SOAS Anthropology Department Seminar Series - Peter Sutoris

The SOAS Anthropology Department welcomes Dr Peter Sutoris for his talk Educating for the Anthropocene: Schooling and Activism in the Face of Slow Violence.

Education has never played as critical a role in determining humanity's future as it does in the Anthropocene, an era marked by humankind's unprecedented control over the natural environment. Drawing on a multisited ethnographic project among schools and activist groups in India and South Africa, Peter Sutoris explores education practices in the context of impoverished, marginal communities where environmental crises intersect with colonial and racist histories and unsustainable practices.

He exposes the depoliticizing effects of schooling and examines cross-generational knowledge transfer within and beyond formal education. Finally, he calls for the bridging of schooling and environmental activism, to find answers to the global environmental crisis. The onset of the Anthropocene challenges the very definition of education and its fundamental goals, says Sutoris.

Researchers must look outside conventional models and practices of education for inspiration if education is to live up to its responsibilities at this critical time. For decades, environmental activist movements in some countries have wrestled with questions of responsibility and action in the face of environmental destruction; they inhabited the mental world of the Anthropocene before much of the rest of the world.

Sutoris highlights an innovative research methodology of participatory observational filmmaking, describing how films made by children in the Indian and South African communities provide a window into the ways that young people make sense of the future of the Anthropocene. It is through their capacity to imagine the world differently, Sutoris argues, that education can reinvent itself.

About the speaker

Peter Sutoris is an environmental anthropologist and Assistant Professor in Education and Social Justice at the University of York. He is the author of books Visions of Development (OUP, 2016) and Educating for the Anthropocene (MIT Press, 2022). His research focuses on imagination of alternative futures, cultures of degrowth and activist pedagogies of change.

We would like to invite attendees to join us at the IoE bar for drinks after the event to continue the conversation.

Contact

If you have any questions, please contact Alice Rudge (ar80@soas.ac.uk).