Transgressive learning, resistance pedagogy and disruptive capacity building as levers for sustainability

If higher education is to make a significant contribution to the transition towards a more sustainable world, it will need to break the resilient practices of ‘business-as-usual’ that normalise growth orientation, individualism, inequality, anthropocentrism, exclusion, exploitation and even catastrophes. Doing so requires more than cultivating often-mentioned sustainability competencies and qualities such as handling complexity and ambiguity, anticipating and imagining alternative futures, taking mindful action, having empathy and agency, and so on. It also requires the capacity to disrupt and to learn from resistance to disruption. This contribution introduces and discusses transgressive learning, disruptive capacity building and pedagogies of resistance, such as learning-based counter-hegemonic responses that can unearth and uproot mechanisms of exploitation, oppression, extractivism, colonialisation and marginalisation. Transgression, disruption and resistance will inevitably lead to tensions, conflicts, controversy and discomfort, but this is where critical consciousness and spaces for fundamental change can arise. More hopeful, energizing and regenerative cultures can develop when this disruptive work can be combined with participation in social movements and transition niches that provide concrete utopias and viable alternatives.