Wicked Problems Sustained By Attacking Sociology: (Re)Entrenching Sociology in Higher Education to Avert Our Environmental Collapse

Deprioritizing and delegitimizing sociologies through global neoliberalization of higher education (HE) diminishes societies’ ability to tame wicked problems by removing a discipline that untangles the inherent messiness between anti-environmental acts and social injustice. Attacks include perverting sociology into neoliberal, (neo)colonial tools that, at best, ignore and, at worst, justify hegemony, socio-historical oppressions (e.g., racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity), injustices, inequalities, planetary unsustainability, and anthropocentrism. A vital role of HE in the public spheres is teaching students for praxis to solve wicked environmental problems in which transformative sociologies are essential. The conundrums of how teaching sociologies diversify reflexivity for effective problem-solving is also the reason why the discipline is being attacked – as pedagogical enemies of hegemonies grounded upon neoliberalism – will be unpacked. Ecopedagogical and transdisciplinary approaches of teaching sociologies to end wicked problems will also be highlighted.

Sociologies are crucial to better understand the local-to-global contexts of inseparable socio-environmental connections and interrogating the politics of (in/non)formal education that instils such false separations and world-Earth distancing (i.e., separating humans from the rest of Nature. Without sociological analysis, the connections that we have with one another, and the rest of Nature are largely unseen, unlearned, and, in turn, unaddressed.

After briefly describing wicked environmental problems, this paper will delve into the essential aspects of teaching sociologies in HE, including in transdisciplinary and ecopedagogical approaches, to counter wicked environmental problems and why such teaching is being attacked. Then, the ways in which opposing processes of globalization is deprioritizing and perverting sociologies will be discussed, including aspects of neoliberalism, neocoloniality, and anthropocentrism that hinders taming the problems. The last section focuses on how utopic imaginaries emergent from sociologies are vital to solve the messiness/clumsiness of wicked problems, including the disruption of oppressive, unsustainable, and fatalistic framings of “development,” “modernization,” and “modernities.”