‘Our common world’ belongs to ‘Us’: constructions of otherness in education for sustainable...

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‘Our common world’ belongs to ‘Us’:constructions of otherness in educationfor sustainable developmentMalin Idelanda & Claes Malmberga

a Department of Nature, Environment, Society, Malmö University,Malmö, SwedenPublished online: 10 Jul 2014.

To cite this article: Malin Ideland & Claes Malmberg (2014): ‘Our common world’ belongs to ‘Us’:constructions of otherness in education for sustainable development, Critical Studies in Education,DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2014.936890

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‘Our common world’ belongs to ‘Us’: constructions of otherness ineducation for sustainable development

Malin Ideland* and Claes Malmberg

Department of Nature, Environment, Society, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden

(Received 12 December 2013; accepted 17 June 2014)

The aim of this article is to analyse how good intentions in Education for SustainableDevelopment (ESD) discursively construct and maintain differences between ‘Us’ and‘Them’. The empirical material consists of textbooks about sustainable developmentused in Swedish schools. An analysis of how ‘Us’ and ‘Them’ are constructed andmaintained is done with help from critical race theory, whiteness studies andPopkewitz’ notion of double gestures, exclusion through intentions of inclusion. Theanalysis departs from five dichotomies: tradition/civilisation, dirtiness/purity, chaos/order, ignorance/morality and helped/helping. We consider these dichotomies as cog-wheels operating in an ‘Otherness machinery’. Through this machinery, ‘We’ areconstructed as knowing, altruistic, conscious and good. The Other is simultaneouslyconstructed as ‘uncivilised’ or as a ‘bad’ Other in need of higher moral standards. Withhelp from these two Others, ‘Swedish exceptionalism’ is formed. The ESD projectcould then be understood as a colonial and excluding project, and we ask how it ispossible to avoid that ‘our common world’ only belong to ‘Us’?

Keywords: environmental education; inequality/social exclusion in education;postcolonial theory; post-structural/postmodern/critical theory; race

Introduction

Sustainable development is often described as a global project, in which ‘everyone’ mustbe included to secure a sustainable future. The aim of the practice is to rescue ‘ourcommon planet’1 in terms of social and ecological change, for example, through integrat-ing ‘the values inherent in sustainable development into all aspects of learning toencourage changes in behaviour that allow for a more sustainable and just society forall’ (UNESCO, 2006, p. 4). However, Agyeman has pointed out an ‘equity deficit’ ofenvironmental sustainability:

There is a common belief among those in the environmental sustainability movement that asthey are ‘saving the world’, they are saving it for everyone equally, which somehow absolvesthem from wider discussions of equity and justice. (Agyeman, 2008, p. 751)

This article intends to problematise the taken-for-granted ‘our’ and tries to reveal who isincluded and who is excluded in this global project. We suggest that the rhetoric of ‘all’becomes a double gesture of exclusion and inclusion through the identification of whoneeds to change, and who represents the norm. Through this recognition, certain

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Critical Studies in Education, 2014http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17508487.2014.936890

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characteristics of excluded groups are differentiated as not desired (cf. Hacking, 2006;McClintock, 1995; Popkewitz, 2008).

We aim to analyse how good intentions in Education for Sustainable Development(ESD) construct and maintain differences between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. In other words, weare interested in exposing social constructions of normality and otherness in the taken-for-granted good intentions within ESD, and we question what the idea of a ‘commonworld’ implies. We draw upon Mannion, Biesta, Priestley, and Ross (2011) to examinehow good intentions to develop ‘global citizenship’ or ‘global sustainability’ are, ironi-cally, reproducing a western norm of how to live. These good intentions are representedby ‘some countries that support the “social imaginary” of globalisation for their own ends’(Bengtsson & Östman, 2013; cf. Gough, 2002; Jickling & Wals, 2008; Lingard, 2009;Mannion et al., 2011, p. 450).

The analysis focuses on textbooks used in Swedish schools. These textbooks can beseen as offering a model for pupils to understand the world, since textual and visualrepresentations in the books fabricate a certain worldview. From our analysis of how Usand Them are represented, we will discuss how these textbooks construct desirablesubjects inside the discourse of ESD. It is especially important to question ESD repre-sentations of different parts of the world and different people, since the ESD discourseemphasises the idea of the ‘common world’, and a globally inclusive project of goodness.We name the construct of the environment-friendly student ‘the eco-certified child’(Hillbur, 2013; Ideland & Malmberg, 2014). It is important to keep in mind that theeco-certified child is neither a real subject nor a fiction; it is rather a discursive figure thatworks as a research object (how an environmental-friendly person is supposed to ‘be’) aswell as an analytical tool (how this desirable person is ‘made up’).

The power of representations

In this article, we analyse how textbook images and language both provide and limitknowledge of different people and societies. The analysed text and images are consideredas representations, reflecting and constituting a political discourse concerning what ispossible to think and say about people and societies in relation to sustainable develop-ment. We examine how the social categories of race and nationality operate in thediscourse of ESD, how they work as cogwheels in what we call Otherness machinery,which discursively constructs who is ‘normal’ and who is ‘the Other’ (McClintock, 1995).Further, the ways in which Us and Them are represented in relation to the world, and inrelation to each other, construct categories of subordination and privilege. Since historiesof postcolonial countries have been written by colonisers, an important task is to ask ‘whois represented, who is not’ in the production of the ‘truth’ about the world (cf. Spivak,1985; Young, 2004, p. 201).

