Jeremy Bendik-Keymer

Philosophers Fight Climate Change Series

This interview series highlights the exciting ways philosophers engage the public to combat a central crisis of our time. 

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer is a professor in the department of philosophy at Case Western Reserve University and a senior research fellow with the Earth System Governance Project, Universiteit Utrecht. He edits a series in public philosophy for the Blog of the American Philosophical Association, and he facilitates emergent learning in Cleveland to foster multi-perspectival, informed, and authentic civic engagement.   

What do you think is the biggest obstacle to folks becoming civically engaged?

I think it’s desperation. Global heating and the likelihood that we are cascading into the Sixth Mass Extinction since life began on Earth are both overwhelming, but they are the results of the inertia of an interlocking set of historical social systems that have incentivized their destructive continuance, and they are held in place by vast amounts of wealth inequality, privilege, and collective insecurity. For everyday people, how can we change anything in time to make a big enough difference? And what are we supposed to do? We lack the know-how elites have, and we lack the resources—the wealth, connections, and positions to secure massive amounts of PR, legal, and other forms of support—to take on the system. Moreover, many of us are atomized next to one another and think and feel individualistically. The result of this mess is an understandable “quiet desperation”—much more knotted and understandable than Thoreau made it out to seem.

Given that obstacle, what’s the philosophical grounding of your civically engaged work?

I focus on people’s cognitive agency and do so by adapting the idea of an emergent curriculum or of emergent learning in pretty much everything that I do inside and outside the classroom.  These notions emerged from the Rousseauian tradition of philosophy of education that took communal form in the Reggio Emilia municipal school system in the second half of the 20^th century as a way of doing “never again” to fascism. I learned of them by working on a long research project at the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Childhood Development while I was completing my dissertation in Philosophy at University of Chicago. The people with whom I worked—the project leaders Daniel and Sandra Scheinfeld—co-wrote a book about a Head Start system in Chicago’s South and West sides through the Chicago Commons Family Centers. It was the first low-income, public, and multi-racial adaptation of what the Reggio schools had done anywhere in the world. The schools used curricula that evolved from children’s interests as these interests were challenged under the premise of meeting the child’s core need to become a competent and engaged agent in the adult social world. The Scheinfeld’s book, We Are All Explorers, is still one of my favorite books today. 

So what types of civically engaged work do you do with emergent learning?

Very many. I have used emergent learning to shape actual curriculum at the various schools where I’ve worked, and I regularly use it to shape the inside of courses when students have to work with a pre-given course title and description. For instance, when I lived in the Middle East, I co-created a conversation circle that met weekly. Over the course of three months, it became clear that students wanted to engage with the complexities of modern identity in the United Arab Emirates. So I created a seminar for the Spring called “Modern Identity.” In that seminar, students engaged in both an academic and a personal way with three core problems of modern identity, affecting their lives and their relationships in the process. Many former students from that time cite the class as one of the most important classes they ever took.

Or in Cleveland for an environmental politics seminar, I challenged students to connect the dots between where they lived and responsibility in our planetary, environmental situation. Students developed a class together in which they linked redlining in Cleveland with the history of colonialism, the still present order of nationalism, ongoing racism in a global system of apartheid, and fossil-fuel–based capitalist industrialism where we live. They created an approach to collective responsibility that began with collective security. They rooted it in their lives in Cleveland.

Over seven and a half years, too, I developed and co-organized two extended community forums, one on campus for the campus and surrounding community, another in a popular neighborhood of Cleveland for the broader metro-region community. In each forum, people slowly surfaced what was on their consciences. In the process, we often discussed global heating, intergenerational responsibility, the right to safety, fossil capitalism, and how to come together to be effective politically as a community. Here, emergent learning (not curriculum) led people to build collective reflection into their lives and to become clearer, more multi-perspectival, more informed, and more authentic in their civic engagement.

Did you ever encounter failure in one of your emergent learning projects?

One project that grew from the community groups got involved with a major arts triennial that was backed by a lot of neoliberal money aimed at gentrifying Cleveland. The art project involved the family of Tamir Rice, who did eventually benefit from it. However, the project was morally compromised on a number of levels, corrupted by the arts organizations involved who sought to build their image in a climate of neoliberal funding, and hamstrung by the main artist who, it turns out, was engaged in something we came to call “trauma-feeding.” I wrote about the project and its failure at length in an engaged, public forum with an international audience. Born of failure, the lessons there are important to consider.

How has the work been useful for your community?

I worry that focusing on singular, civic engagement projects can subtly deflect our attention from what I take to be the main thing that we should be developing: an ethos of political responsibility. One of the things that I am most proud of in my emergent curriculum classes and in the emergent learning community forums is that people have, years later, said how the environments changed their ways of approaching learning and community. What was produced, it seems, was a change in perspective, not a concrete deliverable. I think that the work I’ve done, when it’s worked, has helped people develop their way of seeing, not simply produce a discrete, instrumental result.

Do you have any advice for people who want to work in a way similar to how you’ve all been working?

Sure. I wrote up some advice in a companion essay to this interview. I hope that what is there is helpful. The main thing about emergent learning is to co-create forums where people are truly intellectual agents who can surface the confusion they feel and face and slowly come to terms with how to make sense of their situation. This subtle, sometimes incognito thing is extremely important for our coming to terms with the systems destroying the current order of life on Earth. It’s something that groups like XR (Extinction Rebellion) have understood. Consciousness raising has a core, emotional and relational component. We have to settle into ourselves and our situation, learning for real how to challenge our systems and keep a critical attitude toward the kind of social world that could make sense if only we push to co-create it.

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