Mindy Blaise

Modest witness(ing) and lively stories: paying attention to matters of concern in early childhood

Abstract This article considers the role of early childhood education within these uncertain times of human induced climate change. It draws from feminism and environmental humanities to experiment with different ways of becoming-with the world. By bringing together Donna Haraway’s figure of the Modest Witness and Deborah Bird Rose’s notion of witnessing, the article rethinks what it means to ‘observe’ in terms of ethical response-ability and matters of concern. Data from a multisensory and multispecies ethnography are used to illuminate the observational practices that commonly take place in early childhood settings. The article concludes by employing ‘lively stories’ showing how modest witness(ing) reworks early childhood observations traditionally considered apolitical, distanced, and judgmental towards meaning making as a form of entanglements and open-ended dialogue. Modest witness(ing) attempts to put into practice initial ethical and political pedagogies that early childhood teachers can draw from and begin to address matters of concern in their own settings.

Fabricated childhoods: uncanny encounters with the more-than-human

ABSTRACT This article is based on uncanny encounters with Julia deVilles exhibit, Phantasmagoria. Inspired by Deleuzian-informed research practices, the author experiments with provoking practices to defy dominant developmental notions of childhood. This article reworks a humanist ontology by bringing together the discursive, the material, the human, and the more-than-human through the interweaving of provocations and encounters. Enacting an experimental and performative methodology, the readers movement through the article mimics the journey through an exhibition and the storm of thought and feeling that art can provoke. These provocations set into motion meanings about childhood that sit outside of developmentalism and are rarely entertained in the field of early childhood education.

An uneasy assemblage: Prisoners, animals, asylum-seeking children and posthuman packaging

Events in Australia have acted as provocations to thinking about the consequences of becoming a ‘package’ and then being processed. The image of the human, as prisoner, together with narratives about the child and the nonhuman animal as package, are used here in order to understand the world we share with others. These disparate elements are gathered together to form an uneasy assemblage. Thinking through Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a posthuman performative methodology is used to create this assemblage with its flows, images and stories. Posthumanism presents a challenge that recognizes the possibility of being in the world in a connected/entangled/knotted way. The work of Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe and Karen Barad underpins the theoretical and methodological perspective. Drawing on evidence from the media, the internet, human and animal rights work and visual representations, this work considers what it means to be packaged, commodified and de-humanized/de-animalized. Once packaged certain experiences become normalized and the (re)packaging of people and animals proliferates and emerges in new iterations. This article argues that by following the flows that circulate around the packaged animal or human everything changes, and becoming part of the assemblage invites active engagement with the unease that emerges. In this process our response-ability is called into question along with aspects of a relational ethics.

Queer Departures into More-Than-Human Worlds

This chapter breaks with trends to normalize queer within the human sexuality categories (LBGTQI). The authors approach queering as a strategy for unsettling all normative categories, not just the binary categories of human gender/sexual. They argue that it is just as important to queer normative notions of nature, as structured by the foundational nature/culture divide, as it is to queer the cultural constructions of gender and sexuality. They offer narrative descriptions of three very different queer performative events that mess up the categorical boundaries between nature and culture. The first is an ecosexual performance of queer love for the earth. The second is a performance of queer kinship between children and kangaroos. The third is performance of queer kind in an art installation of a children’s nursery.

Inheriting the Ecological Legacies of Settler Colonialism

One of the driving methodological and pedagogical concerns of the Common World Childhoods Research Collective, to which we belong, is the question of how to deal with the mess of the damaged worlds that we inherit and bequeath to future generations. The essays in this special section were commissioned in the wake of a Canadian SSHRC ‘Connections’ symposium organised by the Common World Childhoods Research Collective, and held at the University of Victoria, British Columbia in late 2014. This interdisciplinary event brought environmental and Indigenous humanities scholars into conversation with early childhood education scholars and practitioners around the theme of: “Learning how to inherit colonised and ecologically challenged lifeworlds.” The authors of these three essays ponder the question of ecological inheritance in the settler colonial contexts of Canada and Australia, cognisant of the fact that settler colonialism remains an incomplete project. Nothing is finally settled. Moreover, they start from the premise that the ecological legacies of the western colonial enterprise of early modernity closely articulate with the anthropogenic disturbances to the earth’s geo-biosphere that we are