Decoupling and techno-optimism be damned, there is a harsh biophysical reality behind our energy and climate crisis: we're fucking fucked. What does it means to teach that truth to students, and what should you teach after you've taught that truth?
In this episode, Wouter Mulders and Mayte Beekman talk to Ginie Servant-Miklos about education under collapse. Ginie is an Associate Professor of at Erasmus University Rotterdam, director of the Bildung Climate School and the author of Pedagogies of Collapse. Societal collapse represents the most fundamental change imaginable, so that should be of interest to transition makers all around. But she also argues that there's a hidden psychological side as well: phone addiction, substance use, and the slow, grinding "small-t trauma" of a system that leaves little room to cope.
The conversation also turns a critical eye on insular academia itself, including spaces like DRIFT. She makes a case for "imperfect solidarity": staying engaged with people whose politics or circumstances don't match your own, rather than retreating into like-minded bubbles. The result is less a doom-laden forecast than a practical philosophy: tell people the truth, then give them the tools to build a meaningful life within it.
Useful links:
- About the Bildung Climate School: https://www.bildungclimateschool.com/
- About Ginie's book, Pedagogies of Collapse: https://www.education4socialchange.com/book-pedagogies-of-collapse
- The start of the episode mentions the upcoming online, international edition of our long-running Transition Management course. If you'd like to be kept up to date on registration for this course, please leave your details here: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/CYxmnsJzzB
What is The DRIFT Transitions Podcast?
How is it that societies can plot the same course for years and years and then suddenly change at lightning speed? And why do sustainable innovations seem to pop up everywhere, while so few of them truly break through?
To understand this, perhaps a new perspective on fundamental change can help. If we want to grasp how our society can truly transform, we must look at it through the lens of transition thinking.
In this show, Wouter Mulders and a rotating cast of colleagues speak to a number of theoretical and practical experts about transition science. Because by understanding transitions toward sustainability and justice, we can also accelerate them—or at least, that’s what we hope.
The DRIFT Transitions Podcast is produced by DRIFT, the Dutch Research Institute for Transitions, part of Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands.