critique”. In their description of peace research and education, they argue there is a great need for “breaking through disciplinary barriers, disobeying the rules of disciplinary etiquette. In contrast to disciplinarity…this transcendence is heretical. It is a generic rebel pushing beyond orthodoxy… the term connotes transformation”. In this regard, “Michel Foucault, not Aristotle or Plato…is the paradigmatic figure of transdisciplinary studies”, they declare (pp. 6–7). Similarly, Montuori (2008, p. ix) argues that “the project of transdisciplinarity is an emancipatory one”, and in agreement, Kincheloe and McLaren (2005) observe “[a]s critical researchers attempt to get behind the curtain, to move beyond assimilated experience, to expose 21 R. C. MITCHELL & S. A. MOORE the way ideology constrains the desire for self-direction, and to confront the way power reproduces itself in the construction of human consciousness, they employ a plethora of research methodologies” (p. 324; see also Mitchell, 2003, 2013). In addition, Somerville and Rapport maintain that transdisciplinarity provides a new framework and context for understanding the most important and difficult issues humanity currently faces, “whether in environmental protection, maintaining our health care systems, drafting new laws, formulating public policy, accommodating religious and cultural pluralism, or dealing humanely and respectfully with an ageing population” (2002, p. ii). Developmental psychologist Jean Piaget is widely credited with coining the term in 1970, but the definition underpinning our chapter builds primarily upon Nicolescu’s elucidation within his Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (2002). He observes that the term “retains a certain pristine charm, mostly because it has not yet been corrupted by time” (p. 1), but that time may have arrived. Julie Thompson Klein (2004) emphasizes Nicolescu’s preeminent contribution through his identification of the three pillars of transdisciplinary thought including complexity thinking, multiple levels of reality and the “logic of the included middle”. In contrast to the traditional one-dimensional linearity of classical thinking, Nicolescu’s transdisciplinarity embraces the logic of including a middle intellectual ground capable of coherently describing and researching different levels of reality, as well as an “open structure of unity”, reports Klein (2004, p. 516). McGregor and Volckmann (2011) also note Nicolescu’s critical notion of this epistemological middle ground within transdisciplinary research, assuming “that knowledge creation happens in the space among disciplines and between the academy and civil society” (p. 15). Also worth noting, the institutionalization of transdisciplinarity within universities has U.N. antecedents that began in 1987 through the creation of the International Centre of Transdisciplinary Research and Studies in Paris by Nicolescu and other colleagues. In 1995, he co-founded the Reflection Group on Transdisciplinarity in a project with UNESCO initially involving 16 scientific and cultural personalities focused on the implementation of transdisciplinary methodologies in various international fields. One of its main aims was the implementation of these principles in education, and slowly but decisively the notion has gained international impact as universities from all over the world have opened themselves to experimenting with transdisciplinary curricula, research activities and conferences (Dincă, 2011). We’ve previously commented how the U.N.’s Decade of Education for Sustainable Development passed with little fanfare in many PSE institutions (Mitchell, 2011; Mitchell et al., 2012) including our own, but increasingly, intersections amongst and between economic wealth and social inequities are nevertheless emerging as integrally related to environmental integrity (Kahn, 2010; Klein, 2014). However, living, working and raising our children in a colonialized nation state – one with the world’s only race-based legislation known as the Indian Act with statutes stemming from 1876 (Government of Canada, 1985) controlling relations for ourselves and nearly two million First Peoples – draws our attention to a previously unrecognized 22 PLANETARY PRAXIS AND PEDAGOGY disjuncture in transdisciplinary scholarship. We argue here that this disjuncture may prove integral to the environmental and social awakening that must occur if life on our planet is to sustain itself, a disjuncture that could make the difference in thinking and acting appropriately in the crucial decades to come. Indigenous notions of environmentalism that previously produced the concept of “minimal impairment” may also be useful, observes historian John Ralston Saul (2008, p. 86). He, too, utilizes a transdisciplinary rationale in his analysis of how pluralism in Canadian society evolved from Indigenous governance systems in place at time of European contact. Like the “Eurocentric marginalization” noted by Kahn (2010, p. 105), Ralston Saul acknowledges the potential for romanticism in making these connections, although a philosophy in which humans are simply a part of nature and not a species chosen to master it is now a central assumption for most scientists whether they are looking at health, climate change, water pollution or species decimation (Albrecht et al., 1998; Arabena, 2006, 2010; Koizumi, 2001). Ralston Saul contends that the “great weakness” in mainstream