Laura Horn: I am associate professor in political economy at the Department of Social Sciences and Business at Roskilde University, a university that's around 30 kilometres outside of Copenhagen. I have been teaching for 22 years in a university context. The questions pertaining to how we teach in the climate and ecological emergency, how we teach in the Anthropocene, really speak to the development I can see in my own teaching, I can see in my own research, but also in the contradictions I see in myself, as an educator and a researcher.
It is not always comfortable to think about these things, but we must. And we must all, if you want to put it in Haraway’s terms, stay with that trouble and either make something of it or find ways to navigate it. Because our students deserve the honesty and integrity of educators to face up to where we are right now in terms of conjunctural development and the futures that we are facing.
I am teaching at all levels, whether that be bachelor, introduction, master or PhD training. In terms of substance, it is mostly related to political economy and international politics. That can be anything from global value chains to global finance. I also teach feminist political economy, green political economy and methodology classes.
Julien Etienne: You just mentioned what you feel you owe the students in terms of teaching them in the Anthropocene. Can you elaborate on your journey to increasingly include climate considerations and discussions of the Anthropocene into your teaching? What came from you, but also what came from the surroundings, the students themselves or colleagues?
Laura Horn: That is a really good point to reflect on and keep in mind that we're all inspiring each other and we're all learning from each other instead of feeling settled. The point here is that this constant learning from others and seeing the decisions on literature, the decisions on themes and topics that others take for their courses, for me, is really important. And to be open to thinking: “oh, yeah, why haven't I done that?” “What would it cost for me to bring in this particular theme?” “What are the transaction costs for, you know, changing something here?”
I'm part of that generation of academia that came into a university landscape in the early 2000s, when uncertainty was increasing. It was after 9-11. I started teaching when Europe was still on the path towards “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world”. Everything was great and then the financial crisis broke. And then the students I had in my classes were only used to crisis. They had never known capitalism that was not in crisis. They had never known nature that was not in crisis. That is the case now with the students who've been socialised into Fridays for the Future, who have seen Greta Thunberg and all the countless activists and movements, but have also experienced COVID and the world becoming very small indeed, and increasing uncertainty.
So I think part of my argument for academics, in particular higher education educators, is that we should think about where our assumptions, norms, practises and expectations come from. They have partially been shaped by the Holocene, by the assumptions that there is stability, that there is a future that can be measured, that universities are a thing that will be around in the future. Having an institution mainly publicly financed, place-based, and safe is a big assumption. We know that because of what we've seen in Gaza. Universities can literally be destroyed. We know that because many universities are actually affected by climate disasters. A flooded university is not a safe space anymore. It cannot be used for teaching. A university that has no resources to invest in air conditioning cannot be used during summer. You cannot sit in a derelict university and learn actively. So there are material circumstances like Goldilocks parameters that we need for universities and for knowledge production and higher education to actually be in place. And these are now increasingly precarious.
As we go about our everyday, we are facing too much teaching and too many deadlines, and we forget that these assumptions are the baseline against which we structure our everyday. The students see that. The students look at us and the way we speak, the assumptions we communicate through the literature we assign, the curriculum we set, and they will think, “yeah, but these people all act like nothing's really happening”. And then they will internalise that. And that becomes problematic, not maybe in the next five years, maybe not in the next 10 years. Give it two, three decades, it is not that far from now: what will the students that I teach now think of us and how we navigate these spaces telling them very calmly, “yes, we want to prepare you for employability and the labour market, and here's a little bit of philosophy of social science and here are some research methods. Make sure you have some quant skills and then everything will be fine.” I do not think that is ethically honest to the students. They need that in the immediate future, of course. But navigating those different temporal claims and different temporal dimensions is something that we owe them.
Julien Etienne: That speaks to an argument you have made with others about how the academic world seems to be in this double reality, where there is an awareness of the climate crisis among academics, but many of them still work and teach as if there was not any climate crisis. Could you speak to how you have sought to better reflect climate change in the curriculum?
