** NEW SUBMISSION DEADLINE: DECEMBER 1ST, 2015 **

Together with my good friend Peter Blaze Corcoran and with support of the Dutch government I have been involved in a Series of books on Education and Learning in for Sustainability published by Wageningen Academic Publishers in The Netherlands. This year we are starting to collect contributions from around the world for the fifth book in this Series ‘Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education’. Earlier books included: Social Learning towards a Sustainable World (2007) – available for free via http://www.wageningenacademic.nl), Young People, Education and Sustainable Development (2009), Learning for Sustainability in Times of Accelerating Change (2012) and Intergenerational Learning and Transformative Leadership for Sustainable Futures (2014).

In ‘Envisioning Futures for Environmental and Sustainability Education’ the editors (Peter Blaze Corcoran, Joe Weakland and myself – with support of Heila Lotz-Sisitka) invite educational practitioners and theorists to speculate on – and craft visions for – the future of environmental and sustainability education. We wish to explore what educational methods and practices might exist on the horizon, waiting for discovery and implementation. How might the collective project of imagining alternative futures help us rethink environmental and sustainability education institutionally, intellectually, and pedagogically? How might we use emerging modes of critical speculation as a means to map and (re)design the future of environmental and sustainability education today?

The future of environmental education is an urgent question in the larger context of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which human activities have become the dominant driver in the ongoing evolution of Earth’s biosphere. Our contemporary ecological moment is characterized by complexity, uncertainty, and “accelerating change” (Wals and Corcoran 2012). While the global impact of anthropogenic climate change is undeniable, the pace of temperature and sea-level rise depends on ecological feedback loops that are not fully understood – and which may be increasing the rate of biosphere destabilization (Hansen et al. 2015). From a social perspective, the Anthropocene is an age of what humanities scholar Rob Nixon (2011) terms “slow violence,” or ecological violence and environmental injustice that occurs on spatial and temporal scales that are hard to understand or represent, most often against the world’s poorest peoples. In light of such developments, educators need strategies for anticipatory engagement with changing socio-ecological realities – both in the present and future – in order to be effective within their various embodied contexts. This volume explores how environmental educators can engage in imaginative mapping concerning large scale, global processes, as well as create useful, situated knowledge for dissemination within their respective socio-ecological contexts.

The full Call can be found here: envisioning futures book CFP 11-14-15!

Specific topics of interest might include but are not limited to the following: the role of academic centers in education for sustainability; education and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals; environmental education, climate change education; global citizenship; environmental education past, present, and future; learning about the future through critical analysis of the past; post-UNDESD 2015 era; forecasting, backcasting, future studies; critical speculation, science fiction prototyping; big data, data mining, data analytics, predictive algorithms; indigenous futurism, afrofuturism; the Earth Charter; epistemological uncertainty, “wicked problems,” feedback loops, accelerating change; religion, eschatology; virtual environments, gaming, digital spaces; transhumanism, posthumanism, animality; extinction, Anthropocene, geoengineering; social implications of demographic shifts, population increase and decline; social innovation for a green economy; the economy of aging; slow violence, intergenerational justice; transformative leaders.

Contributors and chapters

Contributions to the book will be solicited through open call and invitation. Please feel free to suggest authors you’d like us to invite. Because we seek to research the role that centers play in universities in transition to sustainability, we will invite partners in the International Intergenerational Network of Centers to contribute to this volume. We strive to include a diversity of genders, geographical locations, and generations.

“Book +”

We plan that this will be “more than a book.” We see this book as an initiative of a new network of university centers researching the role of charting speculative futures in education for sustainable development. We hope the book and network will be connected to additional resources on a companion website. These might include blogging the editorial process, social networking around the theme of (re)imagining futures, collaboration between centers, augmented reality/QR codes, and open source/downloadable chapters.

Abstract submission instructions

In order for your chapter to be considered, please submit an abstract to futuresbook2015@gmail.com no later than November 13 2015. Abstracts should be approximately 300 words. Please include 2-5 key references in your abstract; these will not count towards your word limit. Please identify the part of the book in which you’d like your chapter to be considered. Also include a short professional biography for all co-authors.