appreciation of the environment today is that “we have not looked seriously at how these ideas came about and what their implications are” (2008, p. 86). He argues that Canadians are attempting to “impose the European, linear view of a human-centred world” onto the current crisis, and thereby suffer from “specialization and narrow silos that dominate education, administration, and policies […] rushing about to impose single-faceted solutions to problems we have represented simplistically” (ibid.). Australian educator Michael Christie (2006) notes further that “Indigenous transdisciplinary researchers need to fight to justify the ethics of their engagement,” as well as having the challenges associated with “how to obtain and maintain ethical/ ethics approval from Aboriginal elders” (p. 85). Christie’s work reveals a disjuncture within the literature on transdisciplinarity between those writing from European sources (see particularly Klein, Thompson, Grossenbacher-Mansuy, Häberli, Bill, Scholz, & Welti, 2001; Nicolescu, 2002, 2008) who have thus far omitted Indigenous epistemologies from theorizing and evaluation of such research altogether. In contrast, those from [post]colonial sources have included and described Indigenous thinking in transdisciplinary discussions originating in Australia (Albrecht et al., 1998; Arabena, 2006, 2010; Brown et al., 2010; Christie, 2006), in Canada (Moore & Mitchell, 2008, p. 9; Mitchell & Moore, 2012), in the United States (Leavy, 2011; Krasny & Dillon, 2013), and in South America (Apgar et al., 2009). As Christie highlights, transdisciplinary Indigenous research is different from interdisciplinary research because it moves beyond the university to take into account traditional knowledge practices which many university-based researchers will never fully understand. This has been our experience in the current study, since the “Indigenous knowledge traditions” that Christie (2006) notes “resist definition from a Western academic perspective”. There are, he further notes, Indigenous knowledge practices which will never engage with the academy, just as there are “branches of the academy which will never acknowledge Indigenous knowledge practices” (pp. 78–79). Moreover, it is clear that a quarter of a billion people on our planet operate within such knowledge 23 R. C. MITCHELL & S. A. MOORE traditions, and these are highly bound up with local ecologies and participatory initiatives. As such, they are also “of key value to the development of sustainable futures, yet little work is being done to prevent the assimilation of these knowledge traditions to a Western positivist ontology”, he warns (2006, p. 79). This omission of Indigenous knowledge frameworks in a large part of the scientific and social science discourses on ‘transdisciplinarity’ strikes us as familiar though, especially recalling Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999/2012) pivotal volume – Decolonizing Methodologies. She notes how “‘[r]esearch’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary” (1999, p. 1), and with her exposition of European settler colonialism throughout the world, she recalls that its accompanying genocides were frequently facilitated through partnerships with academic researchers who played a direct role in the subjugation and assimilation of Indigenous populations (see Canadian Science Writers Association, 2013 for one example). We are mindful then of potentials for new transdisciplinary “regimes of truth” as Foucault warned us (1975, p. 30), but more specifically, that privileged attempts at decolonization of research methods may simply be aimed at reclaiming control over Indigenous ways of knowing (Fine, 2012). Nevertheless, we shed light on this disjuncture in the growing international discourse on transdisciplinarity, and particularly its reform agenda for higher education, as we navigate the “treacherous waters of colonial science” noted by Fine (2012), Tuck and Yang (2012), and others in the attempt to de-colonize ourselves, our students and our research projects. DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY Nestled in the 750 kilometre-long Niagara Escarpment Biosphere Reserve (which was designated by UNESCO in 1990) Brock University is one of a small cadre of academic institutions located within the boundaries of one of the nearly 600 global ecosystems comprising the World Network of Biosphere Reserves (UNESCO, 2014b) at time of this writing. More are being contemplated as the international work of UNESCO continues apace in this critical area of setting aside unique ecosystems on our planet to be understood and evaluated through its three transdisciplinary metrics. Canada’s growing roster of Biosphere Reserves is currently made up of 16 such ecosystems, and their integrally related educational measures of conservation, socio-economic development, and culture are de facto transdisciplinary units of analysis for understanding potential improvements in sustainable relationships between humans and their environments within and beyond these sites. Following the release of findings from the University’s first carbon audit (Brock News, 2009; Mitchell, 2011; Mitchell & Corman, 2009; Mitchell & Parmar, 2010), co-author Shannon Moore and I began to collaborate with colleagues whose research interests intersected with various aspects of environmental sustainability initially asking if they might be interested in partnerships aimed at more fully exploring our geographical and epistemological relationships with UNESCO (Brock News, 2011; Van Dongen & Mayer, 2009). 