Thinking with Black Ecologies in Educational Research

I am interested in possibilities for educational research and practice for and with young children that responds to current times of unevenly inherited environmental precarity. I join others who point to the necessity of situating the causality and current effects of this precarity within past-present atmospheres of racial capitalist extractivism, settler colonialism, and anti-Blackness.11See for example, Françoise Vergès, “Racial capitalocene” in Futures of Black Radicalism (2017): 72–82. This work speaks back to apolitical, universalizing, and human-exceptionalist discourses of the Anthropocene; instead suggesting the need for multi-scalar, situated, and justice-oriented modes of attunement and response.  

I am particularly interested in intervening into the erasures and deficit constructions of Black people’s relationships with the more-than-human world in education. In this regard, I have turned to the conceptual and methodological openings provided by Black ecologies. Black ecologies offer an orientation toward Black relations with the more-than-human world, both imagined and embodied, that centre more-than-human recuperation, relationality, reciprocity, and kinship.22Romy Opperman, “We Need Histories of Radical Black Ecology Now,” August 3, 2020, https://www.aaihs.org/we-need-histories-of-radical-black-ecology-now. Black ecologies are filled with possibilities of inquiring into Black people’s liberatory relations with the more-than-human world, in particular spaces and places. Black ecologies attend to and resist the ways in which these relations have been and continue to be impacted by anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, including their interconnections.  

Black people and their historical and present land relationships are absent from Ontario elementary and middle school environmental education curriculum guidelines.33Ontario Ministry of Education, Environmental Education: Scope and Sequence of Expectations, 2017, http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/environmental_ed_kto8_eng.pdf Alongside this absenting, I have also written about the coloniality and anti-Blackness inherent in normalized pedagogy that positions Black children living in urban contexts as lacking relationships with nature.44Fikile Nxumalo, “Place-based disruptions of humanism, coloniality and anti-blackness in early childhood education,” Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning 8, no. SI (2020): 34–49. Importantly, Black ecologies also insist that Black people’s material and imaginary ways of knowing and becoming-with the more-than-human world cannot be contained by ongoing structures of harm. For example, Justin Hosbey and J. T. Roane, writing on Black ecologies that have emerged from maroon communities within the context of Tidewater Virginia and the Mississippi Delta, point to colonial discourses that “depict Black people either as equal partners in ecological destruction or simply as victims of extraction.”55Justin Hosbey and J.T. Roane, “A Totally Different Form of Living: On the Legacies of Displacement and Marronage as Black ecologies,” Southern Cultures 27, no. 1 (2021): 68–73. Similarly, Katherine McKittrick, thinking with Sylvia Wynter, underlines the importance of a deciphering practice that shifts away from descriptive accounts of the oppression of Black people. As an alternative, a “deciphering practice imagines and enacts an aesthetics of black life outside the intense weight of racism.”66Katherine McKittrick, “Dear April: The Aesthetics of Black Miscellanea,” Antipode 54, no. 1 (2022): 3–18.

Holding close to these teachings, what might it look like to centre Black ecologies in Canadian education research and practice? One possibility is to take inspiration from multiple temporalities. That is to say, Black ecologies are not only concerned with past and present more-than-human relationalities. They also include an engagement with future-oriented, liberatory world-making. I see this as an invitation to imagine what environmental education grounded in Black onto-epistemologies might look like, feel like, and sound like. In my work, I have considered what kinds of pedagogical orientations might be needed to engage children in speculative Black storytelling that centres desired reparative and reciprocal relations with the more-than-human world.77Fikile Nxumalo and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, “Centering Black life in Canadian Early Childhood Education,” Gender and Education (2022): 1–13. With my friend and colleague kihana miraya ross, I have experimented with Black speculative fiction—set in the future amidst the ruins of ecological devastation and anti-Blackness, our story imagines a school for Black children centred on reparative, reciprocal and relational Black land relationships.88Fikile Nxumalo and kihana miraya ross, “Envisioning Black space in Environmental Education for Young Children,” Race Ethnicity and Education 22, no. 4 (2019): 502–524.  

These speculative imaginaries disrupt colonial constructions of “pure nature” separate from humans. This means that urban spaces and places are also sites of real and imagined Black ecologies. In taking seriously the liberatory potential of imaginaries I am guided by two ethos. The first is that pedagogical responses to environmental precarity need to be interdisciplinary; entangling ecological caring, anticolonial and anti-racist ethics and politics, Western science, Black and Indigenous knowledges, the arts, and more. Interdisciplinarity is one antidote against “the grandiosities, myopia, and heroicisms of Man”99Affrica Taylor, “Countering the Conceits of the Anthropos: Scaling Down and Researching with Minor Players,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 41, no. 3 (2020): 340–358. that continue to plague responses to the so-called Anthropocene. The second is a lesson from Black studies on creative expression as a place from which to theorize and make visible what Kevin Quashie calls Black aliveness.1010Kevin Quashie, Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021). Katherine McKittrick powerfully describes this attention to creative expression as: 

Staying with the potentialities offered by interdisciplinarity and Black creative expression, I am currently engaging in a research inquiry aimed at centring Black ecological relationships in climate change education, in both present and future terms. Thinking with Black futures, I am interested in engaging a group of Black families with young children in Toronto schools on their collective desires for the climate justice education for their children. Thinking with Black presence, I am inviting the same group of Black families to share images and stories of their more-than-human relations and environmental practices in Toronto. This research builds on my previous research, which has focused on young Black children and made visible their complex relations with the more-than-human world in urban places and spaces.1212Fikile Nxumalo, “Disrupting Anti-Blackness in Early Childhood Qualitative Inquiry: Thinking with Black Refusal and Black Futurity,” Qualitative Inquiry 27, no. 10 (2021):1191–1199. As the earlier discussion on enacting deciphering practices suggests, I am particularly interested in going beyond revealing the unending ways in which environmental injustices manifest and take hold in Black communities. What can emerge from making visible the Black ecologies that are always, already present in multiple situated forms in the city places and spaces that Black people inhabit? By “making visible” I mean that my theories of change are oriented towards educators and education policy makers who are meeting the imperative of designing situated climate justice education that holds to the inseparability of racial and climate justice.  

Rather than a universalized how-to, my intention is to create pedagogical and curricular openings that are meaningfully and specifically connected to Black communities’ ecological desires and more-than-human relations. My research also aims to intervene more broadly into neoliberal multicultural approaches as a key way of addressing difference in the education of young children in Canada. In my work with young children and educators over the past decade, I have found multicultural approaches unable to hold the specificities and complexities of Black subjectivities. Rather, such approaches oscillate between erasing the long durée of Black onto-epistemologies in Canada and constructing Black life in Canada in deficit ways. For me, taking seriously that “Black matters are spatial matters”1313Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). means finding ways to attend to Black place relations and knowledge-making that are refusals of neoliberal multicultural formations. Black ecologies, at multiple registers—both real and imagined—are filled with such refusals.