In this article we address the issue of how an instrumental approach to sustainability education has dominated the scientific debate of the last 20 years. By conducting interviews and focus group interviews, we have investigated a community arts initiative in the Flemish city of Antwerp in which artists together with local inhabitants engaged in activities around two art installations and address the sustainability of a particular living environment. Our empirical study of this place-based initiative that we call a ‘critical zone observatory’ has been enriched by the work of Bruno Latour, Richard Sennett and Hans Schildermans. We conclude that a temporal and spatial shift in sustainability education (research) is needed from (1) development (a steady movement towards a planned future) and (2) human stewardship (the capability of people to shape their passive living environments) to (1) what we call co-sperity (a collective hope in the present) and (2) inhabitation (an attached and undetermined engagement with the dynamic of one’s habitat). By proposing a collective study pedagogy as an alternative to individual training, we suggest a need for future research on critical zone observatories.

In this contribution to the special issue on adult education, inclusion and justice we discuss how an inclusive pedagogy can foster a more just way of inhabiting litter polluted living environments, in which the interests of both human and non-human dwellers are taken into consideration. More precisely, we theorize how arts can function as study material and enable a collective sensitivity for the ways in which (non-)human entities (e.g., fishermen, seals, birds, litter pickers, tourists, plastic producers) constitute a ‘sick’ habitat. Based upon our theory-driven participatory action research with adult inhabitants of the litter polluted Belgian coast, we conclude that a study pedagogy has the power to constitute collective events of emancipation in which inhabitants of damaged living environments can start to inhabit these places, i.e., they become (more) attentive to the reciprocal relationships with other human and non-human entities and respond accordingly with care towards these entanglements.