Laura Horn: That is a great responsibility and something that needs to be navigated very carefully. There are decision chains about what kind of curricula we teach in, and some of them are obviously set at ministerial level. There are areas where you as an individual teacher or as a teaching team for a particular course need to speak towards parameters that are given. And, as is always the case in an institutional context, that is the responsibility you need to act upon. The interesting question then is: how much can you push those constraints? That is a responsibility, seeing where the boundaries are, naming the boundaries, and seeing how they can be navigated. Sometimes they can be subverted, sometimes they can be navigated, and sometimes they are just what they are.
And then you need to choose your battles.
One of them is employability and labour market relevance. It is in all higher education landscape: we need to produce students that can find jobs on the labour market. And we owe that to our students, in particular students who come from socioeconomically disadvantaged households. People need jobs. That's a reality that often stands opposed to greening the curriculum because often that engagement with climate and ecological concerns and teaching means asking very critical questions. And critical questions are not always the most solution-oriented, right? If the labour market asks for solution-oriented transformation agents, then the ones who say “yeah, but what about?” are maybe not the ones who will be picked when there are 400 applicants for an entry level job. It is something we need to become better at discussing with our students.
That is not so much a question of didactics. It is an existential pedagogical question. It comes to the relationship between the students and those who teach them. The pedagogical relationship also drives the development and revision and tweaking of existing courses to make them more attuned to Anthropocene conditions, and help students acquire new tools, methods, understanding, and ask questions.
You cannot just throw in a green lecture and then be done with it. That used to be the case in the late 2000s, sort of 2010s. Many courses started to include the climate lecture. I myself have done the climate lecture. “Right, we have done all the important things, and now, at the end of the course, let's have this one session where we talk about climate change.” That was a thing. I am glad that increasingly that is not a thing anymore. In my teaching here, together with colleagues, we have mainstreamed climate and ecological concerns into all the different thematic and theoretical discussions, sometimes even just as a registration of absence: “Right, this theory has very little to contribute to this.”
It is important to make sure that it is indeed a mainstreaming, even though mainstreaming in itself is obviously a sort of ambivalent perspective. But there are more and more courses defined around Anthropocene conditions from the outset. That comes with a new challenge, however: how do we make sure that there are concerted efforts, that there's progression?
So we need the structural institutional questions. We need the questions about relevance to the labour market. We need the nerdy, nitty-gritty questions about curriculum design, about the literature list. “Does it matter if I throw in the recent publications from Q1 journals on climate finance and the green industrial state, but I don't cite anyone that focuses on most affected nations?” Diversity questions also have a role to play because we know that knowledge production is characterised by these epistemological power relations.
There really is not an easy answer, but starting to have that conversation and making sure that you pinpoint the different levels of power that come in and also being very clear about your constraints, I think, is the way forward.
Julien Etienne: Coming back to what the students might need for employability and how this links to bringing climate change into the teaching: there is critical thinking, i.e. giving students the ability to work with and question ideas, trends, and frameworks. But there is also practice: once you enter the labour market, climate change will intrude in your work one way or another. And you might increasingly have climate related problems to solve, even if your job title does not have “climate” in it. How will you approach those? What techniques, angles, allies might you find to resolve those problems? Is this perspective on practice something you also weave into your teaching?
Laura Horn: Absolutely. Every job is a climate job from now on. Everything we do, we do in the Anthropocene. The world is no longer the same as it was when we were entering the job market. Being able to give that critical tool set, the ability to ask critical questions and to also have a baseline knowledge of how climate and ecological processes intersect with employability concerns, for instance, becomes really important because otherwise what we end up with is the easy solutions: “Oh, we'll just need more green growth and then that's it.” We need students to have the ability to put question marks to easy solutions, and ask: “in whose interest is this?”
