Pääluento
Greg William Misiaszek (Tohoku University, Japan):
Ecopedagogy:
Freirean Environmental Pedagogies for Justice, Peace, Wellbeing, and Sustainability

Greg William Misiaszek, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Professor at Tohoku University's Graduate School of Education in Japan. He has been the Associate Director at the Paulo Freire Institute, UCLA (PFI-UCLA) since 2018 and became an Honorary Founder in 2009, with various positions at the Institute since 2006. He is most known for his scholarship on ecopedagogy, the work of Paulo Freire, (post)critical theories, and comparative/international education. Throughout his work, Misiaszek uses various (post)critical theoretical lenses to unpack and often reinvent Freire's work for teaching and research to counter socio-environmental racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, violence, injustices, (neo)coloniality, anthropocentrism, epistemicide, and post-truthism, among other socio-historical oppressions. Misiaszek is the Chief Editor of the Freire In Focus Bloomsbury Book Series (with Carlos Alberto Torres) and the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Environmental Education (with Karen Malone), as well as an Executive Editor of the Teaching in Higher Education journal. His latest solo-authored books include Ecopedagogy and the Global Environmental Citizen: Critical Issues, Trends, Challenges and Possibilities (2025, Routledge) and Freire and Environmentalism: Ecopedagogy (2023, Bloomsbury). His latest edited books include the Palgrave Handbook on Critical Theories (Springer, 2023, with Ali Abdi) and Handbook of Ecological Civilization (2025, with Michael Peters, Ben Green & Xudong Zhu). He has four solo-authored books, six edited books, and over 70 other publications. Dr. Misiaszek holds a Ph.D. from UCLA in Comparative Education, an M.S. in education (University of Southern California (USC)), and a B.S. in Environmental Studies (USC).