Review of Dark Pedagogy: Education, Horror and the Anthropocene by Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard, Stefan Bengtsson & Mart
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Review of Dark Pedagogy: Education, Horror and the Anthropocene by Jonas Andreasen Lysgaard, Stefan Bengtsson & Martin Hauberg-Lund Laugesen Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, ISBN 978–3–030-19,932-6 Noel Gough 1
# Outdoor Education Australia 2020
French philosopher Meillassoux (2008, p. 7, his italics) offers what at first sight might appear to be an appropriate way of connecting contemporary philosophy with the practical interests of outdoor and environmental educators: …it could be that contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not; that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory – of being entirely elsewhere. For many Australians, the idea of “the great outdoors” is likely to be associated with one of the longest-running programs on Australian television, a travel magazine series broadcast by the Seven Network, beginning in 1993 and broadcast regularly until 2009, with a short-lived revival in 2012.1 The program featured a team of reporters who travelled around Australia and overseas, reporting on travel destinations, tourist attractions and accommodation. However, this is definitely not “the great outdoors” to which Lysgaard et al. (2019) refer in their several borrowings of Meillassoux’s words. Rather, in Saldanha’s (2009, p. 310) words, they appear to accept their positioning of the outdoors as a “space-time absolutely indifferent to humanity and even to animal life” and interrogate contemporary philosophical questions about the ways in which humans construct their discourses about “the great outdoors.” In their own words, Lysgaard et al. (2019, p. 4) “draw inspiration from speculative realism, and occasionally from other
1
See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0320021/
* Noel Gough [email protected]
1
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education
contemporary trends…in our attempt to develop new perspectives on environmental and sustainability education (ESE).” Lysgaard et al. (2019, p. 5) begin by explaining that both the concept behind and the narrative situating their book are “inspired by the ongoing surge of interest in the classic horror and weird tales [of] author Howard Philips Lovecraft (1880–1937),” an interest that is explicitly shared by speculative realist Harman (2012), among others. Lysgaard et al. (2019, pp. 4–5) explain their rationale for linking Lovecraft’s horror fiction with ESE as follows: A central point that we borrow from speculative realism is an emphasis on the constructive aspects of focusing on the darker side of central ESE concepts, such as nature, place, body, learner, climate and environment and how this approach can be a useful point of departure for trying to deal with these concepts in an educational context. By drawing on recent research
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