Ecoversities Alliance: a five-year experiment in cosmopolitical learning

Abstract

How can higher education be re-imagined so as to include multiple knowledge systems, for a world where many worlds co-inhabit? This is one of the questions at the heart of the Ecoversities Alliance, a planetary alliance of learning places and practitioners reimagining higher education, many of them emerging from social and ecological movements and indigenous communities. Constituted by more than 400 members, representing over 260 organizations in around 47 countries, the Ecoversities Alliance is engaged in experimenting, learning from and practicing ways to regenerate local ecologies, cultures and economies and challenge hatred, violence, monoculture, extractivism, overconsumption, and exploitation. This paper will draw from the perspective of three of its members who have been key participants since its birth in 2015 - as co-founders and steering committee members, reflecting on their learning in/with the alliance. This paper focuses on how the Alliance has been attempting to do what we are calling here cosmopolitical learning: learning how to learn in and between cultures, epistemologies, ontologies; learning to learn from, within, and beyond diversity.