The panel on caring for nature explored diverse approaches to environmental activism and education, emphasizing the interconnectedness of humans, animals, and ecosystems.
Leonie Schmidt and Dr. Najwa Abdullah examined Southeast Asian environmental documentaries that highlight women’s roles as activists, drawing on indigenous knowledge and spiritual traditions to challenge dominant environmental narratives.
Lo Kwai Cheung discussed the complex interspecies relationship between humans and macaques in Hong Kong, illustrating how historical and ecological contexts shape perceptions and interactions.
Daren Leung presented a Service-Learning practicum focused on food waste management, encouraging students to engage with waste as a relational and transformative element of environmental care.
Together, these papers emphasized the importance of integrating cultural, spiritual, and educational perspectives in fostering a deeper understanding of and responsibility for the natural world.
About the project
Our future is marred by effects of climate change, environmental degradation, inequality and political polarisation. In the face of these insurmountable challenges, how do we keep hope and engender change? How do we teach people to care so that we can collectively work towards better futures and seed world-making capacities? How do we learn to tend to the invisible and the inaudible relations between humans and non-humans that make up our world and to create networks where we recognise such interdependence? And how do we organise, cultivate, drive and sustain actions that are equitable and support the diversity and viability of all? In short, how can we make hope possible rather than despair convincing (Williams 1989).
Refusing to give in to the doom and gloom, I gathered the movers and shakers from across the globe and asked them what it takes to find the silver lining in this age of polycrisis. “Rehearsing Futures – pedagogies of hope” took place from the 15-17th May 2025 at HKBU and the outlying island of Peng Chau. Academics, community leaders and creative practitioners from Hong Kong, Singapore, the Netherlands, Canada and the UK joined forces to envision better futures and shared ideas to create a roadmap for change in teaching, research and social action.
Rehearsing Futures focuses on the two senses of rehearsing: the practice – as in the methods and pedagogies; as well as the rehearsal – the repetition, preparation and implementation of such methods. Change points to action, but it also requires practice and repetition; it is an emergent phenomena, which we need to prepare for (Wheatley and Frieze 2006; Bateson 2022).