The analytical categories race and nationality are closely related to other categoriessuch as ethnicity, culture, etc., which are often used in studies like this. Since thesecategories are harder to grasp in a study of text material, we have decided to look at whatis outspoken and visible. However, we do not consider race and nationality as conceptswith given meanings. Instead, we analyse them as technologies of differentiation, separ-ating Us from Them. Thus we analyse how race and nationality operate in the teachingmaterial, and how these categories are used to stabilise or destabilise the colonial gaze ofthe world (Swanton, 2010, p. 2238).

The notion of race is not to be understood as a biological concept. Here, we use it as asocial construct to analyse how assumed differences between peoples/cultures are

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organising the whole society. Race is a visible symbol in the categorisation of normalityand otherness, and it has been shown through many studies how whiteness is repeatedlyestablished as a norm while black people are marked as black, and never as simply‘humans’ (e.g. Aveling, 2013; Dyer, 1997). Although race is a strong visual symbol, it isalso deeply embedded in language. For example, Ladson-Billings (1998) points out that inan American context, ‘intelligence’, ‘science’ and ‘middle class-ness’ are connected towhiteness, while ‘under-class’, ‘welfare recipients’ and ‘basketball players’ becomemarginalised categories of blackness:

The creation of these conceptual categories is not designed to reify a binary but rather tosuggest how, in a racialized society where whiteness is positioned as normative, everyone isranked and categorized in relation to these points of opposition. These categories fundamen-tally sculpt the extant terrain of possibilities even when other possibilities exist. (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 9)

Whiteness has for centuries been connected to desirable human qualities, such as ration-ality and beauty, building on an imperialistic historical narrative in which whiteness isrepresented as the ‘light of the world’ (Dyer, 1993, 1997; Habel, 2012). Blackness, on theother hand, has represented the unknown, mystery and danger. The dichotomy of black-ness/whiteness is related to other dichotomies such as poor/rich and uncivilised/civilised.This cultural system structures what kinds of bodies have access to what spaces, discur-sively in textbooks and concretely in everyday life (Ahmed, 2011; Essed, 1991). Throughrepeated use of dichotomies like black/white, the political semiotics of representationsreconstructs historical power relations in terms of a colonial gaze.

The colonial gaze can also be discussed in terms of everyday racism; when people arecategorised through, for example, colour and language, and are thereby placed in asubordinate position. The processes involved in everyday racism – different social con-structs such as race, ethnicity, nationality, and geography – are not separate acts towardsspecific individuals. Rather, they are an assemblage of a large number of repeatedrepresentations that jointly make up a position from which we interpret the world(Hübinette, Hörnfeldt, Farahani, & Rosales, 2012). Everyday racism is characterised asan unwillingness to recognise the problem of privilege and subordination. For example,there is a widespread self-image among many people in Sweden that ‘ordinary people’ –or for that matter societal structures – are not racist (Pred, 2000). Racism is connected tomarginalised people in nationalistic parties, and is not something that is constantlyhappening in everyday life. The notion of ‘double-binding power’ points out how theidea of ‘Swedishness’ is constructed in the entanglement of ‘the old Sweden’ – ahomogenous society – and ‘the good Sweden’ – an anti-racist and feminist country(Hübinette & Lundström, 2011, p. 43 ff). Both these images assume Swedes as whitepersons, and non-white persons as non-Swedes.

Thus, the social category of race is closely related to the category of nationality. Inthis article, we look at how ‘Swedishness’ is socially constructed in relation to othernationalities. First, one can see how Sweden is a part of the broader category of the‘West’, which according to Stuart Hall (1992) is constructed in relation to the ‘Rest’. Hallshows how the western world has used stereotypical ‘Others’ to constitute and uphold adiscourse of Western Enlightenment as, for example, rational and civilised compared tothe Other as the dark side, forgotten, repressed and denied. Bo Stråth has also shown how‘Swedishness’ is formulated in terms of conscientiousness, industriousness and pragma-tism (cf. Ideland, in press; Stråth, 2000, p. 365). The Swede is described as tolerant and

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liberal, not only compared to the ‘Rest’, but also to other western countries. Sweden has‘portrayed itself as a non-racist and post-racial utopia with no colonial past’ (Hübinette &Lundström, 2011). In relation to the ESD discourse, one can also observe how environ-mental engagement has become another virtue in the construction of ‘Swedishness’(Bradley, 2009).

The notion of Swedishness is important for our understanding of how Us and Themare constructed since the point of departure for the analyses is Swedish textbooks.However, even if the Swedish example has specific attributes we are convinced that thisfocus in the analysis of the constructions of Us and Them can shed light on categorisa-tions in other contexts.

