Charting the Entrudo: Ecopedagogy of Cultural Heritage in the European Outermost Region of the Azores

Description

Ecopedagogy demands we identify non-orthodox educational practices, under the assumption that only by valuing marginal or unconventional experiences we could face the educational challenges emerging from globalization. My dissertation opens with a theoretical study that is dedicated to the establishment of the best epistemological categories to tackle the above issue. In doing so, it assesses different investigative approaches and eventually sides with Lave and Wenger’s ‘communities of practice.’ Furthermore, the research establishes criteria for the operationalization of the above framework by identifying two specific epistemological concepts—situatedness and practice—and their related operationalizations: ‘negotiability continuum’ and ‘apparatus complexity.’ These operationalizations are furtherly identified as the key to detect ‘peripheral participation,’ which is key to well-functioning communities of practice. In doing so, it demonstrates compliance with genealogical research. After the establishment of such theoretical baseline, research unfolded in three stages: desk research and early Rapid Assessment, participatory activity with a team of four native assistants for the production of a scholarly outcome, and revision of such outcome in light of further fieldwork research to validate intermediate results. This main study, which lies at the core of the project, was undertaken in Terceira Island, belonging to the Azores Autonomous Region of Portugal. Desk research shows that Terceira Island is an outermost European territory with a long-standing cultural heritage that resisted commodification on behalf of different market actors. Moreover, owing to the idiographic singularity constituted by its Carnival with regards to its European counterparts, it qualified for fieldwork activities. Fieldwork results were reinterpreted by native assistants and another hermeneutical iteration was accomplished following thematic analysis drawn on further fieldwork activities. The latter entailed non-structured interviews with ‘culture experts.’ In sum, research outcomes show that Terceira’s Carnival is a good case of cultural heritage for ecopedagogy, as it features a healthy management of peripheral participation, which had been previously identified as paramount to educational success. Thus, Terceira’s Carnival is theorized to be a permanent workshop that simulates total social phenomena to foster the negotiation of identity for different groups of islanders according to historical contingencies. Consequently, it appears as a flexible heritage apparatus that could be deployed by different strategic dispositifs.