Abstract
Posthumanist approaches to climate change education promise a set of noble goals: to unsettle anthropocentrism, cultivate attunement to the more-than-human world, and align education with Indigenous relational thought long dismissed by Western humanism. This talk argues that these promises confront a shared structural cost, drawing on two independent critiques. First, the socialist-humanist critique argues that posthumanism relocates the climate crisis from capitalist political economy to anthropocentric metaphysics, yielding curricula that reframe existing activities rather than build the political capacities required to confront ecological catastrophe. The second critique, drawing on Mahmood Mamdani’s account of colonial indirect rule, argues that posthumanism administers Indigenous relational thought within frameworks it still controls, reproducing a structure in which posthumanists and their Indigenous critics occupy complementary, jointly constraining positions. Both critiques converge on the insight that substituting ontological reorientation for political-economic and colonial-historical analysis dissolves the agency required for sustained climate action.
Bio
Dr. Tomas de Rezende Rocha is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Education, Justice, and Equity in the College of Education at the University of Washington (Seattle, WA). He is co-editor of Teachers and Philosophy: Essays from the Contact Zone (2025, with Cara Furman). His current research interests include climate change education, the ethics of teacher strikes, and Latin American philosophy of education.