That is a simple question, but one we often do not ask because it is uncomfortable, because that points towards something that is not a structural process far, far away from me: if this happens in my job, then someone is going to lose. And what if that someone lives in Nepal or one of the most affected nations? So there is also this broader global aspect of understanding linkages, understanding what it means to be me in the immediate context where I am, but understanding how this hangs together in this broader life system, in this broader earth system. And that is difficult and uncomfortable. We cannot always think about it because, who has time to consider the planetary boundaries every second of the day? No one wants that.
You need to have in your education moments and opportunities where you can sit yourself down and think, for example, “what is ocean acidification?” Unless you live in an island state, you probably do not think about ocean acidification or biogeochemical flows or the entire range of changing planetary boundaries that we're transgressing one by one. But once you realise that it basically destroys the Great Barrier Reef that you might be dreaming about visiting one day, the beautiful, wonderful, wild world that we all have in the back of our mind, even at the very emotional, personal level, that might actually cause an emotional response that we do not really allow our students to have. It is not just only a question of how we pair labour market relevance with knowledge about climate and ecological concerns so that they can be valorised in a job later. That is important. And if that is your thing, I think that is a really important way to go. But I think if anyone comes out of university trajectories nowadays and has been through a system of learning where they have not once had the opportunity to actually feel or intellectually resonate with something, to me, that is deeply tragic.
How do we expect students to be able to respond to these great conditions of uncertainty and loss of the Anthropocene if we do not give them tools to navigate between the intellectual and the emotional? There are lots of wonderful things and still so many opportunities and possibilities and organising and community building and everything, but we are also going to lose things in the Anthropocene. And we are not preparing our students for the emotional range they will experience, not that that is okay for them to experience it. We have analytical tools, we need them, but analysis ends with despair and climate anxiety if we do not pair it with a pedagogy that gives them tools also to manage that.
Julien Etienne: I retrained a few years ago and I was attending an excellent course on climate change. I experienced it intellectually, but also emotionally as very hard hitting. Fellow students also experienced it as a shattering experience. This is sort of a whole new thing, is it not? How do you process that, how you work with this emotional response?
Laura Horn: There are two sides to it that are of course interrelated, but one of them we do not talk a lot about. The students I will come to in a moment, but what happens with the educators? I mean, how do you teach? Year after year, semester after semester, and everything is just getting worse and worse. Many teachers are not okay. We are all thinking about how we can make sure that our students do not walk out of our classes with climate anxiety. How can we make sure that we teach with care? But at the same time, we are constrained with the teaching workload and expectations. We might at some point actually want to think about peer supervision or a room where the teachers can rant or grieve and think about how to continue teaching this if it gets worse and worse?
I have experienced many students who are quite good at asking where the good news are. Where do we find the good stories? What do we do now? Sometimes I am just asking “is there anyone here who's in the climate movement? Would you like to share your experiences, share your contacts?” Secretly mobilising for the climate movement in my own teaching, because that is one way of encouraging agency. There are many news outlets that highlight the positive stories. Sometimes that is also something that can be shared with students. We can teach not just on the big, macro structural earth system climate stories, but also cases where concrete action has actually made a difference, and show what mechanisms work or do not work; finding out the mechanism, using our analytical skills to pinpoint: “this is what could be done.” “Could this work here?” “Maybe not, but maybe that could work here.” It is about accepting the losses, but knowing that navigating what we are willing to let go, and what can be built new, is part of the work that we want to share with our students, because there is always something that can be built and something that can be salvaged. That comes when you accept that development might not be as linear as it is in the textbook.
Managing the students and making sure that they do not go into climate doom and gloom and anxiety is possible. It requires also maybe a level of emotional availability or honesty. As an educator, it is your responsibility to maintain that professional setting, but maybe it is worth putting question marks on the kind of professional norms that govern how we act and how we behave in the classroom.
Julien Etienne: I want to go back to a point those who want to bring climate change into their teaching might think about: what sources to use. As a teacher, you might have inherited a course that has been there for many, many years, was done by somebody else. It has a certain structure, a certain set of readings, a certain set of concepts, a certain way of approaching it. And then you're thinking of weaving climate change into that. What does this do to the syllabus? What does this do to the sources? Do you bring a new perspective on “classics”? Do you bring sources that are from another discipline, which might be uncomfortable?
