Education at a Crossroads: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Anthropocene

Omschrijving

An Education Chair in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at a Crossroads of Crisis and Commitment Stepping into this Chair feels both like a homecoming and a new beginning. It is a continuation of my long-standing commitment to justice in and through education, but also an invitation to reimagine what humanistic learning can become in these current times of rupture and reckoning. We find ourselves living in the era of the Anthropocene, an era which is marked by human-induced ecological collapse, deepening social inequalities and intensifying polarization. In such landscapes, education cannot be neutral or untouched, but demands ethical and political commitment, philosophical struggle and planetary awareness.

With this Chair in Education and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), I will build on the humanist-inspired traditions of the University of Humanistic Studies (UHS). These are traditions of meaning-making, critical reflection and emancipatory education. At the same time, I want to challenge humanist traditions to stretch further and move towards a humanism that is better attuned to ecological entanglements and epistemic plurality; a humanism that is not only attentive to diverse human experiences, but also responsive to the more-thanhuman world that we co-inhabit. Two main threads run through my address. The first thread concerns DEI in different layers of meaning. For me, DEI translates into pluralism, understood as active engagement with diversity that entails participation, dialogue and the mutual transformation of all involved. I will approach pluralism, firstly, as a pedagogical practice that needs discomfort, dissensus, interruption and not-knowing as conditions for transformative learning. Secondly, through Appadurai’s notions of scapes and the capacity to aspire, I will highlight pluralism as an analytical lens to resist polarizing binaries of global and local and explore its complex entanglements that shape our lives. Thirdly, with Mbembe and Latour, I treat pluralism as an epistemological stance that honors multiple and suppressed knowledge traditions. And finally, through the idea of dis-enclosure, I will point to pluralism as a political horizon in which epistemology and politics meet. These layers are not separate. Taken together, they will form a red thread in my argumentation: pluralism in the Anthropocene must be understood as pedagogical, analytical, epistemological and political all at once. The second thread is my commitment to justice. I will discuss how populist narratives, in the Netherlands and elsewhere, seek to delegitimize both DEI and climate action by portraying them as threats to national identity and economic security. Against this backdrop, 

I argue that social inequality and ecological destruction are deeply intertwined. Decolonial thought helps me to understand that both are sustained by the same modernist systems, and thus call for an epistemological and educational framework that makes their interconnection visible at every level. With Appadurai, Mbembe and Latour as my interlocutors, I will argue that education can help to nurture the capacity to aspire, confront colonial legacies and foster planetary responsibility. Taken together, these two main threads, pluralism in its multiple registers and justice as horizon and commitment, form the backbone of my plea for engaged humanistic education. Such education must confront the structural conditions of epistemic injustice, colonial legacies, and the ecological crises that shape our everyday lives, our institutions and our imaginations. It must also cultivate an ethos that affirms both human and ecological plurality and that holds open tensions as fertile ground for ethical and pedagogical imagination. In this way, I seek to embody the UHS mission.