Unmanagement Education for the Age of Climate Crisis

Abstract This paper examines how embodied, situated and relational experiences outside‐the‐classroom can open space for epistemic dislocations in Management Education under conditions of ecological crisis. Drawing on a qualitative pedagogical experience in a sustainability course in Brazil, informed by Design‐Based Research—whose assumptions of control, design and predictability we critically question–we explore conditions under which radical imaginaries may emerge through such experiences. Students engaged in encounters with human and non‐human others that generated discomfort and tension with habitual ways of knowing, opening possibilities for the emergence of (dis)enchanted imaginaries of Nature and (de)colonial imaginaries. These dynamics were intensified through situated and embodiment engagements, which at times gave rise to epistemic dislocations, or moments in which established ways of knowing lose their capacity to organize experience as alternative imaginaries become available. Those dislocations created temporary openings for participants to re‐examine their understandings of Nature, coloniality and socio‐ecological relations, remaining susceptible to reabsorption into dominant managerial frames. We contribute to climate‐oriented pedagogy by introducing Unmanagement Education, a reflexive pedagogical approach grounded in non‐mastery, embodiment and situated relationality, that may unsettle instituted imaginaries, opening space for epistemic dislocations to emerge under conditions of ecological crisis.