Rethinking the "Living Logics" of Multispecies Relations: Children's Theorizations and Pedagogical Engagements

• In Event: Responding to Current Times of Anthropogenic Inheritance: Multispecies Relations in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This paper exposes the pedagogical attention given to a collective of children and teachers’ theorizations during a one-year project about the “living logics” (Kohn, 2013) in multispecies relations. The project is part of the ongoing commitment to an emergent critical pedagogy of place within a childcare centre. The desire of this paper is to join the efforts of ethnographers, environmental humanities scholars (Kohn, 2013; Haraway 2008, 2011; Lorimer 2012), and other early childhood scholars (Taylor 2011, Pacini-Ketchabaw 2013, Nxumalo, 2015) that variously urge and inspire us to think alternative—more just and ethical—ways of living with others, particularly when the other is not a human.
These are times of environmental crisis. Such a crisis comes with a call to reconsider the project of humanity, and to acknowledge its failures by searching for inventive new responses. By way of response to this call, an urgency - perhaps not seen since the post-war years in critical theory’s project of Enlightenment self-critique - is now emerging. In what we might see as a new ethical turn, we are again called to rethink the question of responsibility (Haraway, 2008; Rose, 2012; Van Dooren, 2014) - more specifically: What does it mean to live well with others, particularly when this other is a non-human one? When engaging with an inquiry on multispecies relations, how does one think such relations? By what logics do they become sensible? How are, or are not, these the bases of further thought? Following this desire, and its urgent call to new formulations of a response, this paper ‘bares naked’ considerations and interrogations that were, as Donna Haraway would say, ‘rubbed up against’ (encountered as perhaps inchoate instances requisitioning struggles of articulation) as the project took form. Rather than presenting the project as a pedagogical example in responding to an environmental crisis, the paper grapples with the immanent intellectual difficulties that appeared when attending to children’s theorizations on multispecies relations, and also when considering with teachers how to pedagogically proceed within the pedagogical inquiry.
Thus, the trajectory that the paper pursues is one that emerges from a situated and contextual practice that carefully attends to children’s ways of thinking and theorizing, in addition to educators’ responses to them. However, such practice seems to demand—in the name of an ethical inquiry that engages the dimensions of what governs and delimits our work in early childhood education—to be put in conversation with historical, inherited and even universal preoccupations. Therefore, the themes that emerged during the project with the children and teachers in thinking of multi-species encounters will be explored with regard to ethical historicity, inherited modes of thinking and universal scope (a là neoliberal capitalism). The scale of that to which we must respond in times of environmental and anthropogenic crisis may simply demand no less of us.

Author

• Cristina Delgado Vintimilla, Capilano University