Double gestures of good intentions

Racist representations circulate in society beyond individual will and meaning-making(Habel, 2012, p. 46 f), sometimes impregnated with good intentions to include or helpsubordinated groups (Essed, 1991; Hübinette et al., 2012). Thomas Popkewitz (2008;Popkewitz & Silva, 2013) helps us to understand how these good intentions involvedouble gestures of inclusion and exclusion at the same time. When supporting under-achieving children in school, we are, at the same time, constructing them as abject people:those who do not belong in the category of normal or desirable children. Therefore is itimportant to illuminate abjection processes and recognise the barriers that are builtthrough the constructions of stereotypes: of those who are included in normality andthose who ‘need to be saved’ (Popkewitz, 2008).

Through representations of people in need of being helped, tolerated, enlightened, andincluded, the Other is constructed as an object for inclusion. Recognising people’s needfor help, enlightenment or inclusion does not negate the exclusion. They still becomeconstructed as non-participants. ‘Abject people’ are those who privileged social groupsreject, but cannot live without (McClintock, 1995, p. 72); they are those who work as theproblematic Other in the construction of Us, for example, as helping and inclusive.

The double gestures of inclusion/exclusion can take different shapes. Wendy Brown(2006) argues that the notion of tolerance constructs the one who is claiming to be tolerantas normal and good, and the one who should be tolerated as marginalised:

Absent the precise dictates, articulations, and prohibitions associated with the force of law,tolerance nevertheless produces and positions subjects, orchestrates meanings and practices ofidentity, marks bodies and conditions political subjectivities. (Brown, 2006 p. 4)

In a similar way, Giroux shows how the good intention to include minority voices in theAmerican classroom context is reproducing the very problems of exclusion that it tries toget rid of. He writes that the effort to include ‘…promotes rather than displaces the effectsof the colonial gaze’ (Giroux, 1992, p. 14).

This article discusses how the representations of Others construct the Us as good. Theconcepts of goodness and fitting into normality are seldom questioned – ‘what feels goodis good’ (Ahmed, 2011). The privileged position to construct what is good, but also trueand normal through defining reason, belongs to the white middle class. In our case, this isrelated to the privileged position of Swedishness. Popkewitz writes:

The hope that ‘the national dream is not denied’ and that there is no child left behindembodies processes of abjections – fears of not fulfilling the dream of including the excluded


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and fears of populations jeopardizing that future who are rendered abject by their modes ofliving. (Popkewitz, 2008, p. 126, italics in original)

In other words, the discourse organising those who need to be saved in the name of thenation’s or planet’s best, constructs certain types of humans as dangerous, and asthreatening the world through their way of life.

However, not all representations used in the Otherness machinery have outspokennegative connotations. Subordination can also be constructed through positive attributesthat are operating in the double gesture of inclusion/exclusion. ‘Others’ are sometimesdescribed as more natural, spiritual and authentic in comparison with western people whoselives are presented as being destroyed in modern, industrialised and urban societies:

These types of exoticised representations are fundamentally just as problematic as thoseoutspoken negative, since they also serve to obscure the diversity and variety that existswithin these fabricated groups. (Hübinette et al., 2012, p. 27, authors’ translation)

It is thus important to problematise positive attributes and good intentions to ‘save theworld’ since they are ‘meaningful senders of messages about acceptable norms, takingshape whilst people’s reflective guard is down’ (Pripp & Öhlander, 2012, p. 85, authors’translation).

Method

The empirical material consists of teaching material about sustainable development fromtwo categories: (1) textbooks in science, civics and geography for primary and lowersecondary school and (2) thematic fact books for school. In the case of the textbooks, wemade an initial analysis by reading books from different publishers. However, we foundthat textbooks from different publishers are quite similar in regard to their structure andcontent, and have a strong focus on specific facts relating to the latest national curricula inSweden. Therefore, we concentrated on two books from each subject, one for primary andone for lower secondary. Altogether we analysed five textbooks since there was no civicsbook for primary school. From these five books (SO.S Geografi, 2012; SO.S Samhälle,2012; Spektrum Biologi, 2006; Upptäck Sverige Biologi, 2006; Upptäck världenGeografi, 2008), we extracted parts concerned with sustainable development and envir-onmental issues for closer analysis. We have also used two thematic fact books calledSustainable World: Waste (Bowden, 2005a) and Environments (Bowden, 2005b), whichform part of a series of books and which we have analysed in the same way as thetextbooks. These two books were first published in the United Kingdom, but latertranslated – both in language and culture – to Swedish school conditions. The publisherrecommends these books for lower secondary school.

From this empirical data, we conducted a discourse analysis, drawing on a post-structuralist understanding of discourses as systems of thoughts that organise what ispossible to think, say and do in a specific context (Foucault, 1981). We consider the textand images as constituted by – but also constituting – a discourse that operates in manysocietal contexts. It is not limited to school or a specific school subject; instead thediscursive distribution is the very principle of its hegemony (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001).The presented data is thus selected to illustrate this discourse. The hegemonic status of thediscourse illuminates the Otherness machinery that is organising who is Us and who is theOther, and what this categorisation ‘does’ to the production of ‘truth’. Certainly, one could


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find competing discourses in this material as well as in other material. We are aware thatone problem with discourse analysis is that one can easily find what one searches for,instead of seeing complexities. Nevertheless, from this specific material, we can confi-dently state that the construction of Us and Them is quite homogenous. We havespecifically been looking for discursive leaks: examples that challenge the hegemony,but we found very few leaks and those that were found were not really challenging thediscourse. However, one leak is discussed below as an example of how (probably) well-intentioned attempts to bring in examples from the non-western world – in a way –stabilise cultural categories.

