From laughter to loss
Children, ducklings and the geographies of poo in early childhood education and care
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22994643 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Bonan Liu (0009-0000-9798-2159, University of Münster, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-15 |
| Publication date | 2026-06-26 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Children s Geographies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1473-3277 • E-ISSN: 1473-3285 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14733285.2026.2694355 |
| OpenAlex | W7166192665 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 40 |
This paper examines how poo unsettles pedagogical logics and reconfigures more-than-human relations in early childhood education and care (ECEC). Based on multispecies ethnography in a forest kindergarten in Guangzhou, China, it follows three fragments where ducklings and children became entangled through excrement. First, the smell of duck poo-oriented children’s movements and naming. Calling the animals ‘poopoo-ducklings’, they turned excrement into a sensory marker of both duckness and place. Second, feeding practices linked children, teachers, grass, bowls, and ducklings’ bodies, yet poo reappeared as diarrhoea, exposing care as uncertain. Third, the death of a duckling made poo a material witness to the limits of care, generating uneven responses among children, teachers, and researcher. Together, these fragments show that poo is not marginal waste but an active participant in children’s geographies. It interrupts teaching, reshapes place, and challenges the assumption that care is always benevolent or successful. Centring excrement as both bodily product and spatial marker, the article expands children’s geographies of poo by foregrounding how everyday materials shape sensory experience, care, and ethics in ECEC.
Childhood studies · Early childhood education · Ethnography · Foregrounding · Improvisation · Instinct · Laughter · Materiality (auditing) · Product (mathematics) · Witness · Children's Rights and Participation · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
Posthuman literacies
Teaching Kindness and Compassion
“That’s just impossible in my kindergarten.” Advocating for ‘glocal' early childhood curriculum frameworks
Two dialogical theorisations of children’s encounters in more-than-human worlds involving metaphor
Storying hopeful resistances to datafication
Touch
“How do Bugs Move Us?”
Bodies
Natural waste
Care
Ready or not, here they come! Care as a material and organizational practice in Ecec for children under two
Diffracting relationalities in early years pedagogies of care
Beyond pedagogical intention
Re-imagining child-nature relationships in ecotourism
Child-dog faeces assemblages and children’s engagements in activist art
It Matters What Stories Tell Stories; It Matters Whose Stories Tell Stories
Haptic geographies
What else? some more ways of thinking and doing 'Children's Geographies
Rats, assorted shit and 'racist groundwater
Three playgrounds
Questioning care cultivated through connecting with more-than-human communities
Doing Sensory Ethnography
Moving image methodologies for more-than-human geographies
The Hermeneutical Aesthetics of Thick Description
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |