How Does Colombian Ethnoeducation Engage the Natural World as a More-Than-Human Pedagogical Partner?

Eduardo Hazera

Educational collectives in rural Colombia engage the natural world as a pedagogical partner rather than an object of study. These grassroots collectives emerged after Colombian judges started recognizing natural objects as legal subjects. To educate the next generation of nature's legal representatives, these grassroots networks host workshops where Indigenous and Afro-Colombian youth learn about the environment from scientists, lawyers, hunters, and shamans. As such, these youth networks are educational laboratories where participants collaboratively experiment with diverse epistemologies and ontologies to understand nature's subjectivity. I use ethnographic methods to collect data about these youth networks and linguistic techniques to analyze that data. Preliminary findings suggest that these grassroots collectives are worldbuilding experiments that combine scientific naturalism with Indigenous animism to engage the natural world as an active subject in the educational endeavor. My ethnography of this pedagogical praxis contributes to the subfields of multispecies education, ethno-education, and cosmopolitics. In particular, although Latin American ethno-education has long advocated for marginalized epistemologies, the cosmopolitics of Colombian youth networks reframe that advocacy in ontological terms. Alternatively, while the English-language scholarship on multispecies education encourages experimentation, Colombian engagements with the militancy of Latin American ethno-education encourage those multispecies experiments to be more politically engaged. Finally, although cosmopolitical anthropology tends to depict ontological realities as rigid worlds that belong to bounded communities, Colombian hybridizations of naturalism and animism ask cosmopolitics to develop a flexible understanding of ontology. Broadly, my dissertation explores experimental proposals for reconfiguring environmental pedagogy and philosophy in the Anthropocene.

About Eduardo Hazera

I am a PhD Candidate in the Anthropology Department at the University of Texas at Austin. My dissertation examines the complex educational, ontological, and social transformations that are emerging in the wake of Colombia's rights of nature movement, through which natural "objects" are redefined as legal "subjects." I have published in Social Anthropology, Anthropological Quarterly, Anthropology & Humanism, and Visual Anthropology Review. Before starting my PhD, I received an MA in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin and a BA from Emory University, double majoring in Biology and Music. My scholarship has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and others.