Introduction: Being in the World Anew

How should we exist in a post-climate change world? What does it mean to teach in a world defined by the event of climate change? How does this event impact art, creation and creativity? The following publication brought artists and educators together around a series of seminars and colloquia on the role of art and education in climate change. Increasingly, within these dialogues, a shift in perspective began to emerge regarding the temporality of our disciplinary positions concerning the event of climate change. Moving slowly from speculative positions on climate change to post-evental positions, the texts in this publication began to map out the material, pedagogical and existential consequences of teaching and making this shift. Since there can be no simplistic or reductive distinction between pre- and post-climate change life, the texts in this publication operate in the flow of ambiguity between one place and another, between anticipatory anxiety and brutal reality, between resilience and resistance, uncertainty and proposition. In the flow of this process, we have tried to draw lifelines between our educational histories and contemporary pedagogical dilemmas, to sit with the tensions and nervous points of connection between our disciplines and climate change, and finally, to shape or sculpt new educational forms, appropriate to our new reality. This introduction reimagines Sophistic educational practice as a patchwork pedagogy for today in a world increasingly defined by climate-induced nomadism. Stitching, sewing, weaving, and a patchwork pedagogy piece together the fragments of our everyday actions and interventions in art and education across institutional and geographical boundaries.