The analysis was guided by questions of how different races and nationalities areconstructed in relation to place (in time and space) and to each other. Cultural dichotomiesare culturally produced, rather than given (Haraway, 2004), and are thus repetitively being‘re-invented’ through cultural organisations of the world (e.g. through textbooks). Thesereinventions are unstable however, and in the process new connections can be established,challenging the ‘truth’. It might seem paradoxical to analyse cultural dichotomies in orderto criticise the same: aren’t we then contributing to the establishment of Us and Them? Onthe other hand, without shedding light on what is taken for granted, it might be difficult tochange the cultural system.

The analysis of text and images focuses on how boundaries between Us and Them areconstructed and maintained by repeated boundary markers, that is to say symbols fornormality and Otherness (McClintock, 1995, p. 24 f). These boundaries are constructedthrough categorisation, naming and representation:

The naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of a norm.Such attributions or interpellations contribute to that field of discourse and power thatorchestrates, delimits, and sustains that which qualifies as ‘the human’. (Butler, 1993, p. 8)

Since the teaching material is Swedish, it is to be expected that Sweden is the primarypoint of reference in the descriptions. The question is how Sweden, or ‘We’, is positionedin relation to the Other, and in what discursive consequences these positions result. Inshort, we look at how Swedishness and Otherness are constructed, and what kinds ofattributes are related to whom (in terms of the entanglement of race and nationality).

Through the analysis, five dichotomies emerged as important in the fabrication of Usand Them, of those who are the norm and those who should be fostered into the norm:tradition/civilisation, dirtiness/purity, chaos/order, ignorance/morality and, helped/helping.Further, the analysis was focused on how boundaries between different subjects areconstructed, established and eventually challenged inside these dichotomies. Here weanalyse how races and nationalities are represented, for example, through looking intowhere subjects of different nationalities/races are placed, and how this place (in time andspace) communicates meaning. We have also examined which attributes are inscribed indifferent races/nationalities. The analysis is organised into five sections, named after thesefive dichotomies. In the concluding discussion, we use the results to discuss how thisdiscourse constructs desirable eco-certified children, and who – at the same time –becomes constructed as the opposite: the abject dangerous child.

Tradition/Civilisation

In the textbook chapters, the separation between the modern civilised society and thetraditional uncivilised society operates within the discourse in a powerful way. Anne


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McClintock (1995) has shown how imperialism and the invention of race were funda-mental aspects of western, industrial modernity, as part of the construction of the civilised‘Us’. Tradition and civilisation should be understood as powerful commonplaces thatcarry certain kinds of meaning (Haraway, 2004, p. 241). We start the analysis with thisdichotomy, since it orders and imbues the dichotomies that follow.

One central aspect in the Othering of traditional countries from civilised countries isthe emphasising of their relative closeness to nature: ‘It is often said that we who live inmodern communities have come so far from nature that we no longer understand how itworks’ (Spektrum Biologi, 2006 p. 180).2 ‘We’ have – according to the texts – beendistancing ourselves from nature, while ‘They’ still live closely connected to nature, andhave a direct dependence upon the natural world around them. In the teaching material,this kind of ‘untouched’ nature is mostly geographically situated in non-Swedish envir-onments.3 The African savannah (Bowden, 2005b) becomes a boundary marker separat-ing natural, traditional humans from unnatural, civilised humans (Figure 1).

Amy Sloane (2012, p. 183) points out that closeness to nature is a possible positiveattribute for desirable subjects in environmental education. However, in the Swedishtextbooks, this attribute still works in the Othering of traditional societies from civilisedsocieties. The notion of nature also includes the notion of who is developed and respec-tively underdeveloped, and who is technologically advanced as opposed to those lackingthe simplest modern facilities such as clean water, electricity, and so forth. This Otheringis also strengthened by references to history. African societies are, for example, comparedto European societies from the eighteenth or nineteenth century. By comparing Sweden ofthe past with present-day Others, Swedishness is constructed in terms of its developmentof knowledge (‘today we know better’) and technology. This reflects a frequent theme inthe empirical material: We have knowledge which They don’t have. Furthermore, even ifthe rich countries of the West are those who ‘wear away most of the planet’ (SpektrumBiologi, 2006, p. 180), the ‘wearing away’ is done in a modern, highly technological way.This can be compared to Habel’s (2012, p. 54) analysis of how colonial violence has been

Figure 1. The caption of this picture states: ‘Massai run kettle in Massai Mara, where they for along time have lived in balance with nature’ (Bowden, 2005b, p 7). The references to history as wellas nature operate as boundary markers in the Othering of traditional society from civilised society.


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downplayed in favour of the colonisers’ entrepreneurial and engineering virtues. Theresponsibility of ‘us in the rich world’ is a repeated theme, but it is simultaneouslyconnected to the idea that we now have knowledge which makes ‘Us’ supposedly betterin terms of being civilised and technologically advanced.

