Modernity and metacrisis

Over the last decades, the signs of various crises of our predicament are lived and felt all over the world. Droughts and fires, cyclones and widespread flooding, unprecedented storms and heat waves, melting glaciers and rising sea levels, toxic pollution and loss of biodiversity are only some of the disasters tormenting our planet. The loud echoes of worry expressed in presidential addresses to the UN (Mori, Reference Mori and Mori2009), the plea of 11,000 scientists warning of the effects of human activity on Earth (Ripple et al., Reference Ripple, Wolf, Newsome, Barnard and Moomaw2019) and the School Strike for Climate (White et al., Reference White and Ferguson2022), to name a few, shake the planet. The catastrophes of a ravaged planet spanning fossil-fuel consumption, excessive mining extending to the ocean floor, colonisation of Earth’s fertility and pollution culminating in the collapse of ecosystems and forms of ecocides accentuate the Climate Emergency. At the same time, the Climate Emergency is deeply connected with varied injustices including wars and famine. These interconnections reinforce the intricate relationality of political, economic and social power formations and their impact. Not only do they question narratives of mastery, development and economic growth but also problematise neoliberal conceptualisations of education that exacerbate the multiple crises by insisting on these qualities and narratives. Such complexity highlights the multiple crises we are living as an entrenched mode of thinking-feeling and living. An interconnected system of violences (colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, neoliberalism, industrialism, scientism), what I have approached elsewhere (Savva, Reference Savva2025) as violences of the -isms, suggests a life ethos premised on extraction, exploitation and consumerism rendering Earth and world as resources to be plundered. The entrenchment of such an (-isms) ethos prompts the connectedness of the multiple crises lived all over the planet.

Crises of this kind, despite being multiple, are not exhausted as the sum of the parts as they are deeply and complexly interrelated. The entangled nature of these multiple crises questions their grouping as polycrisis, as multiple single crises and problems in need to be addressed distinctly. This quality also refutes monolithic approaches, for instance, an exclusively modern-science emphasis focusing on a technological set of solutions and accompanied with a decline of ethical, theoretical and philosophical problematisation and education. Instead, the entangled nature of these multiple crises stresses the dynamic and relational qualities of our predicament. The notion of metacrisis, originally suggested by Nicholas Hedlund and colleagues (Reference Hedlund, Hargens-Esbjörn, Hartwig, Bhaskar, Bhaskar, Esbjörn-Hargens, Hedlund and Hartwig2016), expresses the connectedness of the planetary crises as well as the complexity needed in order to address them and effectuate a transition to sustainable living, a stance that problematises the mindset of modernity and Enlightenment.

Modernity’s premise on the one and Enlightenment’s assumptions of rational objectivity and mastery of all form part of -isms violences and of the metacrisis. The rule of unity and equivalence, making dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities, has eradicated qualitative difference. The “blocking of theoretical imagination” (Horkheimer & Adorno, Reference Horkheimer and Adorno2002, p. 16) brought by the fixation on theoretical monism, the discovery of general laws and their bringing together in a systematic way so as to form a totalising and grand theory, as well as the stringent belief on the straightforward linearity of cause-effect and on objective observation of facts and calculation of probabilities have paved the way for various forms of delusions and contestations. Modernity’s dominant metatheories, such as positivism, have been deemed as both deeply implicated in and inadequate to account for innumerable degradations and catastrophes.

