Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw

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.

Frictions in Forest Pedagogies: Common Worlds in Settler Colonial Spaces

Bringing frictions to childrens visits to a forest in British Columbia (BC) as possibilities for ‘common worlds pedagogies’, this article proceeds by troubling forest colonialisms, untangling forest histories and trajectories, attending to more-than-human elements of the forest, and inhabiting the forest with children. The article engages with the kinds of questions, wonderings, uncertainties, and possibilities that emerge when forest pedagogies become part of common worlds – in other words, when forests are understood as entangled natureculture spaces in which children, early childhood educators, and the forests themselves shape each other.

Acting with the Clock: clocking practices in early childhood

In this article, the author addresses intra-actions that take place among humans and non-human others — the physical world, the materials — in early childhood educations everyday practices. Her object of study is the clock. Specifically, she provides an example of what it might mean to account for the intra-activity of the material-discursive relations that encompass early childhood education clocking practices. Drawing on the work of Karen Barad and other posthumanist theories, she proposes a particular approach to early childhood clocking practices, an onto-epistemology, as she argues that we learn to act with clocks in early childhood classrooms.

Discourses on Quality Care: The Investigating ‘Quality’ Project and the Canadian Experience

This article describes the contexts within which reconceptualist approaches to research and practice in early childhood education are taking place in British Columbia, Canada. The authors situate their work on a project entitled Investigating ‘Quality’ in Early Childhood Education within national and international early childhood discourses.

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).

Postcolonial Entanglements: Unruling Stories

In this article, I use Donna Haraways philosophy to think about postcolonial encounters between different species. I follow entangled stories of the deer/settler-child figure to trouble colonialisms and untangle the histories and trajectories that we inhabit with other species through colonial histories. I shy away from generalizations and instead grapple with complexities that ordinary stories bring as I attempt to engage in nonhegemonic versions of childhood studies.

Lunch Time at the Child Care Centre: Neoliberal Assemblages in Early Childhood Education

Lunch Time at the Child Care Centre: Neoliberal Assemblages in Early Childhood Education In this article we interrogate neoliberal assemblages within the context of eating and feeding practices in early childhood education. We consider how neoliberal assemblages are enacted and created through multiple linkages between micro and macro regulations and policies, and everyday food routines. We attend to the embodied intensities, desires and affects that accompany these neoliberal formations. In particular, we are interested in making visible entanglements between particular situated neoliberal assemblages and racialization and neocolonialism. In our analysis, we consider how eating and food routines, situated within Inuit early childhood education, come to matter as instances of neoliberal encounters that merge with other discursive and material forces to create particular, situated and at times contradictory neoliberal assemblages that have colonizing and racializing effects on the capacities of certain bodies in certain spaces.

Politicizing Transitions in Early Childhood

The idea of transitions in early childhood education practice rests on a conceptualization of time that is characteristic of western thought: time as spatialized by having been divided into discrete units. This article explores the space-time dimension in relation to transitions. Drawing on Deleuzian-inspired writings on duration, time as intensive, and bodies and affects, the article engages with the following questions: Are there ways to rethink the idea that a child ‘has trouble with transitions’ ? What do we take for granted as we focus on childrens difficulties in transitioning? What are we overlooking when we only pay attention to how children move through activities? How might we direct our attention to what deeply affects children instead of looking only at the shift from one activity to the next? And, perhaps most importantly, what else might be going on in the very moment of a transition? Using an ordinary event from an early childhood classroom as an example, the article argues that too much focus on how children transition from one activity to the next keeps us from exploring the idea of transitions in relation to the intensities children experience and how their experiences endure.

The Meanings Embedded within Childcare Regulations: a historical analysis

In response to current discussions about a universal Canadian childcare system (affordable childcare for all families), this article deconstructs the position that childcare occupies in the province of Ontario through the examination, from a historical perspective, of a document that outlines regulations for childcare programs: the Day Nurseries Act. Three discourses are analyzed by tracing them to social and demographic conditions during the early twentieth century: discourses related to the need for medical supervision of children attending childcare centres; discourses that emphasize the relationship between childcare centres and ‘families in need’; and discourses that refer to the need to follow strict programming and behavioural guidelines.

Following Watery Relations in Early Childhood Pedagogies.

Working methodologically and theoretically with the hydro-logics of bodies of water, this article addresses the limitations of humanistic perspectives on water play in early childhood classrooms, and proposes pedagogies of watery relations. The article traces the fluid, murky, surging, creative, unpredictable specificities of bodies of water that enter an early childhood classroom during a collaborative ethnographic project with young children and early childhood educators.