Fikile Nxumalo
Biographic Data
| ID | 669510 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fikile Nxumalo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fikile |
| FAMILY NAME | Nxumalo |
| SIGNATURE | NXUMALO F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2039-9146 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 200 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
(Re)storying Black early Childhood Educators’ Encounters with Anti-Blackness
This article engages with questions that refuse the dominant registers of despair and recognition that describe the conditions Black early childhood educators experience daily. It asks: How might early childhood education attend to the textures and excesses of livingness beyond dominant registers? What needs to take place in early childhood education so that glimpses of Black freedom permeate these lifeless registers? What places might we search,…
Learning with lands and waters
We share visiting as an Indigenous feminist practice in an afterschool land education program for Black and Indigenous youth. Set in a large North American city, our visiting practices - listening, planting, creating poetry with a buried creek, and visiting a First Nation community on the frontlines of industrial colonialism, stewarded reciprocal relationships with more-than-human kin. These practices supported youth in critiquing anthropocentric…
Climate Action in an Eswatini Community
In this article, we think about narrative and visual stories that emerged from climate justice research with lands, children, families, elders, and teachers in an Eswatini community. The stories we bring forward emerged from land-based and classroom encounters with the effects of climate change and from intergenerational dialogues on revitalizing Indigenous foods. They also emerged as children, families, and community members worked with the land…
Black and Indigenous futures in education
Insisting on relation
Transformative Climate and Environmental Education for a Just Future
This commentary highlights the urgent need to re‐envision climate and environmental education in response to the escalating climate crisis and its far‐reaching social, ecological, and political implications. As young people increasingly express concern for their futures, the authors call for a transformational change in science education that engages with climate change as a complex and pressing issue. To support such transformation, the commenta…
Thinking with Black Ecologies in Early Childhood Education
We are three Black women working in childhood and youth education research and practice in Tkaronto, Canada. In this paper we bring together our personal, research, and pedagogical inquiries into Black ecologies. We focus on foregrounding how Black ecologies can bring possibilities to (re)story Black nature relations and respond to socio-ecological injustice. Our intention is to encourage early childhood educators to think, in situated ways, with…
Reconceptualizing early childhood education
In this article, we enact a partial cartographic storying of reconceptualist turns in our work. We do this by situating ourselves in relation to each other and our work across time as a mode of tracing the (situated) possibilities that these turns have enacted for children-in-relation with worlds. In enacting this dialogic and cartographic storying, we collaborate in a way that is inspired by Black methodologies. This means that we intentionally …
Israel’s war on Gaza and the violation of children’s rights
The current intensification of Israel’s on-going war on Gaza has killed over 25,000 people in less than four months; half of them children. Nearly 60,000 people have been injured, almost all civilians, and many of them children (UNICEF). Many more thousands are missing beneath the rubble caused by the 25,000 tonnes of explosives that have been dropped on Gaza since October 7, equivalent to two nuclear bombs. The IPC has reported that the entire p…
Propositions for anticolonial belonging in Canadian early childhood environmental education
This article puts forward modes of belonging that hold potential for enacting environmental education for socio-ecological justice. The focus is on orientations that can shift the experiences of young, racialized immigrant children living and learning in settler colonial Canada, where neoliberal multiculturalism has a strong hold on early childhood education. As an antidote, three interconnected pedagogical orientations towards belonging are offe…
Creating Openings for Co-Theorizing
This article is derived from a webinar series conversation titled, “Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry.” During the webinar sessions the panelists, Dr. Fikile Nxumalo and Dr. Eve Tuck, discussed the ways in which their philosophical orientations contribute to how they enact inquiry as co-theorizing
Pedagogías decoloniales del agua
In this paper, I share everyday stories of young people’s pedagogical encounters with water. I share these stories as illustrations of pedagogies that welcome young people into caring relationships with more-than-human life. I focus on the decolonial potential of these pedagogical encounters in relation to what they activate for Black, Indigenous and Black-Indigenous world making
Centering Black life in Canadian early childhood education
This paper is a response to multiculturalism’s reductionist and othering constructions of Black presence in Canadian early childhood research and practice. We engage in possibilities for creating movement away from multiculturalism as the primary way of responding to anti-Blackness in Canadian early childhood education. We put forward orientations that emerge when we imagine the abolition of Canadian early childhood education pedagogies and curri…
