Postdigital Ecopedagogies: Genealogies, Contradictions, and Possible Futures

This paper charts some genealogies, challenges, and directions for experimenting with the utopic postdigital ecopedagogies demanded by our present (post)pandemic reality. These are messianic-rather than prophetic-utopias that exist not as proclamations or programmes for a distant future but as potentialities immanent in the irreducible excess of the present. While their roots most clearly emanate from the Freirean-inspired ecopedagogy movement, we conceptualize ecopedagogies instead as educational forms that emerge from, negotiate, debate, produce, resist, and/or overcome the shifting and expansive postdigital ecosystems from and to which we write and think. These are expansive ecosystems of humans, postdigital machines, nonhuman animals, minerals, objects, and more; ecosystems that are overdetermined by new forms of ontological hierarchies and capitalism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism. By charting some of the potential lineages, directions, contradictions, and challenges-and by proposing potential lines of educational praxis-we lay a basis for reinvigorated fields of inquiry that moves beyond the existing postdigital literature on the current pandemic.