Modernity’s dominance exceeds the confines of science, and its ripples are felt in various fields and everyday life. Its emphasis not only instrumentalizes, exploits and capitalises labours but also sets the tone for what and who is deemed worthy and of value for the powers of the -isms. Expunging the memory of intimate connection of peoples and Earth validated the distinction between humans and nature. Nature has been subsumed and transformed into an object to be controlled and used. This kind of reduction and commodification expands beyond nature to the thingification (Césaire, Reference Césaire2000) of peoples. Peoples have been othered (colonised, racialised, sexualised), expelled in the category of nature (Braidotti, Reference Braidotti2019a), subjected to the violences of the -isms. -Isms violences and their implication in the climate emergency have been probed by Amitav Ghosh (Reference Ghosh2021) through the concept of omnicide, “the unrestrainable excess that lies hidden at the heart of the vision of world-as-resource – an excess that leads ultimately not just to genocide but an even greater violence […], the desire to destroy everything” (p. 89). In forming this concept, Ghosh turns to the gruesome history of the Banda Islands where, in the 17^th century, thousands of the islands’ inhabitants were massacred, and plants and trees were destroyed. These catastrophes materialised in the name of the Dutch East India Company’s wealth dictating the monopoly of the nutmeg (and spice) trade and the control of supply. -Isms powers impelling omnicides, in their (trans)historical and political complexity, problematise modernity diachronically and in contemporary imaginings.

In -isms imaginaries, economic powers and modern science have taken control in the disenchantment of the world, the discernment of meaningful connection and the extirpation of animism. They set in motion the processes of terraforming (Ghosh, Reference Ghosh2021) by which changes have been wrought upon peoples and biomes through (settler) colonialism. Drawing on Alfred Crosby’s notion of neo-Europes, Ghosh highlights how settler colonialism dramatically transformed ecosystems by transplanting flora and fauna from Western Europe as it was deemed better and worthier than the native ones. As Western European explorers and settlers usurped territories from Abya Yala to Aotearoa, they would treat them as terra nullius, as empty land, with complete disregard for indigenous peoples and local ecosystems. Such -isms violences are prominent in modern ways of thinking-feeling and living making the world subject to Man and Anthropos, further accentuating the etchings of metacrisis.

Blasting through the figure of Man, Sylvia Wynter historicises the construct of the ethno-class Man legitimising otherings of domination, slavery, conquest, genocide and exploitation. In so doing, Wynter (Reference Wynter1989) problematises the relationality of economics and subordination drawing on Édouard Glissant’s notion of blocking. Wynter probes how Martinique, a Caribbean island turned into department of France, escaped the economic misery of other islands without escaping subordination from psychocultural blockage, the colonial power of assimilation and disconnection from Land. The process of blocking, writes Wynter, is the industrial process itself. It is based on autarkic plantation models instituted by Man effectuating the taming of all, earth and people. Such taming, though, is fomented in the conceptualisation of Man-as-Human (Wynter, Reference Wynter2003), as a bio-economic subject ruling all. Attending to new ways of being human counters the “naturalisation of dysselection” and its “profitable brutalities” (MacKittrick, Reference MacKittrick and MacKittrick2015, p. 7), that is, the othering at the outskirts of Man ensuing objectification and commodification. The dysselected status is not necessarily limited to peoples as it is engendered by a mindset producing archetypes and disposing all that do not fit them. Just as Man is a specific archetype for the human, Anthropos is the archetype for species, placed at the top of the pyramid and at the centre of entitlement. Querying new ways of thinking that challenge modernity’s vision are relational practices at the heart of education, vital for addressing climate change and going beyond the metacrisis.

Modernity and education

Dominant visions of education inanimate and standardise, emphasising acquired knowledge and honed skills along stagnant datafication, ruthless assessment and soulless hierarchising. Such visions cultivate a mentality of teleological development, progress and innovation, highlighting the constant urge to improve, to cull out qualities and entities deemed weak and bring forth the survival of the fittest (Irwin, Reference Irwin2017; Reference Irwin2015a). These visions, though, (re)produce the archetypes of Man and Anthropos. Enlightenment’s mindset of progress, forwarded by powers of the -isms, is faced with multiple interconnected crises. Such mentality shaped the world as “a work of art” (Jagodzinski, Reference Jagodzinski and Jagodzinski2017, p. 2), that is, the over-aestheticisation and marketisation of all (including ways of living and knowing, difference and creativity) so as they can be forwarded for sale and consumption. In this sense, various visions explore and promote what education might be/come. Cochleating around a business model of life advancing technological thinking and an education preparing a competitive workforce for the global market has become the norm. Lived curriculum and embodied pedagogy have been extrapolated as antiquated, whereas wonder and curiosity have been operationalised. The rapid advancement of technology and digitisation has shifted the focus of capital value towards information (Braidotti, Reference Braidotti2017). A new vision of education converted subjectivation and liberation from prejudices and authoritarian obedience to an exclusively mechanistic practising and breaking-down content into simple components to be delivered. Education has been streamlined as the machine of learning (Biesta, Reference Biesta, Serna, Peña and Ramírez2024a) guided by market’s needs for labour in a globalised world.

