Encounter, Feminist Epistemologies, and Responsibility in the Face of Planetary Crises

This paper explores how young people encounter the phenomenon of planetary crises in ways that shape knowledge and responsibility. Contemporary attempts at engaging and calling upon young people to respond often hinge on representational practices that attempt to make the phenomenon of planetary crises present for young people to encounter in their daily lives. We argue, counterintuitively, that these attempts give rise to an inverse relationship wherein the more they make present, the more the phenomenon of planetary crises slips away, indeed giving itself to the encounter only as what Jacques Derrida refers to as an ‘experience of the impossible’. Taking seriously the encounter as an experience of the impossible, we theorize and exemplify impossible encounters in-excess of representation and in-between absence and presence. The paper contributes new theoretical and empirical understandings of how embodied and relational epistemologies can produce situated knowledges that engender other forms of responsibility in the face of planetary crises.