Affrica Taylor
Biographic Data
| ID | 3674878 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Affrica Taylor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Affrica |
| FAMILY NAME | Taylor |
| SIGNATURE | TAYLOR A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Canberra |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9222-1278 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 403 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Child Studies Multiple: Collaborative play for thinking through theories and methods
This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, 'un-closure' , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a…
Common Worlding Pedagogies: Opening Up to Learning with Worlds
Common worlding is a collective pedagogical approach. It is also a deliberate move to open up education to worlds beyond narrow human preoccupations and concerns and beyond its standard framing as an exclusively social practice. In this article, we identify some of the guiding principles that underpin this approach and explain how they work out in practice. We do so by offering a selection of illustrative vignettes drawn from the Walking with Wil…
Introduction to Symposium: Childhood studies in the Anthropocene
Childhood studies scholars have increasingly sought to examine the complex entanglements of children's lives with nonhuman materials, animals, plants and earthly processes. Doing so has enabled new insights into children's relationships with global challenges such as climate change. Now, researchers from many disciplines are reflecting critically upon whether such challenges can be obviously ascribed to human activity, suggesting that we are ente…
Countering the conceits of the Anthropos: Scaling Down and Researching With Minor Players
The naming of the Anthropocene (or epoch of Man) portends precarious futures for twenty-first century children. In deciding how best to respond, feminist scholars warn against perpetuating the heroicism and grandiosity of Man-to-the-rescue scripts. Instead they suggest paying close attention to what is already going on in the world beyond the dominion of Man, and refiguring our place in this more-than-human world by telling different kinds of sto…
Children, bilbies, and spirit bears
In this chapter, the authors examine children&s;s and young people&s;s narrative texts that feature two endangered native species—bilbies in Australia and spirit bears in Canada. They pay particular attention to the ways in which the narratives align endangered native animals, indigenous people&s;s knowledges and beliefs, non-indigenous children as the threatened or rescuing &s;goodies&s;, and feral non-indigenous animals and environmentally expl…
Children, kangaroos, and deer
This chapter recounts two geo-historically specific sets of child-wildlife stories of entangled inheritances and contemporary cohabitations. The first set of stories focuses on the interwoven trajectories of Australian children&s;s and kangaroos&s; lives, and includes narrative vignettes of urban child-kangaroo encounters drawn from Affrica&s;s ethnographic research. The second set of stories traces the multilayered ways in which the lives of Can…
The common worlds of children and animals
This chapter discusses the collective process through which it has assembled the thinking through the common worlds of children and animals. It considers some compelling planetary common world ecological inheritances that cannot be ignored and which are the reason for the claim that the common worlds of children and animals are neither pure and innocent nor utopian. The chapter discusses the ways in which animal stories travel between the global …
Indigenous child-dog relations
This chapter focuses on Inuit children&s;s relations with qimmiit in the Canadian Artic and Arrernte and Warlpiri children&s;s relations with camp dogs in the Central Australian desert to help us think beyond western notions of domestication and beyond anthropomorphising and infantilising notions of pet dogs as surrogate child members of their human families. The contemporary indigenous accounts that the chapter draws upon suggest that the more e…
Children, raccoons, and possums
This chapter describes how the unruly raccoons and pesky possums that move into urban areas and set up residence in early childhood centres in Canada and Australia breach proximate comfort zones and unsettle power relations. It details the cultural, species, and geographical specificities of both sets of urban-child-native-wildlife-residential assemblages. The chapter traces the spectrum of mixed, awkward, and discomforting effects that these sim…
Conclusion
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book is introduced by raising two questions: first, an onto-epistemological question, and second an ethical one. It has moved from a number of counter premises and insists that children grow up in more-than-human worlds, not just in human societies. The book emphasises the productive nature of relations, including child–animal relati…
Children, ants, and worms
In this chapter, the authors think through the ethical possibilities of interspecies vulnerability by focusing upon a series of seemingly insignificant encounters between seemingly minor actors—between young children and worms in a wet Canadian forest and between young children and ants in a dry Australian bush-land. The authors are particularly interested in thinking through the mutual vulnerabilities of these ant-worm-child encounters in the co…
The Common Worlds of Children and Animals: Relational Ethics for Entangled Lives