24 PLANETARY PRAXIS AND PEDAGOGY It is in this light particularly that we have attempted to explicate some of the complexity of Kincheloe and McLaren’s “communicative experiences and structures” (2005, p. 327) in designing our study and in the analysis and reporting of this subset of findings. In short order, our University Senate unanimously approved an application to become the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre, and in a concurrent move that reflected government plans for ‘differentiation’ of the PSE sector in Ontario noted above, our Office of Research Services invited tenured faculty whose research had moved across Departments and Faculties to apply for internal grants of $1 million each. Through this competitive process, five overarching fields of inquiry were eventually chosen from a field of 17 applications representing 160 of the University’s 582 full-time faculty members. These fields of inquiry were identified as “trans-disciplinary spaces” due to their potential to demonstrate evidence of existing strengths, and to showcase new research Centre/Institutes for discovery on local, national and international levels. One of the recipients was the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre5 to which we had both contributed as co-founders (Brock News, 2011, 2014; Mitchell et al., 2012). It may be true that the constraints and opportunities we face in our own geographical and political location are similar to those facing many scholars writing in Western academic institutions, but understanding of this was not our main research focus. We do want to highlight as well that this research (along with each chapter from our contributors) represents an expression of ‘grassroots’ participatory effort that aims towards connecting the global complexity known as ‘sustainability’ with local realities through our theorizing, our findings, and our pedagogical concerns – an aim of critical educators everywhere. Also highlighted in the Introduction to this volume, we consider that the literature and dataset related to this project are interconnected and integral to understanding our scholarly, political, and geographical positions of privilege. As part of this bricolage of contemporary research partnerships, we turn to Kincheloe and McLaren (2005) once again to focus our attention: Whereas traditional researchers see their task as the description, interpretation, or reanimation of a slice of reality, critical researchers often regard their work as a first step toward forms of political action that can redress the injustices found in the field site or constructed in the very act of research itself. Horkheimer (1972) puts it succinctly when he argues that critical theory and research are never satisfied with merely increasing knowledge … Research in the critical tradition takes the form of self-conscious criticism – selfconscious in the sense that researchers try to become aware of the ideological imperatives and epistemological presuppositions that inform their research as well as their own subjective, intersubjective, and normative reference claims. Thus, critical researchers enter into an investigation with their assumptions on the table, so no one is confused concerning the epistemological and political baggage they bring with them to the research site. (pp. 305–306) 25 R. C. MITCHELL & S. A. MOORE Moreover, they argue critical ethnographers are “always encountering new ways to irritate dominant forms of power”, and through “operating in this way, an evolving criticality is always vulnerable to exclusion from the domain of approved modes of research” (2005, p. 306). Kincheloe and McLaren further affirm that researchers taking up this standpoint are positioned “in some places as an outsider, an awkward detective always interested in uncovering social structures, discourses, ideologies, and epistemologies that prop up both the status quo and a variety of forms of privilege. In the epistemological domain, white, male, class elitist, heterosexist, imperial, and colonial privilege often operates by asserting the power to claim objectivity and neutrality” (ibid). Indeed, the owners of such privilege often own the ‘franchise’ on reason and rationality, they astutely point out. Nevertheless, proponents of such an “evolving criticality” also possess a variety of tools to expose such oppressive power politics. Finally, they assert that critical theory is well-served by drawing upon numerous liberatory discourses to facilitate diverse groups of “marginalized peoples and their allies in the nonhierarchical aggregation of critical analysts” (2005, p. 309). Our analysis is also framed by assumptions highlighted within the critical literature review – particularly Freirean pedagogy and notions of qualitative research as a part of a global bricolage related to the exercise of power – along with meanings and values associated with the concepts of ‘transdisciplinarity’ and sustainability. As suggested by Kincheloe and McLaren (2005, p. 3015), our ontological assumptions are “subjective, intersubjective, and normative” although we integrated these assumptions with a nascent, but growing and urgent sense of our collective planetary citizenship. As Arabena (2006, 2008) contends, we consider that these assumptions will play an increasingly important role in a greater understanding of ourselves as 21st century citizens through research frameworks that interconnect with all forms of elemental, plant, marine, animal and cosmological life (see also Callicott, 2012; Kahn, 2010; Mitchell, 2015). Our main research question was: ‘How has the concept of transdisciplinarity facilitated or hindered development of research partnerships on a Canadian campus?’ Repeated invitations to members from all five Centres/Institutes yielded interviews from representatives of just three of these collaborations including the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre, with the overall dataset drawn from the following sources: academic, policy and international legal literature; fourteen face-to-face semi-structured, audio-taped and transcribed interviews6 with key Brock University stakeholders and participants in the development of funded transdisciplinary research Centres and Institutes; and from dozens of participant observations during partnerships that conceived and launched the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre. Our semi-structured interviews included in-depth discussions ranging from 45 to 90 minutes with key faculty informants in the early development of Brock’s Environmental Sustainability Research Centre, and colleagues and administrators 26 PLANETARY PRAXIS AND PEDAGOGY involved in related transdisciplinary research endeavours at both faculty and institutional levels. Participant genders, while not a variable of analysis, were eight males compared to six females, with six of the total interviewees choosing anonymity and eight consenting to have their names associated with their comments. While a majority of interviewees consented to the latter, including participants directly engaged with the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre, a former Vice President of the University, a chemistry Professor Emeritus responsible for and engaged in public relations for the University’s transdisciplinary hubs, and faculty members who reviewed competitive applications for the approval of the five $1 million awards, we’ve nonetheless chosen to anonymize all quotes included here due to expressed minority concern for identification by association (i.e., Quotations A-I). The following main questions guided interviews: • Can you define any principles of ‘transdisciplinarity’ as you have come to know and apply them in your research, teaching or service initiatives? • How have these principles facilitated development of research partnerships within your own program or within the institution? • Could you describe any institutional impediments you have encountered that hindered the growth and perpetuation of ‘transdisciplinary’ partnerships? • Could you describe any characteristics of individuals or organizations that have demonstrated ‘transdisciplinarity’ in their research, teaching and service initiatives? • Are there any models of good practice or good governance that you have adopted, observed here, or in other institutions that have facilitated growth in ‘transdisciplinary’ research partnerships? • How have the above issues played a role in the development of “sustainability” research partnerships? DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS While ethnographic procedures defined our larger institutional data collection, our analytical steps were further integrated with the constant “comparative analysis” of data to data, of data to literature, and of data to theory first made popular by the originators of “grounded theory” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967, p. 21; also 2009). This analytical process took place throughout 2012 with participant observations by both authors, during audio-taped research interviews from 2013–2015, before and after the transcription of those interviews, and after formal data collection had ceased. Such a close and constant analytical process revealed four distinct and recurring themes: transdisciplinary catalysts; transdisciplinary co-opting; transdisciplinary praxis; and transdisciplinary Entelechy. The following sections review and briefly discuss salient quotes representative of these four themes. In another traditional method associated with grounded theory, we 27 R. C. MITCHELL & S. A. MOORE have illustrated these themes within a diagram designated as an “Entelechy Model” for understanding the key concepts of ‘transdisciplinarity’ and ‘sustainability’ as they relate to post-secondary education in Canada and beyond (PSE). We further posit our model has portability and additional potential application across the disciplinary and paradigmatic continuum noted by Albrecht et al. (1998), Brown et al. (2010), Leavy (2011), and others cited within our literature. Transdisciplinary Catalysts Uni-disciplinary knowledges have a range of epistemological and methodological premises albeit with some demonstrating characteristics of “transdisciplinarity” as they “build upon the insights of a variety of disciplines to create something new”, suggested participant A. Disciplines that are inherently transdisciplinary reflect a “holistic” directionality towards a more “universal” teleos or wholeness in their efforts, they continued. This contrasts reductionist and/or deterministic analyses, through a “shared goal” or “common ground”, contended participant B. This same interviewee suggested these characteristics drive the “problem solving process” in transdisciplinary