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

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 victimization that 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.