Spring Seminar 2024: “Conspiring with the Trees”

Dear friends of SPSE (The Society for the Philosophical Study of Education),

We are pleased to invite you to our upcoming spring seminar on “Conspiring with the Trees” on May 30, 2024 at 7:00am-8:30 am (Central Time, USA) / 2:00pm-3:30pm (Central European Time) / 10:00pm-11:30pm (Australian Eastern Standard Time). It will be virtual and free of charge. Please have a look at the flyer in the attachment for further information. 

Our invited keynote speaker is Dr. Eve Mayes from Deakin University (Australia).

For access to the Zoom link, please contact one of the organizers: Sabrina Bacher (sabrina.bacher@uibk.ac.at) or Erica Hagström (erica.hagstrom@edu.su.se)
Feel free to share this event. We look forward to your participation!

Abstract: Conspiring with the Trees

This talk pivots on a particular phrase from the children’s book The Lorax (Dr Seuss, 1972/2012): ‘I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.’ Variations of this phrase have been frequently painted on placards of school strike for climate attendees, particularly during the 2018-2019 mass mobilisations associated with Fridays for Futures and School Strike 4 Climate. The various refracted re-workings of this phrase by students across place and time raise questions of how children and young people, across multiple, variegated and shifting subjec­tivities, speak to, for and with themselves, others, trees, and the world. Questioning whether a school student can ‘speak for the trees’ resonates with long-standing feminist and post-colonial discussions of the ‘problem of speaking for others’ (Alcoff 1991), and whether the ‘subaltern’ can ‘speak’ for themselves (Spivak, 1987). Questioning who speaks for whom raises representational questions – particularly, of how media and academic commentators risk speaking for the multiplicity of the strikers’ bodies, actions and their historical-geographic-scientific-affective-material entanglements. 

The phrase ‘I speak for the trees…’ also raises broader political questions of who can ‘speak for’ the trees and the Earth – particularly in a period where ‘Anthropocene’ universalising discourses risk coming to speak for not only all other human life, but also for the more-than-human and the world itself. As Alexandra Lasczik and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles (2022: 6) ask, ‘Who can speak for the Earth?’ When a child or young person holds a sign, invoking the Dr Seuss children’s book (and its television and film remakes), there is a risk of invoking the historical, Romantic association of the innocent white child with nature (Yusoff 2018). There is the risk of reifying Hollywood-style environmentalisms still bound up with capitalism (the 2012 film The Lorax grossed a worldwide total of $348.8 million). In settler colonial Australia, there is the risk of the (white/settler) young person usurping the place of First Nations peoples as Traditional Custodians for Country.

This talk will grapple with the complex dynamics of speaking and listening, speaking for and speaking with, and how to form political alliances that do not eviscerate, appropriate or colonise difference. Invoking the term ‘con-spiracy’, I work with anthropologist Tim Choy’s (2016, 2020, 2021) discussions of the political implica­tions of the etymology of the Latin conspirare (com, ‘together’ + spirare, ‘breathe’): breathing-with. I suggest that this concept of con-spiracy might invigorate micropolitical movements through the impasses of con­temporary education – from reform to regeneration and respair. To respair – to hope again after a period of despair – offers regenerative possibilities for other peda­gogical and worldly relations.

Bio

Eve Mayes (she/her) is a Senior Research Fellow at Deakin University in the School of Education (Research for Educational Impact), living and working on unceded Wadawurrung Country. She is currently leading the project: Striking Voices: Australian school-aged climate justice activism (Australian Research Council, Discovery Early Career Research Fellowship, 2022-2025): a participatory project centring young people’s experiences of climate change, activism and schooling. Eve’s first book The Politics of Voice in Education (2023, Edinburgh University Press) critiques the liberal humanist and late capitalist logics of student voice in educational reform, whilst affirming other possibilities for transformative pedagogical relations in and beyond schooling. She is a co-convenor of the activist-scholar Earth Unbound collective; the collective’s book Planetary Justice: Stories and Studies of Action, Resistance, and Solidarity (co-edited by Michele Lobo, Eve Mayes & Laura Bedford) will be published in July (Open Access) by Bristol University Press.