Dirt/Purity

Closely related to the dichotomy of tradition and civilisation is how the notions of dirt andpurity operate in the Otherness machinery. A recurring image is of African or Asianpeople in dirty and heavily littered environments. They wear soiled clothes and arelooking for food in dumps or in dirty water: plastic bags are everywhere and beachesare filled with junk (Bowden, 2005a, p. 7, 44; SO.S Geografi, 2012, p. 320; SO.SSamhälle, 2012, p. 350) (Figure 2).

The images communicate a certain lack of order and control. Mary Douglas (1966)has emphasised that the construction of dirt and purity are central themes inside thecultural construction of the civilised society. The idea of dirt representing disorder andcleanliness representing order is found repeatedly in teaching material for ESD.

One theme in the teaching material is that of water problems. A repeated example isdrought, resulting in a lack of potable water and a semi-desert environment. Onecommon boundary marker is the image of women or children carrying water, a motivefound in almost every book we have analysed (e.g. Spektrum Biologi, 2006 p. 206;Upptäck världen Geografi, 2008, p. 30, 32). However, water problems can also meantoo much water, for example, flooding and melting ice. But while the amount of waterseems to be a problem for both the West and the Rest, dirty water is exclusivelypositioned somewhere else:

Figure 2. The caption for this picture states: ‘It is common that children around the world die fromdiarrhoea. The reason is often that they have no access to anything but contaminated water. Here is aboy looking for food among garbage in dirty water in Djakarta, the capital of Indonesia’ (SO.SSamhälle, 2012, p. 350). As a whole, the picture and the caption construct otherness by addressingthe dirt in several ways (diarrhoea, garbage, contaminated, dirty water).


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But many places in the world are missing waste drainage or they do not work. There is a greatrisk that the waste water will come in contact with the drinking water and become con-taminated. This can lead to the spread of disease. Every year, 2.5 million children die ofstomach diseases caused by contaminated water. (SO.S Geografi, 2012, p. 318)

This can be compared to a description of water systems in Sweden:

Today we know better, and now waste water from all of Sweden’s population centres ispurified. But in very many of the world’s major cities, sewage still flows into the sea withoutbeing the least bit purified. (SO.S Geografi, 2012, p. 310)

The phrase ‘we know better’ suggests that Sweden is better developed than Asian andAfrican countries. They are living in a dirty environment, while We are recycling andcleaning our water. Access to clean water is, of course, an important part of people’s lives,and a relevant issue in the ESD material. What is interesting, however, is how powerfulthe symbolism has become, and how strongly it operates in the Otherness machinery as aboundary marker, contributing to what Sara Ahmed (2011) considers ‘different emotionsstuck to different bodies’. In the teaching material, dirt is attached to black bodies situatedin non-Swedish environments.

This dirt discourse should be compared to the clean discourse that characterises theimage of Swedishness. Images of Swedish nature communicate a sense of purity: bluewater, pastoral landscapes and flowers (Spektrum Biologi, 2006, p. 148 ff). Sweden is alsodescribed as exceptional in terms of recycling. For example, one geography book statesthat ‘In Sweden we are world champions of collecting cans’ (SO.S Geografi, 2012, p.317) (Figure 3).

Through the process of recycling, trash becomes ordered and cleaner as it is trans-formed from waste into a reusable resource. Waste can even be treasured in societieswhere energy is produced from it. In comparison to the representations of people and

Figure 3. The caption to this picture states: ‘A man from Stockholm throws his trash’ (SO.SGeografi, 2012, p. 304). Compared to the dirt in Figure 2 from Djakarta, the trash here is ordered inplastic bags with different colours, and the man himself is representing cleanliness with a whitesweater, living in a tidy area, throwing his trash in a – as far as we can see – clean garbage bin.


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places in Asia and Africa, waste appears as a powerful boundary marker. Bradley (2009)has pointed out how important the notion of cleanliness is in the Swedish environmentaldiscourse. Constructions of Swedes’ respective Them (immigrants) in issues related tosustainable development are done through references to littering, cleanliness and the will torecycle garbage. The immigrant is used as the Other to reflect the conscientiousness of theSwede (cf. Stråth, 2000). In a similar way, white is separated from black in the teachingmaterial through images of purity and dirt, beauty and mess (cf. Dyer, 1993, 1997).

Chaos/Order

Another part of the Otherness machinery is the separation of chaotic places from orga-nised places. This dichotomy is very similar to the dichotomies of tradition/civilisationand dirt/purity. However, in this section, we will address it through other issues. We alsodiscuss how this dichotomy operates in the construction of European and Swedishexceptionalism. Thomas Popkewitz and Catarina Silva Martins (2013) state:

The European looks to the rest of the world as a neighbourhood to be acted on, helped orcompeted with through the common values that define its exceptionalism. (Popkewitz &Silva Martins, 2013, p. 45)

