Affrica Taylor

Reconceptualizing the ‘nature’ of childhood

This interdisciplinary article draws upon human geography to bring fresh new perspectives to the relationship between two commonly conflated concepts: ‘childhood’ and ‘nature’. Childhood studies scholars have gone a long way towards retheorizing childhood beyond the ‘natural’ and the ‘universal’ by pointing to its historical and cultural construction. However, as yet, not enough attention has been paid to childhood’s key collateral term, nature. This article seeks to redress this gap by drawing upon interesting retheorizings of nature that have taken place within human geography in order to suggest new ways of reconceptualizing childhood.

Exclusionary Politics and the Question of National Belonging Australian Ethnicities in ‘Multiscalar’ Focus

This article builds on recent efforts to cast the understanding of ethnic and racialized tensions less in terms of a coarse logic of racism than within an analytical frame of struggles over national belonging. This theme is developed with respect to intercultural relations in Australia, in all the complexities of its white settler, migrant, and indigenous formations. The article develops a ‘multiscalar’ focus that takes in the global circuits of movement and relationship linked to British colonialism and international migration, through to contests over the meanings, management and stewardship of local places. In so doing, we also highlight some contextually specific versions of ‘whiteness’ whose various mobilizations help to undo a sense of their fixed status as core attributes of Australian nationhood. The article concludes with a case from Jervis Bay, New South Wales, where contested imaginings of, and investments in, appropriate land uses, have given rise to disputes that are productively conceived in terms of a multiscalar politics of national belonging. Although thus grounded in the circumstances of Australian culture, we believe the core argument can be extended (with all the normal caveats) to other ex-British colonial, immigration nations.

Haraway's ‘bag lady story-telling’: Relocating childhood and learning within a ‘post-human landscape’

In this article, we explore some alternate ways of approaching childhood and learning by taking three short forays into what Donna Haraway calls a ‘post-human landscape’. This exploration takes us beyond the horizons of orthodox educational approaches, in which the individual child is typically seen to be developing and learning within his/her (exclusively human) sociocultural context. The post-human landscape relocates childhood within a world that is much bigger than us (humans) and about more than our (human) concerns. It allows us to reconsider the ways in which children are both constituted by and learn within this more-than-human world. Adopting Haraways feminist narrative strategy, we offer three very different ‘bag lady’ stories that consider the ethics and politics of child/non-human animal cross-species encounters. Each of these stories gestures towards the ways in which we can learn to live with ‘companion species’ rather than only ever learn about them.

Queering Home Corner

A recent Australian controversy over the representation of a same-sex family on national childrens television highlighted the fact that early childhood remains a domain of strongly defended heteronormative family privilege. The authors use this controversial event as a springboard into an analysis of the interplay between the hegemonic discourses of childhood innocence and ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ and as an opportunity to offer a queerer perspective on early childhood. Applying Foucaults ‘heterotopia’ analytic to a set of narrative observations of childrens dramatic play in home corner, the authors trace some of the ways in which children both regulate and transgress the gender norms that underpin heteronormative social relations.

Queer worlding childhood

This paper sets out to queer educations normative human-centric assumptions and to de-centre the straight and narrow vision of the child as only ever becoming an autonomous individual learner. It re-focuses upon the more-than-human learning that takes place when we pay attention to queerer aspects of childrens, as well as our own, entangled becomings in the common worlds in which we live. In this case, the entangled becomings are those of children and dogs. Drawing upon Donna Haraways notion of ‘queer worlding’ and Karen Barads assertion of ‘natures queer performativity’, the authors explore how we might go about ‘queer worlding’ childhood. Using deconstructive and diffractive methods, they trace a selection of entangled child–dog events across three sites: the streets of Hong Kong; an Australian early childhood education bush setting; and an exhibition in a Swedish art museum. Through narrating some of the more disconcerting aspects of these events, the authors reveal how we might tap into the ‘queer worlding’ ways in which the world is acting on us, even as we are acting on it.

Kids, raccoons, and roos: awkward encounters and mixed affects

Within the Western cultural imaginary, child–animal relations are characteristically invoked with fond nostalgia and sentimentality. They are often represented as natural and innocent relations, thick with infantilizing and anthropomorphizing ‘cute’ emotions. Our multispecies ethnographic research – which is conducted in the everyday, lived common worlds of Australian and Canadian children and animals – reveals a very different political and emotional landscape. We find these embodied child–animal relations to be non-innocently entangled, fraught, and messy. In this article, we focus on some awkward encounters of mixed affect when kids and raccoons co-inhabit an urban forest setting in Vancouver, and when kids and kangaroos bodily encounter each other in a bush setting in Canberra. We trace the imbroglio of child–animal curiosities, warinesses, risks, inconveniences, revulsions, attachments, and confrontations at these sites as generative of new ethical logics.

Decentring the Human in Multispecies Ethnographies

Much has been written about the need to bridge the theory/practice divide by bringing them together in the ‘praxis’ of teaching. For researchers inspired by posthumanist theorizations, the task of bridging the theory/practice divide is particularly challenging because it is accompanied by the additional need to resist the nature/culture divide that keeps our human species ‘hyper-separated’ from all ‘earth others’ in the name of ‘human exceptionalism’ (Plumwood, 2002). The foundational nature/culture divide of Western humanism provides the structuring logic for our human-centric practices, and the challenge of decentring the human within the decidedly humanist practice of social science research cannot be underestimated. The challenge is compounded when this research is ‘applied’ in ‘the field’ — or, to put it another way, when it is enacted in the world beyond the academy. It seems much easier to theorize about decentring the human than to walk the talkand find congruent, innovative ways to ‘put new concepts to the test’ (Lorimer, 2010, p. 238).

Beyond stewardship: common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene

Abstract Interdisciplinary Anthropocene debates are prompting calls for a paradigm shift in thinking about what it means to be human and about our place and agency in the world. Within environmental education, sustainability remains centre stage and oddly disconnected from these Anthropocene debates. Framed by humanist principles, most sustainability education promotes humans as the primary change agents and environmental stewards. Although well-meaning, stewardship pedagogies do not provide the paradigm shift that is needed to respond to the implications of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene-attuned ‘common worlds’ pedagogies move beyond the limits of humanist stewardship framings. Based upon a more-than-human relational ontology, common world pedagogies reposition childhood and learning within inextricably entangled life-worlds, and seek to learn from what is already going on in these worlds. This article illustrates how a common worlds approach to learning ‘with’ nonhuman others rather than ‘about’ them and ‘on their behalf’ offers an alternative to stewardship pedagogies.

Thinking About Inheritance Through the Figure of the Anthropocene, from the Antipodes and in the Presence of Others

Modes of thinking matter. In this article we engage with the figure of the Anthropocene as the impetus for rethinking the messy environmental legacies of Australian settler colonialism that we have inherited. We do this rethinking in a small rural valley community, where the intractable realities of human and more than human settler colonial relations are played out on a daily basis. We also try to do this rethinking collectively, in the presence of other animals with whom our inherited pasts, our mundane everyday presents and our uncertain futures are inextricably enmeshed. What comes of all this thinking is a common account of mutual multispecies vulnerabilities and of collective agencies that recasts the dominant tales of a singular Anthropocene and the conventional human-centred inheritances of a rural Australian

Romancing or Re-configuring Nature in the Anthropocene? Towards Common Worlding Pedagogies

Nature-based education is undergoing a revival. This resurgence of interest in natural pedagogies is associated with concerns about children’s increasing alienation from nature in today’s technology-dominated world and with a growing awareness of the significant environmental challenges we all face. Returning children to nature is often presented as a way of rescuing them from this alienation, and preparing them to become future environmental stewards. However, entrenched and romantic notions of nature as a separate and pure domain, to which innocent children might be returned and through which they can be saved, are no longer tenable or constructive. Earth scientists’ identification of fundamental anthropogenic changes to the Earth’s geo-biosphere complicate the assumption that the natural world can be separated out from the cultural world of human societies. Indeed, it is the deluded hyper-separation of ourselves from nature that distinguishes modern western thinking, which has resulted in unsustainable modes of living in the world and produced the anthropogenic ecological crises we now face. In the precarious times of the Anthropocene, I argue that it is time to reconfigure our fraught relationship with nature, and to design common world pedagogies that respond to the real, messy, and non-innocent cosmopolitical worlds in which we actually live.