Fighting for climate environmental education in Brazil: educommunicative perspectives against the instrumentalization of human and nonhuman lives

Thais Brianezi^1*Joanne C. Marras Tate²

• ¹University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil
• ²University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado, United States

Brazilian socio-environmental coalitions and movements that fight for climate environmental education have invested in educommunicative practices and perspectives against the instrumentalization and over-exploitation of human and nonhuman lives over the years. They seem to have learned that, to postpone the end of worlds it is necessary to always tell one more story. Aílton Krenak, Indigenous leader and Brazilian philosopher, teaches us that it is increasingly important to ask ourselves by whom and where these narratives emerge and towards what futures they point at. In this conceptual analysis article, we follow Krenak and ask what stories are being told about environmental communication in the Global South, specifically Brazil, and what futures we want to follow as environmental communication scholars. Following a literature review and empirical data on the recent Brazilian social mobilizations in favor of climate environmental education, we first analyze how the challenge of overcoming economic conceptions of development goes along with overcoming the instrumental vision of communication. We then discuss four epistemological tensions that challenge environmental communication in this counter-hegemonic movement: tactical and strategic, complexity and reduction, virtuality and grounding, and ancestry and acceleration. Finally, we then demonstrate how educommunication, an epistemology of the South, contributes to the decolonial process of paradigmatic rupture of communication, guided by more plural perspectives such as good living (buen vivir).This conceptual analysis falls within the scope of the project "How can educommunication help expand and qualify climate education practices in basic education in Brazil?", which since March 2024 has been developed by the School of Communications and Arts at the USP in an official partnership through a Technical Cooperation Agreement with the federal government (in the form of the Ministry of the Environment) and the São Paulo City Hall (in the form of the Municipal Education Secretariat). With funding from the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São