Efforts to attend to such matters have been plentiful and varied. Global conventions, such as those held by the UN, among others, bring together climate change and education. They uphold green aims such as climate action, clean energy, sustainable cities, responsible production and consumption without hindering development and quality (lifelong) education. Such thinking acknowledges the consequences of expansive growth, that is, extractive overconsumption driven by demographic growth resulting to (over)exploited nature and increased ecological degradation. However, neoliberal tendencies are flexed as the mindset of resourcing prevails. Resourcing maintains Anthropos at the centre of Life and at the top of the hierarchy among species and Earth, propelling other forms of life at the periphery and at the service of this archetype. Such a stance maintains a unified we-ness, a form of humanity’s homogeneity that overlooks and downplays inequalities and sufferings of the -isms (colonialism, imperialism, scientism, capitalism). This kind of approach backgrounds eco-relationalities and differentiates neoliberal sustainability (education) from (education for) sustainable living, accentuating further the dynamics of climate change.

Modernity and climate change

Climate change highlights the mindset of extraction and destruction as well as the irresponsible and unaccountable tendencies denying the effects of such ways of thinking and acting on planet and peoples. Even when effects are considered, the emphasis is bounded on or shifted exclusively to individual or categorical responsibility. More than twenty years ago, Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer were cautioning of mankind’s extraction -isms writing:

Drawing on more recent studies, Dipesh Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty, Bhavnani, Foran, P. Kurian and Munshi2019) and Andreas Malm and Rikard Warlenius (Reference Malm, Warlenius, Bhavnani, Foran, P.Kurian and Munshi2019) pose a double problematisation. On one hand, they problematise the just distribution of Earth’s commons through the historical and intergenerational emissions (and overall environmental load) debt accumulated by the wealthy at the expense of the poor carrying the burden in climate injustice. On the other hand, they also problematise Anthropos’s interference in planetary systems altering the conditions needed for the sustenance of life without enabling the ecosystem to develop balances. These tensions underline that climate change is not amenable exclusively to risk-management strategies and stress both the limitations of human-centric political and justice thinking and the -isms tendencies on life.

In the midst of such calls, a variety of ethicopolitical approaches have sprouted problematising modernity’s orientation and champion reclaiming collective Life. Vandana Shiva (Reference Shiva1993) problematises the commodification of planet (seeds, water, land) and traditional ecological knowledge along heritages of extractive labour of peoples. Shiva ties such mindset with the illusion we live under, of us being separate from and masters and owners of earth and of all casted beyond our enclosed us-ness. The mindset of commodification of Life, where planet and peoples are objectified as resource, validates the heritages of modernity and the sufferings of the -isms. Enlightenment’s ideas shape modernity’s normative assumptions as diachronically contemporary, never falling into decrepit, justifying extractive systems that uphold specific, usually Western, worlds as superior to and separate from the othered rest.

