Call for Participation [Special Session] :

Paper Session on Education for Transforming Consumerism

 

We are looking for participants for a session that we are organizing as part of the conference "Transforming consumption-production systems towards just and sustainable futures" hosted by the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI), the European Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production (ERSCP) and Wageningen University & Research (WUR), July 5-8, 2023 in Wageningen, The Netherlands.

 

Session title -> Eduruption: The disruptive potential of education for transforming consumerism

 

• Proposed Session: Academic session of 90 minutes
• Chairs: Daniel Fischer (Wageningen University) as the contact point of a team of co-chairs
• Session Type: Academic Paper Presentations

 

Abstract

Education is frequently promoted in policy circles as “one of the most powerful tools” (OECD, 2008, p. 25) in changing consumption patterns and leveraging sustainable lifestyles. However, beyond the consensus on the importance of education, pedagogies engaging with sustainable consumption have drawn criticism for being overly focused on the individual and dealing with behavioral changes, promoting "weak" sustainable consumption in instrumental approaches, rather than exposing, problematizing, and altering structures, institutions, and practices that lock people into unsustainable consumption patterns. 

 

To contribute more substantively to the transformation of consumption and production systems towards sustainability, ESD is challenged to devise alternative strategies of transformative or transgressive learning that enable more profound critiques of conditions and collective disruptive action to redesign ways of meeting needs beyond unsustainable consumption. 

 

This paper session invites contributions that highlight education's disruptive potential to support and encourage deep transformational learning processes that contribute to the restructuring of consumer and production practices. Contributions to this special issue can address but are not limited to: 

• concrete teaching-learning cases in transformative and transgressive consumer learning
• conceptual and theoretical reflections on the potential of education to support deep transformations
• contributions synthesizing documented evidence and experiences (e.g., narrative or systematic reviews, meta-analyses) 
• original empirical works offering insights into the mechanisms, conditions, and potentials of consumer education interventions on different levels and in different contexts 

 

We explicitly invite contributions from underrepresented geographies and backgrounds, critical and philosophical perspectives, as well as innovative and method-reflective approaches to the generation and utilization of pedagogical knowledge for the design of transformation processes. 

 

Please submit your abstract of 300-500 via the online submission portal by January 3, and send a copy to Daniel Fischer (daniel.fischer@wur.nl). Abstracts should follow the conference guidelines as outlined on the conference website.

 

A special issue is planned to be produced to which papers submitted to this session will be invited.