Leesa Fawcett

Childhood Animalness: Relationality, Vulnerabilities, and Conviviality

This paper traces how animals have been and are reduced to mere objects for use in child development, examining historical and contemporary trends in developmental literature. We alternatively present scholarship that delves into children’s and animals’ subjective encounters and intersecting worldhoods as critical of more anthropocentric developmental psychology models. We utilize continuity as a model that emerges from our field work in order to make various suggestions about the ethics that emerge from children’s embodied experiences with animals, including felt senses of vulnerability, death, and precarity. Finally, we finish the chapter by outlining potential pedagogical directions that encourage deeper reflections about the precariousness of childhood lives, lived differently and J. Russell (*) Department of Animal Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, USA e-mail: russellj@canisius.edu L. Fawcett Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: lfawcett@yorku.ca # Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018 A. Cutter-Mackenzie et al. (eds.), Research Handbook on Childhoodnature, Springer International Handbooks of Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51949-4_64-1 1 together on this planet. Key to this is the consideration of interspecies, intergenerational conviviality – emphasizing the shared joys, pleasures, and problems of multispecies living.

A Citizen-Led Approach to Enhancing Community Well-Being

This chapter explores a citizen-led approach to measuring and enhancing community well-being within Ontario’s Headwaters region, which resulted in the publishing of a first Headwaters Community Well-Being Report in the Fall of 2011. The Report responded to a desire for greater planning and collaboration across a region that is made up of small urban and rural villages on the border of a larger urban area.