Carrie Karsgaard will be presenting “Instagram as public pedagogy: Online environmental activism” in part of the International Workshop on Environment, Sustainability, & Education series. The Workshop is hosted and organized by the Center for Sustainable Futures at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Israeli Institute of Education for Sustainability at Kibbutzim College. The webinar is open to the public.
Exploring Instagram’s public pedagogy at scale, Karsgaard uses large-scale digital methods to analyze how publics reinforce and resist settler colonialism as they engage with the Trans Mountain pipeline controversy online – a controversy similar to the Dakota Access pipeline and other land-based anti-extraction movements. This presentation will trace opposition to the Trans Mountain pipeline in so-called Canada, where overlapping networks of concerned citizens, Indigenous land protectors, and environmental activists have used Instagram to document pipeline construction; teach using infographics; and express solidarity through re-shared posts. These expressions constitute a form of “public pedagogy,” where social media takes on an educative force, influencing publics whether or not they set foot in the classroom. After examining networked imagery, emojis, and hashtags, this session will open a conversation about the possibilities and limitations of online public pedagogies, which function within and against economies and cultures of digital media, racist and colonial representational regimes, and the broader ecology of social relations.