Laura Horn: For me, these questions of curriculum design and revision are also linked to the fact that this is academic work, which requires energy and time and effort that could otherwise be put towards writing publications that increase our h-index and give us that promotion. That needs to be said very loudly. There are always trade-offs. If you put your time and energy into rethinking the curriculum and that is not being recognised by your institution, that's a trade-off. So we also need institutional forums. Here in Denmark there's a platform for sustainability in higher education and other education forums where we can meet and discuss and learn from each other. And we don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. That kind of exchange is really useful, because it can be much more fruitful and productive if you have that conversation with others than try to do it alone. My recommendation would always be: find your people, find your fellow educators and have a conversation rather than sort of do it out of your own impulse. And then for institutions, the responsibility would be to acknowledge and recognise the work that goes into that.
When you revise your curriculum to bring in the sort of climate and ecological conditions, there are always limits to how much you give students to read and how much they actually read, how much complexity they can deal with. There's a canon that we simply accept. But even there, you can ask questions. Should you have all read this, or might it be time to move towards something else? That might fundamentally alter the narrative in our teaching. Do we read this more critically, against the conjuncture from which the expectations in the literature have been put forward? Being more academically honest about the critical questions we asked to the literature is a good starting point.
Another layer in this question is: what knowledge do we want to share with our students. Does this have to be academic literature from academic publishers and academic journals? Can we give our students an excerpt from an IPCC report? It's meta-analysis, but it's knowledge. Can we give them reports from NGOs that are citing academic literature? Can we have them do more case-based work where they work with observational data, or interview data from stakeholders? Is that also knowledge-based work?
It becomes very existential and epistemological. Maybe we need to think about the kind of boundaries and gatekeeping we do about knowledge in the Anthropocene and what we think knowledge is, whose knowledge, whose voices we want to share with our students. How we ask questions about quality of data generation, knowledge production, but also things like trust and of course epistemological validity and robustness. It is a balancing act, but I think I would want my students to also be exposed to a social reality that is not necessarily filtered through that academic publishing all the time.
Julien Etienne: That brings us nicely to the politics of it all. A few years ago, I was invited to contribute to a workshop on the regulation of industrial hazards, a topic I used to research. And I brought to the table the question of climate change, not only because hazardous industries – oil and gas, chemicals, aviation – are massive contributors to the climate emergency, but also because climate change makes these already hazardous industries even more hazardous. Climate change becomes a key research question for industrial hazard scholars, a managerial issue for industry practitioners and a regulatory issue for regulators. My query back then was called a provocation. It triggered comments that discussing climate change in that space would make us militants. That brought home to me the point Latour makes that climate change in a politicised issue: it becomes impossible to study, teach, research climate change, and not be caught by the politics of it. Many might feel this is a minefield, that weaving climate change into their teaching exposes them to accusations of bias or political behaviour. How have you approached this?
Laura Horn: There is no easy way of phrasing this. I do appreciate the way Latour puts back in the political and also the material. He uses this term that we're all earthbound. And he forces us to own up to that. That's the politicization, the political as well as the earthbound. That is unsettling to these certainties that we have in academia that science is neutral, teaching is neutral. And it makes people uncomfortable because it forces you to think about something that does not necessarily give you a stable job. If you are precariously employed, being seen as political is not an advantage.
In some way it is people like me who have to accept the challenge of addressing Latour's intervention. The privilege of having a teensy little platform comes with the responsibility to acknowledge that there is this Latourian political dimension in whatever we say. Of course, I would never teach or tell the students what to think. Whenever there are courses where there are different theoretical angles, we make sure that they each get the same time and effort and the students then have choice. But even that feels uncomfortable sometimes. To actually take a position is uncomfortable, right? And that is what Latour asks you to do. You're going to have to take a position because this is political. Sitting on the fence is also political.