In the discourse of European exceptionalism, certain kinds of attributes such as rationality,order, conscientiousness and efficiency are emphasised. These virtues operate as powerfulinstruments in the construction of the Other, who is often described in terms of theopposite: emotional, disorganised, corrupt and ineffective. In the teaching material, thenotion of democracy is used to separate Us from Them. One example is a descriptionfound in a Geography book, of the political culture in Germany. Germany is described asa country with a democratic political rationality, where the public opinion to replacenuclear power with green energy solutions led to concrete changes. Another illustrativeexample is in the chapter ‘Creating a sustainable environment’ (Bowden, 2005b). Thischapter is organised under the headlines: ‘International cooperation’, ‘Kyoto protocol’,‘On a national level’, ‘Environmental taxes and Economic contributions’, ‘Learning forthe future’ and ‘Children of tomorrow’ (Bowden, 2005b, pp. 34–39). These sections,which are about organised and democratic ways to create sustainability, almost exclu-sively talk about western countries. These countries are said to collaborate internationally,sign important protocols, legislate against pollution and steer development in a sustainabledirection. Last, but not least, western countries are described as having school curriculathat stress the importance of teaching for sustainability (Figure 4).

The Rest is mainly described in terms of corruption, lack of infrastructure and a lackof functional political leadership (e.g. Bowden, 2005a, p. 21). To show how the colonialgaze organises the text, we discuss an example from a civics book. The intention to focuson African development may have been well-meaning, but the photo of Liberia’s pre-sident, Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, is accompanied with the following text:

Liberia’s president, Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, tries to lift her country out of corruption and healwounds after many years of war through placing well-educated women in prominent politicalpositions. Liberia is one of the world’s poorest countries and after 14 years of civil war,almost all of the men in leadership positions are corrupt, which is why Ellen Sirleaf Johnsonturned to these women. She received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2011 for her actions. (SO.SSamhälle, 2012, p. 342)


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The description and picture of Sirleaf Johnson can be considered as a discursive leak,since she is a black, female, African politician who is mainly in the company of white,western politicians in the empirical material. The representation of her is inside a stronglygendered discourse, organising women as healing wounds and being reliable in contrast tocorrupt men. Besides this, she is also represented as non-white, non-western by wordssuch as ‘tries to’, ‘corrupt’ and ‘poorest countries’. A description of a white, female,European politician in the same book serves as a contrasting example:

Gro Harlem Brundtland, prime minister of Norway during the 1980s and 1990s, is animportant person for the idea of sustainable development. She led the work in the groupthat presented the report ‘Our common future’, at the UN conference about environment anddevelopment in Rio de Janeiro 1992. (SO.S Samhälle, 2012, p. 346)

Brundtland doesn’t ‘try to’, she has ‘led the work’ and is described as an ‘importantperson’. Neither is Brundtland’s work described in terms of any problems, even if it is easyto imagine that there must have been differences of opinion when the influential report waswritten. The description of Sirleaf Johnson is another example of the double gestures ofinclusion and exclusion. The good intention to let students read about a successful Liberianpolitician is stuck in the Otherness machinery. The intention to explain difficulties inLiberia becomes a part of the discourse that demarcates the West from the Rest andreproduces the image of Europe as more effective, with higher morals and as moredemocratic than the rest of the world. Mannion et al. (2011, p. 452) write about a taken-for-granted view that it is Us who, after all, supposedly lead in the process of globalisation.

Ignorance/Morality

So far, we have mainly discussed the separation between the West and the Rest withEurope and North America on the one hand and Asia and Africa on the other. However, in

Figure 4. The caption for this picture states: In Kyoto in Japan in 1997, politicians from 160countries met to jointly find a solution to the climate change problem (Bowden, 2005b, p. 35). Thepicture shows only white people, whom are the ones representing 160 different countries’ organisedefforts to make environmental change.


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the discourse of Swedishness, other developed western countries also operate as Others. Inparticular, the United States stands for ignorance in contrast to Sweden, which representshigh moral standards and responsibility in environmental and sustainability issues. Stråthdiscusses how the idea of Swedish exceptionalism has grown from the emergence of theSwedish welfare state and its ‘underlying moralism. Conscientiousness, industriousness,good character traits and temperance were honoured virtues’ (Stråth, 2000, p. 365).Further on, he explains how Sweden has distanced its national identity from different‘bad Others’ throughout history. In the textbooks, the role of the bad Other is now takenby the United States and China, and these countries occupy symbolic places in thediscourse. The USA’s (and Australia’s) carbon pollution and their unwillingness to signinternational agreements is one example from the textbooks and, as a result, thesecountries are named as ‘the worst environmental crooks’ (Bowden, 2005b, p. 35).China’s rapid development and use of natural resources is another example of how thebad Other is named and shamed. The book SO.S Geografi, (2012, p. 248) has a wholesection about China and energy use:

China’s energy consumption has increased three-fold in 25 years. China is the world’s largestconsumer of fossil fuels: oil, coal and natural gas. China emits the most carbon dioxide(2009) and, in a few years, will consume the most energy of all the world’s countries. (SO.SGeografi, 2012, p. 248)

The United States, China and, to some extent, Australia are described in terms ofignorance (‘they should know better’) and greed. Their unwillingness to change in thename of the planet’s ‘common future’ is often emphasised in the material. If Africa andAsia are contrasted as underdeveloped, unknowing and uncontrolled Others in need ofhelp, the United States and China are constructed as bad Others. They are described interms of being irresponsible and representing a lack of morals and compassion.