The lives and futures of children and animals are linked to environmental challenges associated with the Anthropocene and the acceleration of human-caused extinctions. This book sparks a fascinating interdisciplinary conversation about child–animal relations, calling for a radical shift in how we understand our relationship with other animals and our place in the world. It addresses issues of interspecies and intergenerational environmental justi…
Romancing or Re-configuring Nature in the Anthropocene? Towards Common Worlding Pedagogies
Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene
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, …
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 exceptional…
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 emot…
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…
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
Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education
Learning with children, ants, and worms in the Anthropocene: Towards a Common World Pedagogy of Multispecies Vulnerability
This article takes the naming of the Anthropocene as a moment of pedagogical opportunity in which we might decentre the human as the sole learning subject and explore the possibilities of interspecies learning. Picking up on current Anthropocene debates within the feminist environmental humanities, it considers how educators might pedagogically engage with the issue of intergenerational environmental justice from the earliest years of learning. D…
Settler Children, Kangaroos and the Cultural Politics of Australian National Belonging
This article reflects upon the ways in which white settler children and kangaroos were enlisted into the cultural politics of nation-building and belonging in the early days of Australian Federation. It revisits Ethel Pedley's turn-of-the-century children's book, Dot and the Kangaroo, and contextualises it within some of the notable kangaroo/settler events within Australia's colonial history. It draws attention to the paradoxes inherent in the sy…
Queer worlding childhood
This paper sets out to queer education's 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 children's, as well as our own, entangled becomings in the common worlds in which we live. In this case, the entangled becomings are those of child…
Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood
In this fascinating new book, Affrica Taylor encourages an exciting paradigmatic shift in the ways in which childhood and nature are conceived and pedagogically deployed, and invites readers to critically reassess the naturalist childhood discourses that are rife within popular culture and early years education.Through adopting a common worlds fram
Researching the Naturecultures of Postcolonial Childhoods
MINDY BLAISE Department of Early Childhood Education, Centre for Childhood Research and Innovation, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong BIDISHA BANERJEE Literature and Cultural Studies Department, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong VERONICA PACINI-KETCHABAW School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, Canada AFFRICA TAYLOR Faculty of Education, Science, Technolo…
Caterpillar Childhoods: Engaging the Otherwise Worlds of Central Australian Aboriginal Children
This article engages with the otherwise worlds of Arrernte caterpillar children living in the Aboriginal fringe camps around Alice Springs, in Central Australia. It traces the constitutive relationships between these children's kinship identities and belongings to country, the materialities of the desert environment in which they live, the adaptive and inclusive past and present Arrernte 'Caterpillar Dreaming' stories, Arrernte interspecies relat…
Learning with children, ants, and worms in the Anthropocene: Towards a Common World Pedagogy of Multispecies Vulnerability
This article takes the naming of the Anthropocene as a moment of pedagogical opportunity in which we might decentre the human as the sole learning subject and explore the possibilities of interspecies learning. Picking up on current Anthropocene debates within the feminist environmental humanities, it considers how educators might pedagogically engage with the issue of intergenerational environmental justice from the earliest years of learning. D…
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. …
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 …
Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene
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, …
The Common Worlds of Children and Animals: Relational Ethics for Entangled Lives
The lives and futures of children and animals are linked to environmental challenges associated with the Anthropocene and the acceleration of human-caused extinctions. This book sparks a fascinating interdisciplinary conversation about child–animal relations, calling for a radical shift in how we understand our relationship with other animals and our place in the world. It addresses issues of interspecies and intergenerational environmental justi…
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 emot…
Queer worlding childhood
This paper sets out to queer education's 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 children's, as well as our own, entangled becomings in the common worlds in which we live. In this case, the entangled becomings are those of child…
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…
Countering the conceits of the Anthropos: Scaling Down and Researching With Minor Players
The naming of the Anthropocene (or epoch of Man) portends precarious futures for twenty-first century children. In deciding how best to respond, feminist scholars warn against perpetuating the heroicism and grandiosity of Man-to-the-rescue scripts. Instead they suggest paying close attention to what is already going on in the world beyond the dominion of Man, and refiguring our place in this more-than-human world by telling different kinds of sto…