The experiences of the othered are centred in decolonial approaches to climate change. Farhana Sultana (Reference Sultana2022) problematises depoliticised and techno-economist spaces that erase historical and spatial geopolitics and power relations, re-orienting them as spaces of possibilities to challenge systems and re-politicise climate. In embracing emotional embodiment, Sultana theorises the unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality through lived experiences customarily devalued in Eurocentric modernity and the colonial matrix of power. Sultana draws on her own experience in Bangladesh during a cyclone, stressing climate change as “a restructuring of relationships to ecologies, waters, lands, and communities we are intimately, materially, and politically connected to” (Reference Sultana2022, p. 10) rather than an apolitical, physical phenomenon to be fixed through technoscientific solutions. Sultana’s approach highlights Chakrabarty’s (Reference Chakrabarty, Bhavnani, Foran, P. Kurian and Munshi2019, p. 31) assertion when writing “our debates remain anchored primarily in the experiences, values, and desires of developed nations, that is, in the West (bracketing Japan for the moment), even when we think we are arguing against what we construe to be the selfish interests of ‘the West.’” In so doing, the significance of memory, time and political consciousness is foregrounded as the -isms are lived and felt in post-colonies and marginalised communities in colonial metropoles. Climate change lays bare the slow and brutal violences of the -isms governing and structuring Life across space and time.

The depoliticisation and technomanagerialism of climate change and their ripples have been problematised widely. Ajay Singh Chaudhary (Reference Chaudhary2024), inspired by Frantz Fanon’s work, emphasises collective exhaustion brought by capitalism and accentuates climate change as an inherently political phenomenon. In this sense, approaching climate change as a technoscientific problem that an abstract, universal, heroic we come together to magically and innovatively solve is rejected. In his criticism of the concept of right-wing climate realism, Chaudhary cautions of the business-as-usual stance in climate crisis that maintains, enhances even, existing wealth and power to the point of climate barbarism. Drawing on ExxonMobil’s CEO Rex Tillerson’s proclamation, “my philosophy is to make money. If I can drill and make money then that’s what I want to do” (Reference Chaudhary2024, p. 13), Chaudhary accentuates both the existing system of right-wing climate realism preserving itself and the collective exhaustion brought by its petrochemical and industrial processes that fuel back the system in an ever-ending cycle. Exhaustion is heightened in ethicopolitical and transhistorical approaches highlighting the ennui of climate change. Ghosh (Reference Ghosh2021, p. 91) accentuates exhaustion of meaning as the Earth “(c)onquered, inert, supine, […] can no longer ennoble, nor delight, nor produce new aspirations.” This quality of exhaustion can also be felt in Chaudhary’s articulation of right-wing climate realism. The economics of infrastructure and security heightening the privatisation of public services, the investment on climate protection for the few and wealthy and migration policies as extensions of ethno-nationalist principles are only some manifestations accentuating the extractive circuit of the 21^st century capitalism in its socioecological expression. “We’re Not in This Together[!]” maxims Chaudhary, critiquing the exclusive focus on engineering (superficial) solutions without addressing the inherent power imbalances at the heart of climate change. Studying climate politics, suggests Chaudhary, starts off from today’s interrelated socioecological conditions whilst working through transhistorical (socioecological, economic, political) conflicts and probing (analytically, theoretically and practically) how they result in domination.

The transhistorical dynamics of climate change, along with the conditions and structures driving the contemporary world probed by Shiva, Farhana, Ghosh and Chaudhary, are further complicated by other scholars. Ruth Irwin (Reference Irwin2024), drawing on Martin Heidegger, problematises the relationality of economic growth and climate change discussing economic growth as both a normative discourse of modernity that converted Enlightenment’s idea of progress and as baked into the structures of contemporary governance and way of living. Irwin analyses how green revolution’s advocating for renewable energy, a steppingstone towards a postcarbon economy, does not necessarily lead to decreased emissions. The percentage of emissions is tightly knitted in consumerism emphasising economic growth and -isms violences and injustices. Emissions sprout from industrial wealth’s colonisation of the atmosphere, which has been conceptualised as the carbon sink appropriation, whereby the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb substances has been exhausted (Malm & Warlenius, Reference Malm, Warlenius, Bhavnani, Foran, P.Kurian and Munshi2019; Warlenius, Reference Warlenius2016). In this sense, the industrial revolution not only exacerbated planetary warming by releasing fossil fuels into the atmosphere, in Irwin’s (Reference Irwin2024) discussion, but also colonised Earth’s regeneration, as Shiva (Reference Shiva1993) stresses, by orienting it towards industrial commodities. Climate change is woven into the transhistorical tensions of modernity.

