PhD defence L. (Lydia) Baan Hofman

Brief summary of the doctoral thesis:

If growing up means ‘trying to be at home in the world’, young people’s efforts are doubly threatened in times of climate crisis. Their habitable earth is imperiled materially: homes are increasingly getting too hot or risk being flooded. But also their normal way of making sense of the world, of becoming familiar with it, no longer works. The future is not necessarily better than the present, as we have grown customed to think. How could we help teenagers to respond to and be at home in a world of crisis? 

In this doctoral dissertation, Lydia Baan Hofman proposes a conceptual framework for a pedagogy. From a perspective of feminist environmental philosophy, she theoretically explores how young people in schools could become able to respond to times of climate crisis and environmental destruction – or, inspired by Donna Haraway’s notion, how they could become ‘response-able’. Baan Hofman presents five elements for a proposed Pedagogy of Partial Reponses: knowledge, care, thinking, imagination, and self. She draws from (feminist) science and technology studies, feminist and decolonial theories, political and social theory, and philosophy of education to articulate her framework.