Education and ecological precarity
We want our children to survive
Sharon Nelson-Barber, a sociolinguist, directs Culture & Language in STEM Education within WestEd’s Science and Engineering content area. She is co-founder of POLARIS—Pacific/Polar Opportunities to Learn, Advance and Research Indigenous Systems—a research and development network that supports healthy communities by integrating Indigenous perspectives with new frontiers of knowledge that strengthen educational transformation. In this interview, we…
Undoing human supremacy and white supremacy to transform relationships
Megan Bang (Ojibwe and Italian descent) is a Professor of the Learning Sciences and Psychology at Northwestern University and is currently serving as the Senior Vice President at the Spencer Foundation. Dr. Bang’s research focuses on the complexities of navigating multiple meaning systems in creating and implementing more effective and just learning environments in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics education. Ananda Marin (A…
Disrupting Anti-Blackness in Early Childhood Qualitative Inquiry
Working with Black feminist concepts of Black futurity and Black refusal, this article seeks to illustrate what is possible when early childhood research does not begin with the anti-Blackness that is pervasiveness in early childhood education. My focus is on the liberatory potential of attending to quotidian relational world-making practices in the places and spaces of Black childhood. Thinking with a photo essay on Black boys and with images of…
Infantographies
Decolonial Water Pedagogies
In this paper, I share everyday stories of young people’s pedagogical encounters with water. I share these stories as illustrations of pedagogies that welcome young people into caring relationships with more-than-human life. I focus on the decolonial potential of these pedagogical encounters in relation to what they activate for Black, Indigenous and Black-Indigenous world making
Anti-Colonial Orientations to Place
The authors bring together decolonial, place attuned, and critical posthumanist orientations to analyze an event during a residential workshop organized as part of a state-funded research project on decolonizing early childhood discourses in South Africa. An invitation during the workshop to grapple with what might be unsettling by attending to the agency of the more-than-human world and its entanglement with unequal human geographies of place, g…
Explorations of the Tensions and Potentials of De-Centering the Human in Early Childhood Education Research
This introduction serves as a general introduction to the symposium on “Explorations of the Tensions and Potentials of De-Centering the Human in Early Childhood Education Research.” More-than-human theoretical perspectives (such as new feminist materialism and critical posthumanism) have provided pedagogical, methodological and conceptual tools for attending to the ways in which young children’s learning subjectivities emerge within relational on…
Situating Indigenous and Black Childhoods in the Anthropocene
Place-based disruptions of humanism, coloniality and anti-blackness in early childhood education
This essay engages with the generative potentials and necessity of attunement to place in education. I focus in particular on what bringing Indigenous and Black feminisms and feminist new materialisms into conversation, might mobilize towards unsettling the anthropocentric, colonial and anti-black inheritances of early childhood education. I situate my engagements with place within ongoing and intensifying anthropogenic environmental precarity th…
Staying With the Trouble
This article attends to the possibilities that emerged from pedagogical invitation to the more-than-human in a qualitative inquiry course. We focus on the situated ethical and (micro)political grapplings that emerged from paying attention to the more-than-human alongside asymmetrical human and more-than-human lifeworlds. Our orientation toward the ethical and (micro)political is enacted through visual, poetic, and narrative storytelling that atte…
Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education
This book draws attention to the urgent need for early childhood education to critically encounter and pedagogically respond to the entanglements of environmentally damaged places, anti-blackness, and settler colonial legacies. Drawing from the author’s multi-year participatory action research with educators and children in suburban settings, the book highlights Indigenous presences and land relations within ongoing settler colonialism as necessa…
Staying with the trouble' in child-insect-educator common worlds
Classroom pet programs have become extremely popular in urban North American early childhood classrooms. This article challenges anthropocentric child-pet pedagogies by proposing common world pedagogies of ‘staying with the trouble.’ Drawing from a common world multispecies ethnography in one early childhood centre, the authors engage with the specificities of educators’ and children’s everyday practices of caring for and detaching from an introd…
Unruly Raccoons and Troubled Educators
Current times of anthropogenically damaged landscapes call us to re-think human and nonhuman relations and consider multiple possibilities for alternative and more sustainable futures. As many environmental and Indigenous humanities scholars have noted, central to this re-thinking is unsettling the colonial nature/culture divide in Western epistemology. In this article, through a series of situated, small, everyday stories from childcare centres,…
Envisioning Black space in environmental education for young children
