Within the folds and among the wounds of conflicts at the roots of the eco-technological entanglements of advanced societies: pedagogical perspectives starting from the humanitarian catastrophe of congolese society devastated by the Coltan war

Abstract

The eco-technological entanglements of advanced societies generate, mainly along the routes of e-waste consumed in the West, India, and elsewhere, communities living at the threshold of subsistence by collecting discarded technological waste. There are, however, also vast communities, such as the Congolese one, suffering from extremely violent and seemingly endless wars caused by struggles among major world powers and multinational corporations acting “by proxy” for the procurement of precious Coltan resources, a highly valuable mineral used in the manufacture of technological artefacts essential to the “civilized world”: from mobile phones to missiles. How can educational processes of critical conscientization be promoted in the West regarding the dramatic “material foundations” of “virtual worlds,” within a perspective of co-responsibility toward a planetary collectivity conceived as a “community of destiny” (Morin, 1996; Ceruti, 2019)? How can one act, from an emergency-pedagogical perspective (Annacontini et al., 2022), to rebuild the social fabric of the Congolese community, exhausted and drained by an endless war fueled by the need to sustain the technological development of “advanced societies”? This contribution aims to address these questions.