Learning with Care: Being with a Wounded Planet
Contributing a keynote lecture to the conference: LEARNINGS/UNLEARNINGS: ENVIRONMENTAL PEDAGOGIES, PLAY, POLICIES, AND SPATIAL DESIGN, on September 7, 2024
With Keynote addresses by Nicola Antaki, Anna Keune, Elke Krasny, MYCKET, Ashraf Salama, and Henrika L.M. Ylirisku; Färgfabriken, Liljeholmen/Stockholm, 5-7 September 2024.
The pedagogy of cruelty, which Rita Segato speaks of in order to analyze modern colonial patriarchy, uses the regime of capital to transform care into a source of cheap labor and the planet into a resource of cheap nature. This pedagogy of cruelty is central to capitalist warfare. The exhaustion of care and the depletion of nature are effects of this cruelty. Even though there is today growing awareness of the critical condition of the planet the pedagogy of cruelty continues to wage war on care and war on nature on nature. Exhaustion and depletion are planetary wounds in need of care and healing.A feminist analysis of this cruel pedagogy of patriarchy raises the question of what learning with care can do in order to imagine being with a wounded planet otherwise. Being with beings who are wounded requires to understand their condition and to learn what it means to care. Care therefore is in and of itself an ongoing process of learning, unlearning, relearning. This lecture focuses on recent feminist practices in architecture, the arts, curating, and urbanism that are bringing into existence ways of being with a wounded planet. The ways in which these practices resist the death-making pedagogy of cruelty and insist on the liveliness of life-making despite of it all inspires hope for learning with care in order to be with a wounded planet otherwise.
