Educating for connection: Learning hope and undoing technologies of anti-relationality through aesthetic engagement, decolonial feminism, and action research

In view of the so-called ‘omni-crisis’, including climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, and accelerating inequalities, among other horrors, we must orientate towards transformation. We question how to radically and holistically educate towards greater connection, humanity, and engagement in a UK business school, enabling different ways of ‘seeing and being’ that open up pathways for undoing the ‘technologies of anti-relationality’ (Wilson Gilmore, 2002) that underpin the globalized, racial, heteropatriarchal, capitalist structures that catalyze the omni-crisis. Inspired by traditions of decolonial feminism, action research, and aesthetics, we orientate towards connection as a basis for tentative and partial hope. Building on the Batesonian framing of aesthetic engagement as that which sensitizes us to the wider ecology of mind, enabling greater recognition of the inter-relatedness that underpins all of life (Bateson, 1978), we look to aesthetics for insight into connection as both a key element of the nature of the problems we are interested in, and a key element of possibilities for repair. To illustrate these ideas in practice, we share a case study from an undergraduate unit on sustainability and corporate social responsibility, in which we not only aim to critically complexify understanding of the issues but also offer a carefully curated selection of aesthetic stimuli that enable and invite students to engage more deeply and holistically, and to build capacities for connection (to the extent they wish). We reflect upon the craft of teaching such a course, noticing the importance of aesthetic sensibilities in judging how to curate our offerings.