research, and are innately “problem focussed” with some domains such as “environmental sustainability” obviously transdisciplinary since related research projects cannot claim any “existing disciplinary boundary around the ideas of sustainability”, argued A. Transdisciplinarity is the essence of a “holistic” way of being in the world, and an ontology that is aimed at “moving beyond”, A observed. The same participant expanded the notion with an example from pedagogy: I tell my students the only people who think they can divide up the world into history, politics, economics, psychology, and so on, are academics. Disciplinary categories create a “disjuncture” for knowledge mobilization argued this key informant. It is also necessary for academically-based scholars to be “drawn” out of the “safety” of their own disciplinary “silos” said A, while participant I suggested “to do TD really does require a particular attitude”. This kind of movement allows educators to become “catalysts for transdisciplinarity”, suggested informant B. Once again, participant I mused “you definitely have to have respect for other people…I would use the word ‘curious’- I honestly think TD is not for everybody”. The process can be “applied to any problem” suggested B, but may only be facilitated through the support of governance and institutional structures. Since individual ideologies and attitudes lean away from sharing the “range of knowledge forms and ideas”, noted B, these ideas being the “currency of the academy”. “Like fortresses”, A argued, disciplines are framed by “walls, jargon, journals and careers….and sustained by pretentious notions of autonomy, status, prestige, income and other relations of power.” These pretensions are “driven 28 PLANETARY PRAXIS AND PEDAGOGY by the false concept that the world is also organized around our disciplines” maintained A. The transition from uni- or inter-disciplinary frameworks also “takes an ontology of humility and realization that in the act of sharing our specialized knowledge forms we don’t lose our power but create something larger than the sum of the ego-centric parts”, stated E. Similarly, research relations of “power must be addressed and equalized …. among the constellations of transdisciplinary partners”, said B, since rather ironically, transdisciplinary work calls for “good interpersonal boundaries, transparent communication”, and a strong commitment to explicit principles. Otherwise, continued B, academic “egos will be too insecure to open the power/ knowledge nexus…and enter the world of uncertainty that comes with the complexity” of such problem-centred research projects. The challenge also comes when fissures become obvious between “academic training that is designed to make us experts”, and the need to be “open” and “engage in disciplinary humility”, said B within our exchanges of knowledge. Transdisciplinary approaches include the appreciation of the “situated-ness of knowledge”, stated C, and how socially situated knowledge “informs decisions and policy related to human- environmental relationships and problems”. In the context of environmental sustainability it is also essential that scholars open themselves to understanding various “traditional and/ or Indigenous knowledges”, argued E, as well as the enhanced roles of “civil society actors”. “Transdisciplinary research is action orientated….and impacts…processes outside the university”, suggested C. This infers and involves a re-orienting towards community–centric, rather than the typical CV-centric or institutionally-centred, research aims and intentions. Related catalysts for transdisciplinarity within the context of sustainability research must “engage in self-critique”, contended B. At the same time, observed C, these catalysts must be capable of “problematizing how different types of knowledges that impact climate change policy” are assessed. There must be consistent “ontological and methodological assumptions”, agreed B, and a style of “epistemic equity”, contended C, among diverse knowledge claims and their holders. Such transdisciplinary scholarship needs a “champion”, argued D, and C observed that because of this “complexity”, praxis “doesn’t happen naturally and organically without facilitation or leadership”. Numerous interviewees referred to the individual scholarly attitude towards knowledge and power in transdisciplinary relations. Qualities of “openness to others”, said A, and “flexibility” considered C, help individual academics and transdisciplinary teams access the realm of “complexity” noted B, or the “unities” and “totalities” identified by A. When tackling the “wicked problems of complexity and climate change” noted by E, the greatest opportunities are found “when space is created for individual and community partnerships outside of the walls of academe”, emphasized B. 29 R. C. MITCHELL & S. A. MOORE Transdisciplinary Co-Opting For most individual scholars, as participant H suggested “the only way forward was to completely abandon [my discipline] “since working together in a TD way – it was an absolute, complete failure”. This challenge, while noted by most contributors to the burgeoning ‘TD’ literature, implied the concept of transdisciplinarity had simply and readily been co-opted “as a widget to be replicated in previously established research programs built within existing uni-disciplinary frameworks”, as participant E observed. This co-opting occurs primarily due to incentive