The way industrial production is nurtured by the consumerist ethos is another component of the climate change discussion. Irwin’s (Reference Irwin2024) study stresses consumerism enabling industrial production without serious accountability. Even though some forms of accountability can be identified in the production-to-consumption line through an emphasis on ‘ethical’ resourcing, they universalise and behaviouralise climate change by simplifying or romanticising the violences inherent in such structures (Malm et al., Reference Malm, Warlenius, Bhavnani, Foran, P.Kurian and Munshi2019; Malm & Hornborg, Reference Malm and Hornborg2014). The dynamics of modern economics premised on extraction alienated communities from their connection with Land and transformed them into modern consumers participating into systems that exacerbate climate change. Such critical accounts open pathways to consider how climate change might enable imaginaries of new modes of living.

In bringing ecological degradation in dialogue with historicity, Dipesh Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2009) queries how we think about the birth of the modern world comes to matter in the planetary crisis. Chakrabarty probes the collapse of geological and human time underlining the importance of bringing together the planetary and the global, deep and recorded histories, species-thinking and critiques of capital as intellectual formations being shaped in tension with one another. In emphasising such linkages, Chakrabarty suggests

Chakrabarty does not deny the role of modernity and -isms violences in climate change. Problematising humans’ becoming a force altering geological conditions, that is, Anthropos’s dominance over biomes and Earth, does not counter the “politics of ‘common but differentiated responsibility’” (Reference Chakrabarty2009, p. 218) of humans. Such crisis requires thinking on both registers, bringing together Anthropocentrism and Humanism. As Chakrabarty concludes, this kind of crisis poses the question of collectivity without diminishing particularities.

Anthropocentrism and Humanism are probed further in the posthuman convergence. ‘‘We’ may be in This together, but we are not all human and we are not one and the same” asserts Rosi Braidoti (Reference Braidotti2019a; Reference Braidotti2020) troubling humanity’s archetypes and their exceptionality. Humanity is not neutral but selective and exclusionary, validating entitlements and control. For Braidotti, affirmative relational ethics, a way of relating through interdependence and shared ways of becoming-world together, responds to the call of our predicament. A shift of this kind generates a new we that is heterogeneous and collective, surpassing modernity’s problematics, underlining an ethics of intimacy with the world and opening pathways for moving beyond the metacrisis to a different milieu.

The etchings of the metacrisis: Education and climate change

A different milieu that goes beyond the metacrisis problematises our predicament and queries how different imaginaries of education might be evoked. Current scholarship asks us to attend to struggles that may have been neutralised or unified within an amorphous and enclosed we in the quest for a common response to climate collapse (Hamilton & Neimanis, Reference Hamilton, Neimanis, Blas, Jue and Rhee2025; Sultana, Reference Sultana2022). Critical interrogations of the complexities of the -isms stressing the material difference that feminist and decolonial theories can effectuate to the critical climate emergency project are necessitated. Challenging modernity’s tropes, development mindsets and Eurocentric dualisms, recognising and addressing -isms’ impact on lands, bodies and psyches may attend to the entangled harms of the metacrisis.

Amid such tensions, Zachary Stein (Reference Stein2022) argues “Education is the Metacrisis.” In taking up Nicholas Hedlund’s (Reference Hedlund2023) discussion of the deep and complexly entangled global crises and their overlapping components (ecological, technological, political-economic, ethical, existential, epistemic), Stein highlights education as the common space where the entanglement of the multiple crises and the opportunity for a collective planetary paideia meet. In resonance with Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2009), Stein places emphasis on awareness. Whereas Chakrabarty foregrounds the awareness of us (differentiated) humans becoming a geological agent, Stein stresses the awareness of the metacrisis itself, suggesting how humans understand themselves and the world is crucial if an otherwise (education) is to be animated. Probing the metacrisis, then, is inexorably linked with probing the way that the -isms’ “matrix of power” has been unfolding “through institutional, financial and geopolitical world orders and knowledge systems” (Sultana, Reference Sultana, Solnit and Young2023, p. 60). Working with the metacrisis at the intersections of education and climate change animates potentials for re-imagining other ways of living without downplaying -isms violences.