This could be compared to representations of Swedish people. For instance, onerepeated theme is found in images of white people on bikes (e.g. Spektrum Biologi,2006, p. 189, 197). Another representation of a white Swedish environmental ‘hero’ is apicture of a young, white girl sitting in the grass with her feet facing the camera (SO.SSamhälle, 2012, p. 348) (Figure 5).

She has a laptop with a picture of the planet Earth and the text ‘Change the world’.She is representing the white, modern human being in terms of morals, responsibility andknowledge. Here is another example of Brown’s (2006) notion that tolerance producesand positions subjects and orchestrates meaning, the fabrication of the moral subject isseparating Us from the Other. Some nationalities are marked as ignorant, and others aremarked as morally superior. This dualistic cogwheel structures the world in the Swedishtextbooks.

Helped/Helping

The last cogwheel in the otherness machinery is how people ‘in need of help’ and therespective people ‘helping’ are represented. In the empirical data, people who help arealmost always white. Above, we could see how Gro Harlem Brundtland from Norwaywas presented as an ‘important person’ for sustainable development. Al Gore from theUnited States is introduced in a similar way:


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[Al Gore] has lectured over the whole world and has raised much awareness, not least in hisown country. In 2007, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, together with the UnitedNations’ climate panel IPCC. (SO.S Samhälle, 2012, p. 352)

These two politicians represent a whole discourse on how to save the world throughsustainable development. In the discourse, they operate as powerful figures that carry awhole apparatus of meaning (Haraway, 2004). The figure of Gro Harlem Brundtlandincludes – as mentioned above – the ‘Brundtland-report’, Our Common Future, and thecontinuing work of sustainable development ‘all over the world’. Al Gore can, in a similarway, be described as a symbol for awakening and acting on the climate change issue. BothBrundtland and Gore are represented as energetic, rational, and with good intentions tosecure ‘our common future’ (e.g. Habel, 2012). The notion of ‘our common future’ is ametaphor that supposedly embraces everyone; the creation of a ‘mystical participation in acommon good that, in fact, differentiates and divides’ (Popkewitz, 2008, p. 112). In thisspecific idea of the ‘common world’, some people and nations are excluded and con-structed as needing modernisation (cf. Andreotti, 2007), which does not seem to bepossible without help from the West:

For this to be possible, the world’s richest countries pledged to contribute 100 billion dollarsper year from 2020. The money will also help vulnerable countries adapt to climate change.(SO.S Geografi, 2012, p. 306)

Besides rich countries, different organisations are also described as helpers: the UN, theRed Cross, Doctors without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) and Save the Children(Upptäck världen Geografi, 2008, p. 34). The text emphasises that these organisationsare founded in the West. We note that the Muslim organisation Red Crescent is notmentioned at all. In other words, the textbooks clearly separate those who help from theOther in need. This is another example of the double gestures of inclusion andexclusion.

Figure 5. There is no specific caption for this picture in the social science book. However, it isplaced together with an illustration of ecological footprints. The girl thus represents a responsibleand aware white environmental hero (SO.S Samhälle, 2012, p. 348).


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Finally, we see how ecotourism is represented and operates in the double gesture:

In, for example, Ecuador, the Achuara people are now engaged in ecotourism. Until the1970s, they lived completely isolated in the rainforest and unaffected by modern civilisation.They engaged in felling trees to make room for livestock, but now they get about 45 percentof their income through the eco-village Kapawi, where they are responsible for maintenanceand services, and serve as guides on excursions into the rainforest. In 2011, the Achuarapeople are being counted upon to be able to independently manage the entire eco-village,which will then be donated to them. Hopefully, the village will become a sustainable projectfor both people and the environment. (Bowden, 2005b, p. 31)

Several double gestures and cogwheels in the Otherness machinery are operating in thisquotation. The Achuara people are described as living in another geographical place – therainforest – and in another time, unaffected by modern civilisation. The otherness is alsostrengthened by the descriptions of how the Achuara people are going to be ‘educated andcapable in the future’. The good intentions and the representation of ecotourism helpingthe Achuara people to take care of the eco village are examples of how the double gestureoperates. They are helped, with the aim to be rescued and included, but are at the sametime made exotic and constructed as subordinate. They are also lacking a voice, as thestories told in the Swedish textbooks are – not surprisingly, but still problematically –always from a Swedish perspective. In relation to this, it is important to recognise who hasa voice in the ESD material. Haraway points out the lack of voice for the representedOther:

One set of entities becomes the represented, the other becomes the environment, oftenthreatening, of the represented object. The only actor left is the spokesperson, the one whorepresents. (Haraway, 2004, p. 88)

Eco-certified racism?

