Pluriversal Pedagogies for the Post-Anthropocene: Radicalising Democracy through Social Movements

How do diverse social movements strive for social justice? How do they connect this struggle with attendant ones for symbolic, racial, ethnic, gender and environmental justice? What kind of pedagogies underpin such movements? This paper draws on empirical work with social movements that spans over the last 12 years in Latin America (i.e. Brazil and Chile) and Europe (i.e. Greece and Britain). I discuss the repertoires of action they utilise and the responses they generate to some urgent societal and planetary challenges of our times, such as climate change, the crisis of democracy and the debunking of mainstream politics. I offer a novel theoretical framework that juxtaposes the realist pedagogies that are dominant in the Anthropocene with the pluriversal pedagogies that progressive social movements advocate. I argue that the pedagogies these movements engender and the politics they propound contribute to the generation of alternative epistemologies, prefigurative ontologies and socially just axiological frameworks. I develop further this framework to consider the potential of these movements to transcend the triumvirate of capitalist-colonialist-ecocidal relations associated with in the Anthropocene. The aim of this paper is to enrich the global tapestry of alternatives (TAP, 2020) that are being weaved by social movements, activists and a multitude of groups around the world with empirically-grounded work that is generative of new praxiological and theoretical possibilities.