This contribution is part of various efforts for an otherwise beyond a neoliberal rhetoric and ideology instrumentalising education, pivoting towards a standardised, outcomes-based and market-driven approach mainstreaming sustainable development (Irwin, Reference Irwin2022a; Jickling & Sterling, Reference Jickling and Sterling2017). In the thick of the -isms and the waning faith in modernity (Pugh et al., Reference Pugh, Laky de Angelo and Angliker2021, p. 269), this contribution prompts re-imagining environmental education. Weaved through the etchings of the metacrisis, Irwin’s (Reference Irwin2024) problematisation of consumer ethos along Ghosh’s (Reference Ghosh2021) omnicide, Sultana’s (Reference Sultana2022) heaviness of climate coloniality and Chaudhary’s (Reference Chaudhary2024) politics of exhaustion and brought with Stein’s (Reference Stein2022) educational crisis accentuating the crisis of the psyche and the spirit, open up potentials for probing intergenerational relationalities and meaningful connections. In what follows, I discuss the orientation and ethos of such an approach and query it in Southeast Mediterranean in its relationality with the planetary.

Working with the metacrisis: Education and climate change

Scholarship and research bringing together climate change and education have probed subjectivities, activism and intergenerational justice sharpening the demand for a qualitative shift in education (Everth, Reference Everth2024; Mayes et al., Reference Mayes, Abhayawickrama, Heyink and Groundwater-Smith2025; Mayes, Reference Mayes, Wyn, Cahill and Cuervo2023; McGimpsey et al., Reference McGimpsey, Rousell and Howard2023; Rousell et al., Reference Rousell, Cutter-Mackenzie and Foster2017). Education is probed as a worlding process beyond informational and scientism approaches to climate and pedagogy. At the same time, the consumerist ethos of life that globalism heralded all over the world (Gaudiano González, Reference Gaudiano González and Irwin2010) is troubled. Thus, a qualitative shift in education is not satisfied by solutions nested in adding subjects and reiterating curricula nested in modernity’s mastery and market notions of innovation, efficiency and sustainability (Irwin, Reference Irwin2015b) but rather accentuates the way of relating. The belief that climate change is a problem occurring in some abstract and distant elsewhere and can be solved through technology alone has been insidiously cultivated by technocratic approaches to education and promoted by mass media. In this sense, mass media and educational systems have functioned as instruments of control, shaping mentalities, ways of living and moulding new subjectivities by embedding the Western and corporate ethos. An atmosphere of numbing the production of untamed dissident subjectivities (Guattari, Reference Guattari2000) has been cultivated necrotising the mental, the social and the environmental ecology. The interconnectedness of the three ecologies and the re-invention of practices under the ethical, political and aesthetic aegis of ecosophy (Guattari, Reference Guattari2000, p. 41) can re-imagine living. Understanding the problematics shaping our predicament and experimenting with new practices advancing other ways of subjectivation and relation to Earth and peoples shapes awareness and transgresses anthropocentrism and humanism. In this sense, the entanglement of education and climate change can fertilise otherwise imaginaries.