Settler Children, Kangaroos and the Cultural Politics of Australian National Belonging
This article reflects upon the ways in which white settler children and kangaroos were enlisted into the cultural politics of nation-building and belonging in the early days of Australian Federation. It revisits Ethel Pedley's turn-of-the-century children's book, Dot and the Kangaroo, and contextualises it within some of the notable kangaroo/settler events within Australia's colonial history. It draws attention to the paradoxes inherent in the sy…
The Sun Always Shines in Perth’: A Post‐Colonial Geography of Identity, Memory and Place
In this paper I explore some of the textual possibilities of post‐colonial geography. Using the conceptual tool of place as a palimpsest, I trace some geographies of memory across selected colonial and post‐colonial texts. By focusing on the relationship between representations of ‘sunny Perth’ and ‘Nyungah Perth’, I tease out some of the more general theoretical issues which pertain to a politics of place and space within this (post)colonial Aus…
Caterpillar Childhoods: Engaging the Otherwise Worlds of Central Australian Aboriginal Children
This article engages with the otherwise worlds of Arrernte caterpillar children living in the Aboriginal fringe camps around Alice Springs, in Central Australia. It traces the constitutive relationships between these children's kinship identities and belongings to country, the materialities of the desert environment in which they live, the adaptive and inclusive past and present Arrernte 'Caterpillar Dreaming' stories, Arrernte interspecies relat…
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
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 t…
Researching the Naturecultures of Postcolonial Childhoods
MINDY BLAISE Department of Early Childhood Education, Centre for Childhood Research and Innovation, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong BIDISHA BANERJEE Literature and Cultural Studies Department, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong VERONICA PACINI-KETCHABAW School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, Canada AFFRICA TAYLOR Faculty of Education, Science, Technolo…
Child Studies Multiple: Collaborative play for thinking through theories and methods
This text is an exploration of collaborative thinking and writing through theories, methods, and experiences on the topic of the child, children, and childhood. It is a collaborative written text (with 32 authors) that sprang out of the experimental workshop Child Studies Multiple. The workshop and this text are about daring to stay with mess, 'un-closure' , and uncertainty in order to investigate the (e)motions and complexities of being either a…
Introduction to Symposium: Childhood studies in the Anthropocene
Childhood studies scholars have increasingly sought to examine the complex entanglements of children's lives with nonhuman materials, animals, plants and earthly processes. Doing so has enabled new insights into children's relationships with global challenges such as climate change. Now, researchers from many disciplines are reflecting critically upon whether such challenges can be obviously ascribed to human activity, suggesting that we are ente…
The Sun Always Shines in Perth’: A Post‐Colonial Geography of Identity, Memory and Place
In this paper I explore some of the textual possibilities of post‐colonial geography. Using the conceptual tool of place as a palimpsest, I trace some geographies of memory across selected colonial and post‐colonial texts. By focusing on the relationship between representations of ‘sunny Perth’ and ‘Nyungah Perth’, I tease out some of the more general theoretical issues which pertain to a politics of place and space within this (post)colonial Aus…
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 …
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. …
Common Worlds: Reconceptualising Inclusion in Early Childhood Communities
‘Common worlds' is a conceptual framework developed to reconceptualise inclusion in early childhood communities. Common worlds take account of children's relations with all the others in their worlds — including the more-than-human others. The ethics and politics of living together in these common worlds is the central concern of this article. The article begins by charting the interdisciplinary scholarship that has inspired the development of th…
Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood
In this fascinating new book, Affrica Taylor encourages an exciting paradigmatic shift in the ways in which childhood and nature are conceived and pedagogically deployed, and invites readers to critically reassess the naturalist childhood discourses that are rife within popular culture and early years education.Through adopting a common worlds fram
Researching the Naturecultures of Postcolonial Childhoods
MINDY BLAISE Department of Early Childhood Education, Centre for Childhood Research and Innovation, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong BIDISHA BANERJEE Literature and Cultural Studies Department, The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Tai Po, New Territories, Hong Kong VERONICA PACINI-KETCHABAW School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, Canada AFFRICA TAYLOR Faculty of Education, Science, Technolo…
Caterpillar Childhoods: Engaging the Otherwise Worlds of Central Australian Aboriginal Children