In this article, we bring attention to absences and deficit assumptions that continue to circulate in relation to environmental education for young Black children in North America. We focus our attention on tracing some of the ways in which racial innocence works to exclude and limit possibilities for young Black children’s learning. Our analysis includes making visible connections between racialized discourses of childhood innocence, antiblackne…
Towards ‘refiguring presences’ as an anti-colonial orientation to research in early childhood studies
In this paper, I craft a methodological orientation for attending to the intricacies of everyday place encounters in early childhood settings with particular attention to settler colonialism and more-than-human entanglements. Drawing from my work with children and educators in childcare settings located in what is now British Columbia, Canada, I use refiguring presences to describe this research methodology, and its particular attention to unsett…
Decolonizing place in early childhood studies
This article aims to center Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies in considerations of place, environment, and “nature” in early childhood studies. We consider how these perspectives might enact knowledge-making that politicizes, unsettles, and (re)stories place-based studies of childhood. In particular, we are interested in possibilities for unsettling the dominance of EuroWestern knowledges in both normative and critical…
Education and ecological precarity
Staying With the Trouble
This article attends to the possibilities that emerged from pedagogical invitation to the more-than-human in a qualitative inquiry course. We focus on the situated ethical and (micro)political grapplings that emerged from paying attention to the more-than-human alongside asymmetrical human and more-than-human lifeworlds. Our orientation toward the ethical and (micro)political is enacted through visual, poetic, and narrative storytelling that atte…
Pedagogical gatherings in early childhood education
In this article, the authors critically and generatively encounter emergent curriculum, drawing from their experiences working as pedagogistas in three different early childhood education centres in Western Canada. The intent is to engage with the concept of emergence as that which can bring ethical and political engagements with curriculum and pedagogy; complicating understandings of emergent curriculum as simply following the lead of children. …
Place-based disruptions of humanism, coloniality and anti-blackness in early childhood education
This essay engages with the generative potentials and necessity of attunement to place in education. I focus in particular on what bringing Indigenous and Black feminisms and feminist new materialisms into conversation, might mobilize towards unsettling the anthropocentric, colonial and anti-black inheritances of early childhood education. I situate my engagements with place within ongoing and intensifying anthropogenic environmental precarity th…
Geotheorizing mountain–child relations within anthropogenic inheritances
This paper focuses on children’s relations with what is now known as Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia, Canada. In particular, it grapples with encounters with the mountain, atop which several childcare centres are located. The mountain, on unceded Indigenous Coast Salish territories, has become a contested site of colonial capitalist extraction due to a proposal to build a tar sands oil pipeline that would tunnel through the mountain. Sustain…
Infantographies
Undoing human supremacy and white supremacy to transform relationships
Megan Bang (Ojibwe and Italian descent) is a Professor of the Learning Sciences and Psychology at Northwestern University and is currently serving as the Senior Vice President at the Spencer Foundation. Dr. Bang’s research focuses on the complexities of navigating multiple meaning systems in creating and implementing more effective and just learning environments in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics education. Ananda Marin (A…
Decolonial Water Pedagogies
In this paper, I share everyday stories of young people’s pedagogical encounters with water. I share these stories as illustrations of pedagogies that welcome young people into caring relationships with more-than-human life. I focus on the decolonial potential of these pedagogical encounters in relation to what they activate for Black, Indigenous and Black-Indigenous world making
Stories for living on a damaged planet
This article examines children’s encounters with dead and dying bumble bees in their everyday entangled lives. Within the context of an early childhood classroom located in suburban British Columbia, Canada, the article stories situated and emergent bee–child worldings to illustrate possibilities for learning with other species in anthropogenically damaged worlds. I pay attention to some of the ways in which children’s and educators’ practices ha…
Israel’s war on Gaza and the violation of children’s rights
The current intensification of Israel’s on-going war on Gaza has killed over 25,000 people in less than four months; half of them children. Nearly 60,000 people have been injured, almost all civilians, and many of them children (UNICEF). Many more thousands are missing beneath the rubble caused by the 25,000 tonnes of explosives that have been dropped on Gaza since October 7, equivalent to two nuclear bombs. The IPC has reported that the entire p…
Centering Black life in Canadian early childhood education