Premising life and education on technocratic and mass media approaches reduces the experienced world to recognisable bits of information advancing its consumption based on the marketisation of affect. A business ethos of this kind has diminished the intensity of affect (Colebrook, Reference Colebrook2011). This phenomenon highlights both affect’s capture by -isms forces in favour of sensation and the exhaustion brought by such capitalisation as Chaudhary (Reference Chaudhary2024), Ghosh (Reference Ghosh2021) and Jagodzinski (Reference Jagodzinski and Jagodzinski2017) prod. Re-imagining affect as “intensive, creating new relations and lines of thought, opening different mappings or potentials among what is lived and what might be thought” is suggested by Claire Colebrook (Reference Colebrook2011, p. 54) as a way that might reanimate thinking. Re-vivifying affect, though, is inexorably linked with how education is thought and imagined. If thinking and education are approached at an extensive level, that is, at the level of adding more information and honing skills, then all will still be maintained as grasped and calculable, subject to models of correct reason and normalisation and an ethics of humanist managerialism. If, however, thinking and education are approached in their intensity, then no predetermined imaginaries are advanced and an openness to what might be(come), where our encounters are not reduced to our normalisations, is fertilised. “Climate change has brought to the fore the harsh reality of human thinking, its capacity to know its world only by altering its world. To live is to respond to, or bear a relation towards, what is not one’s own” writes Colebrook (Reference Colebrook2020, p. 58), prompting thinking and living as relation(alitie)s and inviting an imaginary of education beyond the magisterial and managerial.

An otherwise imaginary of education is vivified in the philosophical, poetic and spiritual. Sean Sturm and Stephen Turner (Reference Sturm and Turner2018) bring together the complex emergency of contemporary (higher) education, the Christchurch devastating earthquake and aftershocks and probe a philosophical approach to teaching the emergency. They query “plastic” and “seismic” practices that problematise a less prescribed pedagogy and attend to a hospitable experimental (higher) education space of many worlds. Such an approach intensifies education, in Colebrook’s discussion, generating new connections whilst tending to the local space as articulated in the tension of its (Māori and Pākehā) historicity, technocapital interests and the earthquakes. In tending to these tensions, tāngata whenua has been discussed as a philosophical concept sprouting from Māori and Pacifica ways of living, underlining the intimate connection of peoples and Land as one of the placenta, enabling cohabitation and nurturing (Irwin, Reference Irwin2015a). Tāngata whenua refers to land-earth-placenta-human connection, where one forms the other and all are thought of as having presence and authority. This ontology stresses not only an ethics of interdependence but also a practice that is a political act (Hoskins & Jones, Reference Hoskins, Jones, Martyn, Keane, Macleod, Dunes, Aoake, Jones, Hoskins and Callister-Baker2023; Jones & Hoskins, Reference Jones, Hoskins, Taylor and Hughes2016). As Papa Anaru, a Ngāti Porou elder in Aotearoa, stresses, it is a relation of custodianship nested in respect and nurture (Robinson, Reference Robinson and Rollason2014). Working with the metacrisis at the intersections of education and climate change, then, invokes an intimate connection between the material and the spiritual.

Intimacies of this kind are composed of diverse complexities. Eco-relational spirituality (Vaai Lumā, Reference Vaai Lumā2019) is discussed as the guiding principle of many Pacific peoples over the centuries amid narratives treating the area as a trophy of geostrategic competition driven by economic interests. Eco-relational spirituality emphasises the deep relation between the diverse and the whole and the realisation that we do not know all there is. It frees from mentalities of ownership towards relational spaces and honours Earth as part of us. Pacific islanders’ turning to local ways of life stresses the importance of inheritance bequeathed by ancestors and underlines scepticism to statistics and solutions coming from those largely responsible for increased emissions (Hereniko, Reference Hereniko and Rollason2014). Eco-relational spirituality counters modernity’s problematics and suggests an otherwise imaginary.

Indigenous concepts have been approached as a counterpoint to the alienation of modernity through their translation into a “conceptual futurity” (Irwin, Reference Irwin2022b, p. 10). The colonial dependency syndrome (Vaai Lumā, Reference Vaai Lumā2019) has been opposed by community-based approaches as a response to development agendas refuelling the forces of the -isms. Indigenous concepts, though, are not simply an alternative worldview to Enlightenment’s separation of the material and the spiritual. In other words, it is not a matter of dialectically opposing and repositioning views on the world as that would reproduce Enlightenment’s premises. Instead, concepts of indigenous cosmologies are vibrant modes of thinking-feeling that animate an otherwise where we could realise the “co-relational poetics-aesthetics’” (MacKittrick, Reference MacKittrick and MacKittrick2015, p. 8). When such concepts are enfolded in an inquiry that prompts the violences of the -isms and the implications of the disconnection between peoples and Land, a multitude of affective encounters is evoked, what I approach here as imaginaries of eco-relationality.