systems within PSE. Observing the process within our own University by simply adopting the term as a tool to “advance personal research agendas” is par for the course, suggested participant D. This interviewee also observed a very “shallow commitment” to any of the evaluative dimensions we’ve noted in the literature. This approach may also be used as a “weapon to silence dissenting voices”, further argued B. Individuals are simply attempting to open dialogue along disciplinary lines said D, “and talk philosophically about transdisciplinary principles”, but the actual depth of such collaborations is revealed when grants are awarded and the “money comes out”. Then the “old rules” of the academy and the “school yard” fall into place, D further maintained. It is apparent that these ‘old rules of the school yard’ have fully co-opted dominant notions of transdisciplinary collaboration in our University. As further evidenced by interviewee H, “the only ‘principle of TD’ I see in these research relationships is ‘commonality of theme’… all you have is multiple conversations within your own discipline, and nothing going across the disciplines”. This participant continued: “I haven’t seen transdisciplinarity here, here’s how it plays out [in the review process]. You are in a room, you are reviewing a grant, and one of the criteria is: ‘is this proposal interdisciplinary?’ And not in the grant room, but over lunch, informal and off the record ‘oh yeah. I know about these people’. They said ‘we need to be interdisciplinary’ so ‘a general paediatrician, let’s put them on’. And having seen how the grant functions, afterwards of course, the people who are tapped to make the grant interdisciplinary are then dropped, or shunted, or pushed away”. These conversations observed B, are also being shaped to “fit” existing research agendas “into the favoured modus operandi” of granting and governing structures “without understanding the established principles of the discourse present within transdisciplinary literature”, opined E. This same participant declared: The likelihood of any enduring research/community partnerships based on transdisciplinary thinking here at Brock is minimal since no one I’ve spoken to seems to know what the hell the notion really means or how to appropriately evaluate research projects making these claims. The hierarchical organizational structures of academic institutions are entrenched within the type of “top-down funding structures” noted by C that “act not for 30 PLANETARY PRAXIS AND PEDAGOGY knowledge to bloom” but for the “self-preservation of power elites”, observed B. “Academic work has always been an elite world”, noted C, and for which certain forms of “knowledge are privileged”. This is a “linear notion of how knowledge production happens”, they continued. Under the current guise of transdisciplinary research, there “exists a vibrant kind of branding”, says B, that simply “rewards traditional power structures and reifies academic regimes of ‘so-called’ truth”. These regimes are built upon “a priori assumptions about what works”, said C, and thereby greatly “limit” how knowledge is produced and disseminated. This is demonstrated by what research is considered “legitimate by funding agencies” and for which much of the related transdisciplinary scholarship in our own University to date is still beholden along strict disciplinary lines of knowledge production, C further complained. Transdisciplinary Praxis To enact the Greek notion of praxis, or in this context transdisciplinarity, many scholars retain their disciplinary knowledge while in the same instance attempt to “reach beyond our disciplinary silos”, said E. This is very different from unidisciplinarity or multi-disciplinarity which is simply “one plus one plus one”, observed F. Transdisciplinary praxis may be conceptualized as a “new participatory methodology”, B pointed out, through a form of “dialectics” noted C, that are enacted as a “emergent form of participatory action research that is problem focussed, community-centric” and driven towards “critical consciousness”, said B, and the “collective action” highlighted by D. Methodologically, participatory-dialectics actualize transdisciplinary praxis. This is achieved by removing “structural constraints” (D) and by being institutionally led by a “champion” (D) for the shared goal. The transdisciplinary team needs to be open to “moving outside of their comfort zone” (F). The leader needs to encourage the team to acknowledge multiple perspectives to engage the fullness of understanding our complex world rather than a series of “partial pictures” (A) that fragment “a vision for solution focussed action” (E). This knowledge mobilization is aimed at “solving problems” (C) through “dialectics” (C) across “formal and informal disciplinary contexts” (B). This process when applied so “social-ecological problems” (C) necessitates having an “eye towards complexity, an eye towards transdisciplinarity, an eye towards participation, an eye towards equity, knowledge and action” (C), It is to “reach further and further”(C) beyond “disciplines” (C) for the benefit of “rigorous” (C) and “comprehensive” (C) “solution-focussed praxis” (B). The central challenge to transdisciplinary praxis is this prerequisite of “work in teams”, argued B, and “collegially” suggested D, with “openness”, by C, and “open-ness, respect, safe environments where it’s good to disagree and be civil, having