Video: global change

Tutorial: 7th June

Social cartography: global justice table

Proposed exercise: Review two of the resources below and use the table to examine which orientation of global justice the speakers most resonate with. What analysis and propositions are presented? Who would disagree with the perspective presented and why?

• The big picture: how we got into this mess
• Living into being
• Four futures: life after capitalism
• Parrot’s training (story)
• Abuela Grillo (story)
• The innovation of loneliness

Recommended reading (optional):

• mobilizing different conversations about global justice in education
• alternative orientations to the future
• global citizenship and digital democracy
• critical future anticipation in education
• against the tide
• unraveling fantasies

Possible activities for students:

•  Watch the you tube animation ‘Abuela Grillo’ about  the uprising of the people of Cochabamba in Bolivia against water privatization. The animation is based on a Ayoreo (indigenous) narrative about a  cricket grandmother whose singing produces water. The grandmother can be seen as a metaphor for the metaphysical forces/spirits behind natural phenomena (represented, in this case, in a humanized insect form). As you watch the film, ask students to think about: how does the grandmother establish her relations? What happens when the grandmother starts to be exploited? How would the story of the uprising be different if told from a Western perspective? What can we learn from the telling of the story from a Ayoreo perspective that we would not be able to learn through a Western narrative? What are the educational implications of these different modes of telling stories?
• There are several movies about future dystopias and the end of the world as we know it (some deeper/better than others). For secondary school students, a project involving analyses of different futures through film reviews could be a good way to initiate discussions of ethics, distribution and politics. Students can be asked to analyze implied critiques and propositions, analogies, metaphors and allegories deployed, invisibilized conflicts, and /or  engage in exercises about probable, possible, present and preferred futures (see http://www.teaching4abetterworld.co.uk/futures.html) . Here is a list of recent films that could be examined: Hunger Games, Divergent, Interstellar, the Girl With All the Gifts, Snow Piercer, Ender’s Game, Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending, OtherLife, the Matrix, Inception, District 9, Avatar, Blade Runner 2049, Transcendence and several episodes of the series “Black Mirror”.

Evaluation (anonymous)