Search

As a case study on the presence (or absence) of environmental education in history textbooks, this paper examines how Singapore's nationally mandated secondary school history curriculum portrays the relationship between humans and the nonhuman environment. It analyzes all seven government-authored lower-secondary-level history textbooks, published between 1984 and 2015. The results show that history textbooks largely and consistently portray humans in Singapore as isolated from, rather than depending on and entangled with, the environment. We describe and analyze two trends. First, narratives about the nonhuman environment are largely relegated to Singapore's past and disappear almost entirely as textbook narratives approach the present. Second, history narratives represent narrowly utilitarian, negativistic, and dominionistic perspectives of thinking about and relating to the nonhuman environment. We contextualize these results and discuss the implications of teaching such narrow and misleading conceptions of human--environment interactions in official history education.

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.

As a case study on the presence (or absence) of environmental education in history textbooks, this paper examines how Singapore's nationally mandated secondary school history curriculum portrays the relationship between humans and the nonhuman environment. It analyzes all seven government-authored lower-secondary-level history textbooks, published between 1984 and 2015. The results show that history textbooks largely and consistently portray humans in Singapore as isolated from, rather than depending on and entangled with, the environment. We describe and analyze two trends. First, narratives about the nonhuman environment are largely relegated to Singapore's past and disappear almost entirely as textbook narratives approach the present. Second, history narratives represent narrowly utilitarian, negativistic, and dominionistic perspectives of thinking about and relating to the nonhuman environment. We contextualize these results and discuss the implications of teaching such narrow and misleading conceptions of human–environment interactions in official history education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ethics of having children in the age of climate change is increasingly being discussed, but the political dimensions of individual reproductive choices in relation to climate change have been almost entirely ignored. This lacuna is addressed by drawing on a survey of 607 climate leftists who were factoring climate change into their reproductive plans and choices. Using a grounded theory approach, it identifies four dimensions of the connection between reproductive choices and environmental politics in the age of climate change: the parental investment in environmental politics; children as future environmentalists; the opportunity cost of parenting; and fertility as a socio-political tool. It adds reproductive plans and choices to the range of ways in which individuals conceive of themselves and act as environmental political actors, situating these results within the scholarship on eco-reproductive concerns, environmental micropolitics, environmental lifestyle movements, green parenting, and political demography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]