Yakushima Glocal Art Project

Abstract: Aface the crashing wave of the global climate crisis, humans are struggling to stay afloat. Building a raft of sustainable environmental ethics whilst swimming in the dark waters of unsustainable “modernity” requires a herculean effort. And yet, here we are. The Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) curriculum of Yakushima municipality in Japan is doing its localised part to gather the wood, tie the planks, and fashion the sail by refining its environmental education curriculum into a radical place-based pedagogy. But building a raft requires more than technical knowledge—it also requires artistry. Using participatory art and ethnography-leaning qualitative methods, this thesis investigated Yakushima High School students’ vision of this raft and its oceanic range—that is, it investigated the students’ conceptions of glocality within the context of sustainability. Findings materialised into and from an artistic boundary object expressing four key conceptions: Nature as Lowest Common Denominator, Water as Connector, The Preeminence of Trash and Waste, and Facing Reality, Responsibility, and Hope. This thesis concludes that artistic methods have great value in catalysing dialogue and knowledge production on topics of glocality and sustainability, especially when such methods are explicitly informed by the feminist and decolonial emphasis on situated narrative of subaltern groups—such as rural Yakushima’s students—in order to construct a sustainable political ecology, as Yakushima’s ESD hopes to do. May our raft be humbly grand, and sail us far into a sustainable future.