If you have someone who says, “Why do we have to fly so much in academia?”, you can come with 1000 reasons why, of course, we need to fly. But at the same time, there is a nagging little doubt that this is political, that there are consequences to this. Real consequences. And that causes discomfort. We do not like discomfort. We don't like making the students uncomfortable because the students have lives and a gazillion things to do and studying is such a short time in their lives. And we want to make sure that we create an environment in which they feel they can engage their intellect. But again, it's a question of pedagogical honesty and integrity to point out that there is no neutral studying and that whatever they will read is political.
Not to let them sit with it and sort it out themselves, but rather engage in this conversation of what comes next and how we make sense of this. Isn't that also what Latour wants of us to think about: sense-making apparatuses? That is something we can give our students. Sense-making is something we can help them develop tools for. We cannot give them the sense. They will have to figure that out for themselves. If it is not us in academia, who else can give them the analytical conceptual superpowers to engage with the sense-making?
Julien Etienne: You were talking about creating this space where students can develop their academic, their intellectual capacities and engage with difficult questions. We now experience the climate crisis increasingly in our surroundings and our bodies. The crisis is in the room right here, right now, or it is just outside, or it is on people’s feed with news of wildfires, flooding, drought, and the like. How do you balance creating a space where students feel they have the space and time to think, while the crisis is at the door? Is there value in reminding them of the crisis to ground their thinking should they escape the reality we are in?
Laura Horn: It comes to the kind of pedagogical relationship we have. Pedagogy is always part of this broader assumption of where does change come from. This is very Gramsci. How do we change? How do societies change and why don’t they change? There is this idea that, the more people are confronted with the immediate consequences of the climate and ecological crisis, the more they will act. We know that that is not true. Just because we sort of confront people with reality does not mean they would go: “oh, now I see the light.” Surely we must do something else. The pedagogical relationship might help, as well as finding your way, thinking your way into this balancing act of looking into what are the genuine concerns and social realities of the people you work with right now. Students might be immediately mostly concerned with the cost of living, the pressures that are being put on them, or residency visas. We can find out where the linkages are, but also where actionable moments are. Just plonking the realities of climate and ecological emergency on someone's shoulders, that is not pedagogy. That is just throwing someone into the climate despair pit. It is the responsibility of the person who is in the pedagogical power relation, if you want to call it that, or the one who frames the room, sets the minutes, structures the meeting, to think about: where is that balance that is characterised by knowledge?
Often people still do lack knowledge. There's this knowledge-action discussion in climate psychology. We do not lack data, but a lot of people do actually still lack a little bit of understanding. So literacy does have justification and can be part of helping people see how this affects me and how this is going to continue into the future. Finding formats where you can do that, where you can develop the next steps together becomes increasingly important because people do not like being preached to.
That becomes tricky when we are in the climate space because of the media framing. You know, the moment someone says, “oh, you're a regular Greta, aren't you?” Then you've basically lost because you have been marginalized. You are the militant. You are the radical. But no, this is just common sense. And this brings us back to Gramsci. The common sense that we need to establish is that, of course, it makes sense to think that way. Of course it does. But that is political, because common sense is always political. There are very powerful interests that say “No, we do not want to think that way.” The pedagogical hegemonic struggles we are all engaged in about how should we teach, what should we teach, are indeed struggles. They are relationships governed by power relations. Whether you are a higher education educator, whether you are a consultant coming into an industry, the moment you get the militant stamp on your forehead, you might get less contracts, people might stop talking to you, or inviting you for keynotes.
Those are very real material interests that need to be navigated. We should not be reducing everything to “are we individually acting the right way? Are we conscientious? Do we do the right thing?” The point is to resist this individualization and to look at this as a Latourian “assemblage” of different actors, different agents doing things related to each other. The moment we create communities, the moment we set up linkages across different social groups, different institutions, to insist on this common sense of featuring climate and ecological concerns into our teaching, into our pedagogical relationships, the curriculum, what have you. I think that is the way the social struggle should go.
This conversation has been transcribed and copy-edited by Julien Etienne and Laura Horn.