Vexations: Multispecies Worlds and Relational Pedagogies

• In Event: Animals in Environmental Education: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Curriculum and Pedagogy

Abstract

How can students’ abilities to belong in embodied and imaginative ways to their multispecies worlds be nurtured as a form of creative resistance to dominant anthropocentric pedagogies? The purposefulness of this paper is to explore how EE and ethics resists reproducing colonizing, anthropocentric relations to more-than–human worlds. Theoretically, this is in keeping with philosopher Hans Jonas (2001) use of the word “purposefulness” as a quality that belongs to all living beings, not just humans. The paper’s theoretical framework ranges across the intersections of experiential EE, Indigenous pedagogies (specifically Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee), animal studies, and phenomenological perspectives. While vexatious pedagogical questions call forth interdisciplinary responses and responsibilities, they also trouble issues of gendering, colonization, and embodied learning. Methodologically, the paper draws on arts-based research as a way to disrupt and reimagine narratives of justice and multispecies pedagogies.

Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee ontologies believe animals are our kin and must be treated with respect as our elders. “All our Relations” is a kincentric ontology of Being, which details human obligations to other animals (Arquette, 1999). From another ontological perspective, there is Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) phenomenological sense of a “strange kinship” where we are strangers (etrangers) and also connected as kin through the flesh of the world. Tewa scholar Cajete (2000) believes that Indigenous knowledges are similar to phenomenological thinking because they are both grounded in sensory, place-based, lived experiences of the land. Yet despite these kincentric ways of thinking, epistemologies of anthropocentrism still dominate most curricula. To reimagine these epistemological forces “the nature of thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist” (Wolfe, 2010, p. xvi). One way to change thinking is through diversifying cultural production. Thus, this mode of inquiry is a mixture of arts-based research methodologies (McKenzie et al., 2010) that present new ways to approach animal studies pedagogy while highlighting animal agency and human-animal relationships. The data sources are material, imaginative projects from current animal studies scholars (see Chaudhuri & Hughes, 2014).

The arts-based methodologies provide alternate points of view on the emotional frictions of human exceptionalism and narrate new possibilities across differences. As King advises us, “Want a different ethic? Tell a different story” (2003, p. 164). Ideally by collectively working on the problem of the animal, students may gather greater emotional resilience, lessen feelings of alienation (Fawcett & Dickinson, 2014), and interact more constructively in the political ecology of education (Lloro-Bidart, 2015a). In Anishinaabe thought, humans were the last and youngest creation so the least experienced and most dependent on all other beings. As Barad reminds us, “phenomena—whether lizards, electrons or humans—exist only as a result of, and part of the world’s on-going intra-activity, its dynamic and contingent differentiation into specific relationalities” (2007, p. 353). This paper on animal studies pedagogy investigates ways to enrich our abiding interanimality, specific relationships, and flourishing in a wondrous, vexatious, and vulnerable world.

Author

• Leesa K. Fawcett, York University