64th Annual Meeting – (Education Beyond the Human)
Conference Theme
Education and Planetary Challenges
• Empirical elaborations of the relationships among education, environment, and planetary changes
• Critiques of the ‘business-as-usual’ approaches to post-2015 educational governance, including attention (or lack thereof)
to environment issues in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the aid to education initiatives that support them
• Potentials and limitations of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), including programming that goes beyond the
focus on cognitive skills and knowledge and rejects methodological individualism, nationalism, and populism
• Earth-friendly research initiatives, including technological and social alternatives to the current high-carbon research
practices that would lead to a cultural change
Education and (Post)Human Futures
• Reevaluation of human rights and humanism – their traditional roles, objectives, and constructions – in the context of
climate change and the human/environment interface
• Approaches in comparative education that engage with ontological alterity, including education policy framings,
pedagogies, practices, and spaces that decenter the human
• The role of Artificial Intelligence and emerging technologies in reimagining – and remaking – processes of governance,
research, and learning, including creative alternatives opened by posthuman futures
Education as Sympoiesis
• Multiple knowledges and worlds, political dynamics, and power relations in the educational production of epistemologies
and ontologies, including non-Western, indigenous, feminist, and marginalized ‘Others’
• Educational engagements with more-than-human-worlds, both in terms of the kinds of imagination necessary to conceive
them (science-fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, speculative feminism, science fact) as well as formal and
nonformal educational practices of crossing (to interact with artificial intelligence, multispecies, spirit worlds).
Program Highlights
We live in a moment of epochal precarity. Altering life on the entire planet, humans have become the dominant force behind irreversible ecological catastrophe: natural resource depletion, water and air pollution, human overpopulation, species extinction, and a fundamental breakdown of the ecosystems that have sustained life on Earth for millions of years. Variously called Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or Chthulucene, this new era signals the end of human exceptionalism and (neo)liberal individualism – the core concepts of Western philosophy and the foundations of modern political economy – as a single vision for surviving on a damaged Earth. What is required is an urgent redefinition of what it is to be human and a radical reconfiguration of the relationship between human and Earth. The central concern of CIES 2020 is what these planetary changes – and their political, economic, social, and environmental consequences – entail for education.
- Throughout the duration of the conference, CIES 2020 Program Committee planned to feature a series of conference keynotes. As in music, these keynotes set the tone for the conference and highlight various aspects of the conference theme “Education beyond the Human: Toward Sympoiesis.” They weave in and out through the entire duration of the conference, inviting the participants to explore alternative ways for thinking about and experiencing life – and education – on a damaged Earth.
Thank YOU from the CIES 2020 Team!
Thank you to everyone who made CIES 2020 a resounding success! From the presenters, to the chairs, discussants, plenary speakers, singers, artists, sponsors, volunteers and everyone else who worked so hard to make CIES 2020 a success – thank you!
We had nearly 1200 people joining us onsite and 1800 online. More details on the number of panels and papers are to come, but please know that we are so grateful for the enthusiasm, creativity, and engagement in every aspect of this conference.
The Hub will remain open until May 15th, where book launch videos and poster presentations are still available to view. The Film Festivalette will remain open until May 1, 2022.
Event Gallery
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