The spatial politics of learning: Community education, environmental justice, and the geography of care

Abstract

Abstract

This article asks what becomes visible when learning is approached not as a neutral cognitive act, but as a spatial and political practice through which communities interpret environmental harm, negotiate responsibility, and develop capacities for collective response. It argues that learning is inherently geographical because it is organized through unequal relations of place, infrastructure, memory, and authority, and that environmental justice is inseparable from pedagogy because communities must learn to perceive harm, interpret its causes, and cultivate shared capacities for response. Advancing the concept of the spatial politics of learning, the article positions community education as an epistemic, ethical, and political practice through which damaged environments become sites of inquiry, obligation, and contestation. A geography of learning names the spatial conditions under which knowledge becomes possible and consequential, while a geography of care names the relational infrastructures through which attentiveness, maintenance, and repair are sustained and disputed. Drawing on sustained engagement with riverine communities in the Musi River Basin, South Sumatra, the article invites a dialogue between human geography, place-based education, childhood geographies, and care scholarship, while refusing any idealization of community or care as inherently emancipatory.