From Damage to Repair: Global Majority Philosophies of Sustainability in Higher Education Olga Mun, Gulzhanat Gafu, and Aizuddin Mohamed Anuar

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Olga Mun is an early career researcher at the University of Oxford, where she is the co-convener of the Climate Change Education Reading Group for the Department of Education. Her main research interest is in the topic of epistemic injustice across all levels of education and the reparative ways to address them. Gulzhanat Gafu is an assistant professor of education at Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan. She completed her PhD in education at the UCL Institute of Education. Aizuddin Anuar is an assistant professor at the Academy of Future Education at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. He is a scholar of comparative and international education, with interests in the intersection of education and inter/national development. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford.

This talk draws on the speakers’ recently published creative manifesto pertaining to the role of higher education in the sustainable development goals. Epistemic injustice, racism, material imbalances between the Global North and South, and the dominance of neopositivism in comparative and international education (CIE) research are shaping global knowledge production processes. In the field of sustainability education, emphasis is often placed on UN frameworks and goalposts, with little consideration of local knowledges that predate the creation of international institutions and the very concepts of nation-states themselves. The speakers argue that such one-way, simplistic narratives of the assumed absence of sustainability capacities neglect and, hence, contribute to the erasure of local knowledges on sustainable living. They aim in their creative manifesto to “repair” such epistemically unjust practices by theorizing the concepts of budi and obal to offer alternative imaginaries of sustainability in higher education – ontologically, epistemically, and axiologically. It is written in a manifesto format to inspire an urgent conversation on this challenging issue with creativity, care, consideration, and imagination.

‘Obal and Budi Philosophies as Reparative Visions of Sustainability in Higher Education: A Creative Manifesto’ DOI: 10.1086/738280