Archipelago as Form Education In A Post-Climate World

This chapter investigates the significance of the event in education in response to one of the most critical events of our time, climate change. The concept of the event in education has been a consistent trope over the past two decades, often understood as an encounter with the other. More recently, it has lost traction and does not fit within the broader theoretical shifts in Anthropocene discourse: post-humanism, new materialism, and decolonialism. There are many possible reasons for this shift, but one of the most novel and most relevant to this publication concerns the impact of the event of climate change itself on event studies. Due mainly to its multi-scalability and shifting temporalities, the event of climate change is uniquely challenging to pin down to a specific time and place, resulting in a problematic ambiguity. Following this, the impact of such ambiguity on the rise of climate denial is a serious concern, prompting the need for new educational forms. Exploring an evental education for the event of climate change, this paper reflects on the nature of educational form as evental form. Specifically, it will show how an evental form of education was developed in a unique, archipelagic Masters programme in West Cork. Developed across the islands of West Cork, the MA in art and environment utilised the geographic imaginary of the archipelago and the post-colonial discourse on archipelagic thinking to develop an appropriate framework to address the ambiguity of the event of climate change.