This article engages with the otherwise worlds of Arrernte caterpillar children living in the Aboriginal fringe camps around Alice Springs, in Central Australia. It traces the constitutive relationships between these children's kinship identities and belongings to country, the materialities of the desert environment in which they live, the adaptive and inclusive past and present Arrernte 'Caterpillar Dreaming' stories, Arrernte interspecies relat…
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 t…
Settler Children, Kangaroos and the Cultural Politics of Australian National Belonging
This article reflects upon the ways in which white settler children and kangaroos were enlisted into the cultural politics of nation-building and belonging in the early days of Australian Federation. It revisits Ethel Pedley's turn-of-the-century children's book, Dot and the Kangaroo, and contextualises it within some of the notable kangaroo/settler events within Australia's colonial history. It draws attention to the paradoxes inherent in the sy…
Queer worlding childhood
This paper sets out to queer education's 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 children's, as well as our own, entangled becomings in the common worlds in which we live. In this case, the entangled becomings are those of child…
Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education
Learning with children, ants, and worms in the Anthropocene: Towards a Common World Pedagogy of Multispecies Vulnerability
This article takes the naming of the Anthropocene as a moment of pedagogical opportunity in which we might decentre the human as the sole learning subject and explore the possibilities of interspecies learning. Picking up on current Anthropocene debates within the feminist environmental humanities, it considers how educators might pedagogically engage with the issue of intergenerational environmental justice from the earliest years of learning. D…
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 exceptional…
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 emot…
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…
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
Romancing or Re-configuring Nature in the Anthropocene? Towards Common Worlding Pedagogies
Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene
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, …
Children, bilbies, and spirit bears
In this chapter, the authors examine children&s;s and young people&s;s narrative texts that feature two endangered native species—bilbies in Australia and spirit bears in Canada. They pay particular attention to the ways in which the narratives align endangered native animals, indigenous people&s;s knowledges and beliefs, non-indigenous children as the threatened or rescuing &s;goodies&s;, and feral non-indigenous animals and environmentally expl…
Children, kangaroos, and deer
This chapter recounts two geo-historically specific sets of child-wildlife stories of entangled inheritances and contemporary cohabitations. The first set of stories focuses on the interwoven trajectories of Australian children&s;s and kangaroos&s; lives, and includes narrative vignettes of urban child-kangaroo encounters drawn from Affrica&s;s ethnographic research. The second set of stories traces the multilayered ways in which the lives of Can…
The common worlds of children and animals
This chapter discusses the collective process through which it has assembled the thinking through the common worlds of children and animals. It considers some compelling planetary common world ecological inheritances that cannot be ignored and which are the reason for the claim that the common worlds of children and animals are neither pure and innocent nor utopian. The chapter discusses the ways in which animal stories travel between the global …
Indigenous child-dog relations
This chapter focuses on Inuit children&s;s relations with qimmiit in the Canadian Artic and Arrernte and Warlpiri children&s;s relations with camp dogs in the Central Australian desert to help us think beyond western notions of domestication and beyond anthropomorphising and infantilising notions of pet dogs as surrogate child members of their human families. The contemporary indigenous accounts that the chapter draws upon suggest that the more e…
Children, raccoons, and possums
This chapter describes how the unruly raccoons and pesky possums that move into urban areas and set up residence in early childhood centres in Canada and Australia breach proximate comfort zones and unsettle power relations. It details the cultural, species, and geographical specificities of both sets of urban-child-native-wildlife-residential assemblages. The chapter traces the spectrum of mixed, awkward, and discomforting effects that these sim…
Conclusion
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book is introduced by raising two questions: first, an onto-epistemological question, and second an ethical one. It has moved from a number of counter premises and insists that children grow up in more-than-human worlds, not just in human societies. The book emphasises the productive nature of relations, including child–animal relati…
Children, ants, and worms
In this chapter, the authors think through the ethical possibilities of interspecies vulnerability by focusing upon a series of seemingly insignificant encounters between seemingly minor actors—between young children and worms in a wet Canadian forest and between young children and ants in a dry Australian bush-land. The authors are particularly interested in thinking through the mutual vulnerabilities of these ant-worm-child encounters in the co…
Sociology (18 works) · Children's Rights and Participation (14 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (14 works) · Political science (11 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works) · Environmental ethics (8 works) · Geography (8 works)