Seeing Sustainability: Aesthetic Public Pedagogy and the Formation of Ecological Citizenship

ABSTRACT

Ecological citizenship education has specified responsibility, agency, justice and participation, but it has not fully explained how citizens are formed through visual culture beyond formal education. This conceptual article develops aesthetic public pedagogy as a specific mode of public pedagogy: the contested process through which publicly circulating visual and sensory forms configure ecological relations and invite audiences into ecological subject positions. Unlike public pedagogy, visual environmental communication, arts‐based environmental learning or ecological literacy considered separately, the concept explains how aesthetic encounters can transform perceptibility, attachment, interpretation and future orientation in ways relevant to citizenship. Through purposive theoretical sampling and comparative analysis of ecological citizenship education, public pedagogy, and visual and aesthetic environmental communication, the article derives four analytically distinct but non‐linear mechanisms: ecological visibility, affective attachment, critical eco‐visual literacy and civic ecological imagination. It specifies conditional propositions for each mechanism and integrates spectacle, consumerisation, exclusion and depoliticisation as endogenous distortive pathways shaped by audience position, power and institutional context. The framework does not assume that exposure to environmental imagery produces citizenship. It identifies when aesthetic encounters are more likely to support witnessing, responsibility, critical judgement and collective agency, and when they are more likely to produce passive spectatorship or consumer citizenship. A final operationalisation shows how the framework can guide the design and evaluation of museums, public art, digital platforms and formal educational activities.