complexity, a curious personality and being humble” as emphasized by 31 R. C. MITCHELL & S. A. MOORE interviewee I. It is necessary to find others who “share enough principles” said B, and who are actually interested in “looking beyond their own standpoints”, they continued, to work on “complex problems”, and across “disciplinary battle lines” added interviewee E. In reality this is “extremely difficult”, acknowledged B), and “time consuming” said A, and often “painful” they admitted A. There is also a direct relationship between the “amount of positional power or expertise” that an individual perceives in themselves and “their fear of abandoning that stature by breaking down barriers to knowledge mobilization…It is easier not to work in transdisciplinary teams” admitted B; however, when achieved, this apparent “contradiction in motion” A contended, has the unique potential of finding “solutions that have never been imagined prior to these complex partnerships” E offered. Transdisciplinary Entelechy Entelechy is “a subtle and complex gestalt”, suggested B, for which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and “ever moving” observed A. This is how participant B expressed the notion: Transdisciplinary research is extremely difficult to authentically achieve if we consider the principles…that ask scholars to continually be critically conscious of what is not being understood and to bring in partners to help increase understanding. It is important to bring in community non-academic partners as well as indigenous and traditional knowledge. Then you need to struggle to find a common language to communicate…it is this struggle and often conflict that creates the pathway to new knowledge and solutions—and that is when it gets rewarding…this is an ever evolving process that is not finite yet is directed towards a shared goal—an Entelechy. The notion of Entelechy appears and was first articulated by ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, and for an insightful discussion see Lindsay (1998). The notion was also described in the writings of 18th century German philosopher Hegel who explains Entelechy as “self-replicating” and describes “living Entelechy as the unity of multiplicity, not a unity over multiplicity” (Ferrarin, 2001, p. 189; see also Luhmann’s autopoietic discussion, 1986). To achieve this style of transformational knowledge production, we’ve turned again to the literature and to some of those who have actually accomplished these next steps in reforming academic relations in the way many of our participants aspired. In key findings from their collaborations in a Swiss-based, global sustainability consortium, Kueffer et al. (2012) point out that within academic systems, decisions made by scientists about what to study and how to allocate their time are “strongly influenced by many factors, both formal and informal, that constitute the incentive system” (p. 6). The most important factor remains “success in academic publishing” and the great pressure is to “publish their work as effectively as possible” (ibid.). 32 PLANETARY PRAXIS AND PEDAGOGY Rather than uni-dimensional metrics for making appointments and promotions with “high bibliometric impact” being the overriding evaluator, when reaching for transdisciplinarity, they argue, this concern simply becomes one of equal value with “other metrics related to the societal impact of the research” (ibid.). This progressive thinking was not present during our study, and is still quite foreign to individual academics anchored in Cartesian-style logic and decision-making procedures about what counts, or even how to count what counts. This traditional dichotomized approach was also prevalent in decision-making and resource allocation in our study, exercised by those with power dominating those with less rather than choosing to serve the larger constituencies to which we all belong beyond our professional and intellectual regimes. From their sustainability collaborations, Kueffer et al. (2012) argue for opening up the variety of measures utilized within PSE to promote and encourage diversity in transdisciplinary collaborations. These new measures include periods spent in industry, public administration and civil society organizations being seen as beneficial along with non-academic sabbaticals, staff exchanges within applied and non-academic institutions, and co-location of researchers with external partners. To achieve Entelechy, scholars and non-academic partners operating within transdisciplinary teams need be open to “changing and learning” emphasized C, and moving beyond single disciplines or even interdisciplinary knowledge towards a style of “simple complexity” contended B. To “authentically weave academic scholarship with Indigenous and community-based knowledges” observed B, a grasp of the “complex whole in motion” is also a necessary consideration, argued participant A. They continued, in actuality it is “impossible to fully grasp”, and this “humbles us” as we struggle to imagine our limited “individual part within this totality” acknowledged A. In the same instance, this complexity can be tethered by our sense of institutional “stability” said D, and as A maintained, academic support systems evident through the “dynamics, actors, structures and processes” with whom we intellectually engage. In the final analysis, transdisciplinary approaches to sustainability are “solution focussed and part of a perpetual