L.04. Expanding Ethics In Times Of Authoritarianism And Ecological Collapse

In recent years there have been various attempts to revitalize and expand what ethics entails in order to better meet the growing threat of authoritarianism, fascism, and ecological collapse. Fields as diverse as Indigenous studies, anthropology, political philosophy and science studies have all reshaped our collective understanding of what ethics is, how it works, as well as its stakes. For example, Physicist and feminist scholar Karen Barad (2007) encourages us to view ethics as an emergent phenomenon, entirely dependent on the relational entities involved, rather than something pregiven. Sociomaterialist philosophy, from Baruch Spinoza to Rosi Braidotti (2017), has also attempted to give us a more complex and relational ontology that moves ethics away from rigid moral codes and an overly simplistic recourse to law (Deleuze 1988). One overall goal of these efforts has been to position ethics as a much more relational field of inquiry filled with potentiality. Indeed, the ethical worlds we inhabit must nurture multispecies flourishing if humans hope to exist on this planet with their more-than-human kin for many millennia to come. Key to this relational approach to ethics is an engagement with ontology, aesthetics and affect, politics, science, and spirituality. We invite scholarship that comes to bear on ethics and education in diverse ways, which may include one or more of the following: the nature of ethics itself, an ecological ethics that embraces more-than-human life; the politics of ethical systems; or the ethical relations/subjectification practices explored or resisted by students in institutionalized schooling.