Teaching in the Ruins: from collapsology to collapsosophy 

This paper is part of an ongoing personal meditation on the purpose of education in a time ecological and social collapse. Since 2010 I have been struggling with the depressing challenge of how, as an educator and citizen, to respond to what may be variously referred to as the poly-crisis, meta-crisis or Great Unravelling. It can be troubling to work within any sector of society that is unable to recognise or respond to the enormity of the interlocking existential crises facing the world today. However, it feels intensively far worse to work within Higher Education and the Liberal Arts, where questions of truth, meaning and value are paramount. How are we to act and think if our world is ending? How can we ready both ourselves and our students for the possibilities and realities of collapse? Or as Ahmed Afzaal has cogently asked, ‘[h]ow are we to prepare our students so they can meet, in ethical and humane ways, the challenges they are likely to face? … [I]f we don’t continually change our pedagogy in light of what we’re learning about the world’s future, our students are likely to discover that their education was utterly worthless insofar as it failed to prepare them for the world.’ In response to these challenges and questions, I think we must be prepared to experiment. I offer here some past and present activities (and failures) of my own, both off-curriculum and on, contextualised with recommendations and publications from fellow travellers, including Afzaal’s (2023) Teaching at Twilight: The Meaning of Education in an Age of Collapse, Boyd’s (2023) I Want a Better Catastrophe, Jackson and Jensen’s (2022) An Inconvenient Apocalypse, Steven and Chapelle’s (2021) Another End of the World is Possible, de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity, Hine’s At Work in the Ruins and Yunkaporta’s (2019) Sand Talk. As an ecological philosopher by training, I include a brief disciplinary perspective on collapse (including collapsology and collapsosophie), concluding with some wisdom from Isabelle Stengers’ most recent work (2023) Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse.