Anthropocene Subjectification and Emancipatory Education

In “What is Enlightenment?”, Kant proposed the connection between the Enlightenment political project, the aims of education, and the philosophical project of emancipation. In short, he confirmed the Enlightenment subject and condition as an “ultimate destination” of humanity and thus a central aim of education. In this opening to Part II , Cary articulates how the conditions of the Anthropocene—as revealed through the Anthropocene subject —distort this prevailing modernist view of emancipation handed down from Kant and the Enlightenment. This comparison reveals that, while Kant’s Enlightenment subject is an archetype proposal for a globalist, cosmopolitan world of the future, unbound by dogma and tradition, the contemporary Anthropocene subject is not an idea or proposal at all but rather, a real , material, and embodied instantiation—the result of being thrown into a world (and a body) irrevocably changed and marked by human exploitation of planetary resources and systems. Engaging with the conceptual framework of biosemiotic learning theory, the chapter ends with a curricular story about following shared animal pathways , an example of the kind of openings and invitations that educators can follow to push back against this constraining enlightenment heritage and wild their pedagogies in a time on unravelling.