Working with the metacrisis: Whirling encounters and affective archives

This contribution works with the notion of metacrisis evoking Édouard Glissant’s (Reference Glissant and Obaist2021) notion of whirling encounters. In whirling encounters, we wander and encounter -isms systems of domination and control. Linear timespace and geometrical scalability are excised, and the complex relationality of Land and people is heightened. Whirling encounters is combined with an affective approach to archives inspired by Astrida Neimanis (Reference Neimanis and Hessler2018) and Lydia Cabrera (Reference Cabrera2019). Neimanis (Reference Neimanis and Hessler2018) does not consider the archive as a concrete pathway to the past and rethinks it as the intensities of affect that might enable us to approach the harms of our times in their transhistorical perplexity. Cabrera (Reference Cabrera2019) blurred the lines between ethnography and storytelling exploring black oral traditions and sacred practices in the Caribbean. Transgressing archives-as-data, Cabrera privileged archives as interactive and embodied, honouring an alternative history of stories and songs. Whirling encounters, then, manifests as a form of historical storytelling, a wandering through archival material of intimacy, feeling and affective intensity. I do not engage only with studies but also with sites, objects and personal recollections. My focus is not so much on analysing archives for their underlining ideological and political intricacies but rather on bringing archives into being. I move beyond the documentation of events and zoom on the intensities of affect. In this sense, archives are not a passive resource of information on a long-gone past. Modernity’s alienation is exiled for an embodied and embedded approach that reanimates the intimate relationality of peoples and Land and unfurls the forces of the -isms and their effects.

Such an approach is queried in Southeast Mediterranean in its connection with the regional and the planetary. Customarily, the Mediterranean is understood as an area of a homogenous Europe. This way of thinking erases difference and sufferings approaching Europe as a stagnant concept and world. Here, Southeast Mediterranean is approached in its plurality, Mediterranean(s), an open-ended assemblage of whirling encounters (Glissant & Obaist, Reference Glissant and Obaist2021). In evoking Glissantian philosophy and in drawing connections with the Caribbean and the Pacific, I do not compare histories and I do not impose frameworks from one area to the other. Instead, in acknowledging and taking seriously and respectfully the legacies of the -isms and of modernity and their indelible marks, I animate transoceanic thinking and probe worlds of resonance connecting Southeast Mediterranean(s) with the planetary. In shifting between the local and the planetary, I query pre-industrial practices of islandic Southeast Mediterranean(s) respectful of local and planetary ecosystems in their tension with -isms violences. The gentle and intimate relationality of peoples and Land comes to matter countering the consumerist ethos (Irwin, Reference Irwin2024) and the colonisation of Earth’s fertility (Shiva, Reference Shiva1993) whilst being mindful of romanticising tendencies. The connection of the regional and the planetary augments -isms violences, heaviness (Sultana, Reference Sultana2022) and exhaustion (Chaudhary, Reference Chaudhary2024; Ghosh, Reference Ghosh2021) without eliminating particularities. Southeast Mediterranean(s), then, goes beyond the actual geographical location to ways of thinking-feeling and living that do not conform to Eurocentrism and the normative alienation of modernity.

Re-imagining education beyond the metacrisis transcends modernity’s dominant metatheories and probes inquiry as a different worlding. Inquiry surpasses the technocratic and stagnated mindset of our predicament (Guattari, Reference Guattari2000). It stems from an ethos of eco-relationality evoking care and responsibility. The process of inquiry is affective, vibrant and intimate, re-vivifying different ways of living beyond the impasses of our times.