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 context of ecologically precarious futures. The efforts to develop a multispecies ethics of environmental vulnerability also draw directly from ethnographic observations of the relationalities, interdependencies, and encounters between children and animals in their local common world environments. Ants might be small, even smaller than earthworms, but they render big species like humans quite insignificant in other scalar terms. Taking the encounters amongst children, earthworms, and ants as serious moments of multispecies mutual vulnerability has required authors to continually work at decentring the human in their own thinking and practice.

Biology · Zoology · Children's Rights and Participation · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

• Vibrant Matter

  Jane Bennett, Jane Foress Bennett•Vibrant Matter•2020

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