cycle of questioning, acting, being and knowing” observed B, one that is also open to “change, growth and uncertainty”, as observed by participant E. The result is a contradictory relationship between the arcane traditions and power relations within academe on one side, and complexity, uncertainty and access to Indigenous partnerships necessitated by Entelechy on the other. This disjuncture defining how transdisciplinary catalysts operate (as opposed to co-opting the opportunities for reform and transformation) is similar to the omission in TD literature we noted, and the challenges of “trying to reach from the bottom up through to the top down” observed F, in a single continuous motion. This bifurcation can be transcended when working towards a common goal with the support of governance structures and leaders willing to interface with holders of competing worldviews through transdisciplinary praxis and participatorydialectic engagement. 33 R. C. MITCHELL & S. A. MOORE To address problems of sustainability transdisciplinary teams must address their questions at the “global ecosystem level” (F) while also accounting for “non-human, and human adaptation” (E) in local communities. The end result, Transdisciplinary Entelechy, is not finite but an ever-moving and evolving complex similar to Niklas Luhmann (1986) notion of communicative systems transforming through social autopoiesis. Figure 1 is an illustration of such Entelechy. Transdisciplinary Catalysts Transdisciplinary Praxis Transdisciplinary Entelechy Figure 1. Transdisciplinary Entelechy Model CONCLUSION In order to avoid Co-opting Transdisciplinarity, Figure 1 demonstrates both the system and process called for by Urry (2005) if our emergence from simple forms of environmental knowledge created by disciplinarity are to take the turn toward the Catalysts required to create planetary Praxis. These transformations are nonlinear, and non-negotiable if collectively humans are going to achieve the Entelechy required to transform Earth’s ecosystems from the current status as a toxic dump to the truly terrestrial habitat necessary for intergenerational hand-off. In Figure 1, Transdisciplinary Catalysts are circles representative of traditional academic faculties, uni-disciplinary departments and programs, Centres and Institutes, linked with new and emergent professions related to post-disciplinary thinking and applied in partnership with Indigenous, business, community-based and civil society actors—some of which have distinct boundaries, while some offer diffuse borders where knowledge and skills overlap or are interlinked. Transdisciplinary Praxis is enacted with a critical consciousness and intellectual humility, as argued by Kincheloe (2008), and others cited in our literature. Such intentions are focused on the creation of new knowledge and intelligent dissemination and application between and among academics, professionals and social actors whose places of privilege within social, cultural and academic hierarchies offer innumerable opportunities to transform individuals and regions located at the margins of political and positional power in both local and world society. What other choices are left? In the PSE provincial reform context and our own University’s response with five differentiated research ‘hubs’, Transdisciplinary Praxis appears rather remote due to our vast assemblage of epistemologies, ontologies and methodologies. 34 PLANETARY PRAXIS AND PEDAGOGY Yet, the whole project still has real potential for evolving towards the type of Transdisciplinary Entelechy described by our participants. Any resultant movement towards critical, integrated, transformational knowledge production also has potential for the type of projects characterized by research driven by non-academic partnerships, holistic frameworks and socially inclusive procedures. The embrace of growing complexity and non-expert approaches towards tackling societal problemsolving also seems remote given the hierarchical reward systems we inhabit and the ego-centric character of most academic researchers. Thus, as noted in our literature and as our participants observed, the map of transdisciplinary power relations should be re-drawn to include planetary-wide, non-linear, and Indigenous epistemologies that exhibit open-ness, respect, humility, and equity in resource allocation and governance structures. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 The study “Leveraging Transdisciplinarity in Higher Education: A Study in Transformation” was reviewed and received clearance through Brock University Research Ethics Board [File #12-137 Mitchell]. Brock University Strategic Mandate Submission to Ontario Government (2013). Available from https://www.brocku.ca/webfm_send/29427 and accessed December 15, 2014. The initial sustainability study leading to the investigation reported in this chapter was reviewed and received clearance through Brock University Research Ethics Board [File #08-067 Mitchell and Corman]. See Brock Launches UNESCO Chair in Community Sustainability (25 June, 2014). Available from http://www.brocku.ca/brock-news/?p=28727 and accessed December 15, 2014. Brock University Environmental Sustainability Research Centre – A Transdisciplinary Research Initiative (2014). Available from http://www.brocku.ca/trans-disciplinary-research/engines-of-transdisciplinary-research and accessed 15 December, 2014. 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