ABSTRACT
I have spent the last 15 years of my life working within higher education, in the hope that the university as an institution, but also as communities of intelligent and often well-intentioned human beings, could become much more readily involved in developing important insights and responses to the interdependent, and often intractable, social and ecological crises that have come to define our times. In this chapter I draw upon my experiences of developing transdisciplinary and student-led forms of education at a Swedish public university to explore the roles that institutions of higher learning could take in enabling meaningful responses to the existential predicament of climate change. I ask challenging questions about the extent to which our institutions still can make meaningful contributions to this end, and in what ways they may inadvertently become more and more a part of the problem. Inspired by conversations with researchers, educators, students and activists in social movements, I also reflect on ways in which learning, both within and outside academia, could be reimagined in our age of social and ecological unravelling.