This paper is a response to multiculturalism’s reductionist and othering constructions of Black presence in Canadian early childhood research and practice. We engage in possibilities for creating movement away from multiculturalism as the primary way of responding to anti-Blackness in Canadian early childhood education. We put forward orientations that emerge when we imagine the abolition of Canadian early childhood education pedagogies and curri…
Transformative Climate and Environmental Education for a Just Future
This commentary highlights the urgent need to re‐envision climate and environmental education in response to the escalating climate crisis and its far‐reaching social, ecological, and political implications. As young people increasingly express concern for their futures, the authors call for a transformational change in science education that engages with climate change as a complex and pressing issue. To support such transformation, the commenta…
Researching Neoliberal and Neocolonial Assemblages in Early Childhood Education
The article provides a discussion of “researching” neoliberalisms and neocolonialisms in white settler colonial societies such as Canada. It addresses the research implications after conceptualizing neoliberalisms as assemblages that are always already implicated in colonial histories. Specifically, the article discusses the need to rethink methodologies when neoliberalisms do not follow coherent directions, the kinds of methodological and resear…
Touching Place in Childhood Studies
I situate this chapter alongside recent work in early childhood studies that has used more-than-human 1 epistemologies and ontologies to consider nature pedagogies in relation to Indigenous knowledges, human/more-than-human relationalities, natureculture entanglements, and anticolonial possibilities (Duhn, 2012; Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2013; Ritchie, 2012; Somerville, 2006; Taylor, 2013). Inspired by this work, and its commitment to resisting simplisti…
Towards ‘refiguring presences’ as an anti-colonial orientation to research in early childhood studies
In this paper, I craft a methodological orientation for attending to the intricacies of everyday place encounters in early childhood settings with particular attention to settler colonialism and more-than-human entanglements. Drawing from my work with children and educators in childcare settings located in what is now British Columbia, Canada, I use refiguring presences to describe this research methodology, and its particular attention to unsett…
Unruly Raccoons and Troubled Educators
Current times of anthropogenically damaged landscapes call us to re-think human and nonhuman relations and consider multiple possibilities for alternative and more sustainable futures. As many environmental and Indigenous humanities scholars have noted, central to this re-thinking is unsettling the colonial nature/culture divide in Western epistemology. In this article, through a series of situated, small, everyday stories from childcare centres,…
Decolonizing place in early childhood studies
This article aims to center Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies in considerations of place, environment, and “nature” in early childhood studies. We consider how these perspectives might enact knowledge-making that politicizes, unsettles, and (re)stories place-based studies of childhood. In particular, we are interested in possibilities for unsettling the dominance of EuroWestern knowledges in both normative and critical…
Stories for living on a damaged planet
This article examines children’s encounters with dead and dying bumble bees in their everyday entangled lives. Within the context of an early childhood classroom located in suburban British Columbia, Canada, the article stories situated and emergent bee–child worldings to illustrate possibilities for learning with other species in anthropogenically damaged worlds. I pay attention to some of the ways in which children’s and educators’ practices ha…
Geotheorizing mountain–child relations within anthropogenic inheritances
This paper focuses on children’s relations with what is now known as Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia, Canada. In particular, it grapples with encounters with the mountain, atop which several childcare centres are located. The mountain, on unceded Indigenous Coast Salish territories, has become a contested site of colonial capitalist extraction due to a proposal to build a tar sands oil pipeline that would tunnel through the mountain. Sustain…
Staying with the trouble' in child-insect-educator common worlds
Classroom pet programs have become extremely popular in urban North American early childhood classrooms. This article challenges anthropocentric child-pet pedagogies by proposing common world pedagogies of ‘staying with the trouble.’ Drawing from a common world multispecies ethnography in one early childhood centre, the authors engage with the specificities of educators’ and children’s everyday practices of caring for and detaching from an introd…
Situating Indigenous and Black Childhoods in the Anthropocene
Situating Indigenous and Black Childhoods in the Anthropocene
Pedagogical gatherings in early childhood education
In this article, the authors critically and generatively encounter emergent curriculum, drawing from their experiences working as pedagogistas in three different early childhood education centres in Western Canada. The intent is to engage with the concept of emergence as that which can bring ethical and political engagements with curriculum and pedagogy; complicating understandings of emergent curriculum as simply following the lead of children. …
Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education
