"We Call Ourselves Marginalized": Young People's Environmental Learning and Navigations of Marginalization in a Kenyan Pastoralist Community

Abstract

In recent decades, indigenous knowledge has been added to the environmental education agenda in an attempt to address the marginalization of non-western perspectives. While these efforts are necessary, the debate is often framed in terms of a discourse of victimisation which overlooks the agency of the people we refer to as marginalized. In this paper I discuss how young secondary school graduates from a pastoralist community in Kenya use and negotiate indigeneity, marginal identity, and experiences of marginalization in social navigations aimed at broadening their current and future opportunities. I argue that researchers not only need to pay attention to how certain voices are marginalized in environmental education research and practice, but also to how learners as agents respond to, use and negotiate the marginalization of their perspectives.