Energy, Experience, and Educational Psychology: Changing practices in and beyond Fossil Capitalism

Abstract

I first introduce an approach in educational psychology that has developed ways of understanding individuals’ actions and experiences in explicit relation to socio-material practices and societal conditions. Next, I describe the particularities of human experience in the era of fossil capitalism, suggesting that, in educational psychological and multi-disciplinary research on experience and action, we should pay particular attention to homogeneous and heterogeneous aspects of subjective and collective experience, as well as to diverse manifestations of nihilism in human activities. Thereafter, I exemplify this approach with an excerpt from an empirical study of psychosocial welfare work in schools, illustrating how to detect the dynamics of choosing ‘a ghost’ over a socio-material practice when developing a school. Finally, I discuss the possibilities of this approach for multi-disciplinary research that aims to understand and support human strivings in a fossil and post-fossil era.