This book draws attention to the urgent need for early childhood education to critically encounter and pedagogically respond to the entanglements of environmentally damaged places, anti-blackness, and settler colonial legacies. Drawing from the author’s multi-year participatory action research with educators and children in suburban settings, the book highlights Indigenous presences and land relations within ongoing settler colonialism as necessa…
Envisioning Black space in environmental education for young children
In this article, we bring attention to absences and deficit assumptions that continue to circulate in relation to environmental education for young Black children in North America. We focus our attention on tracing some of the ways in which racial innocence works to exclude and limit possibilities for young Black children’s learning. Our analysis includes making visible connections between racialized discourses of childhood innocence, antiblackne…
Anti-Colonial Orientations to Place
The authors bring together decolonial, place attuned, and critical posthumanist orientations to analyze an event during a residential workshop organized as part of a state-funded research project on decolonizing early childhood discourses in South Africa. An invitation during the workshop to grapple with what might be unsettling by attending to the agency of the more-than-human world and its entanglement with unequal human geographies of place, g…
Explorations of the Tensions and Potentials of De-Centering the Human in Early Childhood Education Research
This introduction serves as a general introduction to the symposium on “Explorations of the Tensions and Potentials of De-Centering the Human in Early Childhood Education Research.” More-than-human theoretical perspectives (such as new feminist materialism and critical posthumanism) have provided pedagogical, methodological and conceptual tools for attending to the ways in which young children’s learning subjectivities emerge within relational on…
Situating Indigenous and Black Childhoods in the Anthropocene
Place-based disruptions of humanism, coloniality and anti-blackness in early childhood education
This essay engages with the generative potentials and necessity of attunement to place in education. I focus in particular on what bringing Indigenous and Black feminisms and feminist new materialisms into conversation, might mobilize towards unsettling the anthropocentric, colonial and anti-black inheritances of early childhood education. I situate my engagements with place within ongoing and intensifying anthropogenic environmental precarity th…
Staying With the Trouble
This article attends to the possibilities that emerged from pedagogical invitation to the more-than-human in a qualitative inquiry course. We focus on the situated ethical and (micro)political grapplings that emerged from paying attention to the more-than-human alongside asymmetrical human and more-than-human lifeworlds. Our orientation toward the ethical and (micro)political is enacted through visual, poetic, and narrative storytelling that atte…
Disrupting Anti-Blackness in Early Childhood Qualitative Inquiry
Working with Black feminist concepts of Black futurity and Black refusal, this article seeks to illustrate what is possible when early childhood research does not begin with the anti-Blackness that is pervasiveness in early childhood education. My focus is on the liberatory potential of attending to quotidian relational world-making practices in the places and spaces of Black childhood. Thinking with a photo essay on Black boys and with images of…
Infantographies
Decolonial Water Pedagogies
In this paper, I share everyday stories of young people’s pedagogical encounters with water. I share these stories as illustrations of pedagogies that welcome young people into caring relationships with more-than-human life. I focus on the decolonial potential of these pedagogical encounters in relation to what they activate for Black, Indigenous and Black-Indigenous world making
Centering Black life in Canadian early childhood education
This paper is a response to multiculturalism’s reductionist and othering constructions of Black presence in Canadian early childhood research and practice. We engage in possibilities for creating movement away from multiculturalism as the primary way of responding to anti-Blackness in Canadian early childhood education. We put forward orientations that emerge when we imagine the abolition of Canadian early childhood education pedagogies and curri…
Education and ecological precarity
We want our children to survive
Sharon Nelson-Barber, a sociolinguist, directs Culture & Language in STEM Education within WestEd’s Science and Engineering content area. She is co-founder of POLARIS—Pacific/Polar Opportunities to Learn, Advance and Research Indigenous Systems—a research and development network that supports healthy communities by integrating Indigenous perspectives with new frontiers of knowledge that strengthen educational transformation. In this interview, we…
Undoing human supremacy and white supremacy to transform relationships
Megan Bang (Ojibwe and Italian descent) is a Professor of the Learning Sciences and Psychology at Northwestern University and is currently serving as the Senior Vice President at the Spencer Foundation. Dr. Bang’s research focuses on the complexities of navigating multiple meaning systems in creating and implementing more effective and just learning environments in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics education. Ananda Marin (A…
Sociology (31 works) · Indigenous and Place-Based Education (21 works) · Pedagogy (17 works) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (17 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Indigenous (14 works) · Children's Rights and Participation (13 works) · Ecology (13 works) · Psychology (13 works)