To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all beensystemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature,workers, animals – in short domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirrorthe self. … To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God. (Haraway, 2004, p. 35)

This quotation from Donna Haraway underlines our analysis of the construction of Us andThem in Swedish teaching material for sustainable development. To be the One (the Us) isto be autonomous and powerful. This identity is constructed through its Other, an abjectgroup the One cannot live without. Haraway’s work critiques this dualistic understandingof the world, and she problematises it through different figures that exceed the culturaldichotomies and dissolve cultural borders rather than establish them. This problematisingof cultural dichotomies does not happen in the studied textbooks. Instead, certaindichotomies operate to conserve cogwheels in the Otherness machinery. We are notclaiming to have analysed all possible dichotomies, but those that have been discussedhave all pointed out Us as knowing, altruistic, conscious and good, and apparently asAgyeman (2008) says, saving the world for everyone equally. In a double gesture ofinclusion and exclusion, the uncivilised Other appears in need of help, and the bad Otherappears in need of higher moral standards. A discourse of Swedish exceptionalism isconstructed, and in this concluding section we speculate on how the Otherness machineryinscribes the notion of who becomes the eco-certified child and who becomes the Other:


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the one who is constructed as threatening our common world with his or her way of living(Haraway, 2004; Popkewitz, 2008).

To summarise, from the analysis of the teaching material, it is clear that the eco-certified child is characterised as one who is supposed to engage in sustainable develop-ment. How is the desirable subject constructed? According to the books, this personshould be civilised, organised, clean, technologically knowledgeable and helpful; in short– a modern person. In contrast, Africa and Asia are described in terms of tradition, dirt,chaos and the need for help. These dichotomies constitute and are constituted by thecolonial – and everyday racist – separation between the privileged and the subordinated,and between the norm and those who should be fostered into the norm. Also China andthe United States are used to promote the Swedish exceptionalism in terms of high moralstandards.

The Swedish qualities represented are difficult to resist: who doesn’t want to beorganised, clean, helpful, moral? Opposing them puts us in a ‘silly position’. However,with help from the analysis of the dichotomies, we can also see how these are used tofabricate the dirty, chaotic, unmodern abject people in terms of nationality and race. Theconsequence is that the (Swedish) child who engages in the ESD meets the world with acolonial gaze. The engagement in sustainable development assumes the Other as the onewho should be fostered into a specific way of living – in line with Swedish exception-alism. The Other is the one who threatens the world, and We are the ones who save it.The inclusive ESD project could thus be understood as a colonial, differentiating andexcluding project. Therefore, an important issue to raise is how one can construct adiscourse that displaces effects of colonial norms while we are still under their influ-ence. How can the privileged be engaged in ‘the unlearning of one’s own privilege’(Giroux, 1992, p. 19).

One way of problematising the Swedish exceptionalism is to question the notion ofwhat counts as knowledge. Knowledge is stressed as an essential attribute in sustain-able development, whether it comes to transportation, clean water or tourism (Ideland& Malmberg, 2014). However, it is a certain kind of the so-called civilised, entrepre-neurial and technical knowledge that is in focus. Other kinds of knowledge do notcount, and the knowledge is almost exclusively situated in the West, and onlyrepresented by white people – the enlightened ones (Dyer, 1993, 1997). Further,Noel Gough writes:

The global reach of European imperialism has given Western science the appearance ofuniversal truth and rationality, and many people (regardless of their location) assume that it isa form of knowledge that lacks the cultural fingerprints that seem much more conspicuous inknowledge systems that have retained their ties to specific localities. (Gough, 2002, p. 1223)

Later on, Gough (2002, p. 1228) asks the difficult question, ‘How can we think globallywithout enacting some form of epistemological imperialism?’ This is definitely a relevantpoint in relation to how the Otherness machinery operates in the educational discourse.From our analysis of the Swedish textbooks, we see how even good intentions to informchildren/people about the conditions in and challenges faced by foreign countries arecaught in an understanding of Us and Them. Therefore, we would like to add somequestions that might be impossible to answer but are nevertheless necessary to reflectupon: how can we teach sustainability from a non-colonial perspective? Is it possible toescape Swedish exceptionalism? How can we avoid eco-certified racism? How can weavoid ‘our common world’ only belonging to Us?


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AcknowledgementsWe thank Tom Popkewitz, Per Hillbur, our colleagues at SISEME and reviewers for their helpfulcomments on the text.

FundingThe project ‘The eco-certified child’ is financed by the Swedish Research Council, dnr 2011-5907.

Notes1. The notion of ‘our common world’ has also been used by Haraway (2008) to include non-

human beings in the concerns for the world. However, this article is focusing on representationsof humans of different colours and from different nations, and non-human inhabitants of theworld will not be discussed. Our use of the notion ‘our common world’ also speaks to the titleof the UN report, Our common future.

2. All quotes from Swedish textbooks are translated by the authors.3. There is an alternative discourse operating in many teaching materials for ESD, where the

Swedish child is positioned in natural surroundings. Sustainability is then interpreted in terms ofa natural life (Ideland & Malmberg, 2014). What we are arguing here is how the boundarybetween ‘nature-dependent’ countries and ‘technologically developed countries’ is establishedin the construction of Otherness.

Notes on contributorsMalin Ideland is an associate professor in Ethnology and a senior lecturer in Educational sciences atMalmö University, Sweden. Her research interests are how discourses operate inside education forsustainable development and science education.

Claes Malmberg is an associate professor and a senior lecturer in Science education at MalmöUniversity. His research interests are how discourses operate inside education for sustainabledevelopment and science education.

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