Education in a Time of Social and Environmental Unravelling Transdisciplinary Responses to the Polycrisis

1 Introduction: Reconceptualizing Education in a Time of Unravelling

2 Climate-change Education, Beyond the Info-Dump

3 Attending to “Land as School” and the “Colonial Resident Question”: Place and Land as School?

4 The Educational Failure to Address Overshoot: An Interview with William Rees

5 The Ontology of Disaster: A Conversation with Marion Benkaiouche

6 Anthropocene Subjectification and Emancipatory Education: Seeking Shared Animal Pathways

7 How to Be Here? Three Conversations with Tim Lilburn

8 Response-Ability, Along a Way of Life: Doing-Undergoing Towards Postgrowth Futures

9 Widening the Circle of Relations: A Dialogue with Michael Ling

10 Pre-Conversations on the Sacred and Sacrifice: A Dialogue with Zuzana Vasko, Charles Scott, and Heesoon Bai

11 Education and the Problem of Generations: An Interview with Tim Ingold

Biography

Cary Campbell is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, Canada, and resides in Grandview Woodland, East Vancouver, where he was born and raised.

This is a profoundly important and timely book. Cary Campbell offers a bold, unflinching, and deeply humane rethinking of education in an era of polycrisis and planetary unravelling. With exceptional clarity and philosophical depth, he shows how our inherited educational stories, rooted in growth, technocratic solutionism, and anthropocentrism, are inadequate to the challenges before us. Instead, he invites readers into a pedagogy of attentiveness, humility, and existential courage: one that confronts ecological limits, honors land and intergenerational responsibility, and opens pathways for truly transdisciplinary, place-based, and post-growth forms of learning. This book is a rare achievement—rigorous, poetic, and urgently necessary. It will become essential reading for educators, scholars, and all who seek to imagine meaningful educational futures in a time of profound change.

Jing Lin (University of Maryland)

The beautiful thing about an unravelling is that it does not tell us what to do. It helps us recognise what is happening. Cary Campbell has collaborated with William Rees and other key authors to examine the state of the world with eyes wide open. This brave exploration of economic growth and the consequences of extractive capitalism, in the times of polycrisis, will help change the direction of education. From the mundane to the sacred, our students are demanding brave texts such as this one. 

Ruth Irwin (author of Economic Futures; Climate Change and Modernity; editor of Beyond the MetaCrisis)

Cary Campbell’s watershed publication, Education in a Time of Social and Environmental Unravelling: Transdisciplinary Responses to the Polycrisis, is a tour de force work in education. It carries the voices of the younger generations confronted by the terrifying sight of Polycrisis, The Great Acceleration, and Unravelling. An educational philosopher and curriculum theorist himself, Dr. Campbell sends an urgent call, through his book, about coming to our senses, here and now—to hear, feel, and see what the Earth is saying. But we can’t hear: our senses are chocked by the clamoring of the No-limits-to-Growth fantasy. Can education play an important part in restoring our senses and restorying who we are? Dr. Campbell's answer is resounding Yes.

Heesoon Bai, Professor of Philosophy of Education, Simon Fraser University