Propositions for Encountering Place: Contesting Coloniality in South African Early Childhood Education

• In Event: 34.046 - Inhabiting the Tensions and Potentials of Decentering the Human in Anticolonial Educational Research

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to engage with the potentials and tensions of attending to the more-than-human within highly asymmetrical human relations in the colonial context of South Africa. Our specific focus is on what emerged when a group of early childhood teachers and researchers engaged in a workshop on decolonial orientations to place in the Western Cape, South Africa, as part of a state-funded research project on decolonizing childhood discourses.

The theoretical framing of the workshop brought together perspectives from critical geographies, critical posthumanism and the environmental humanities to foreground the ways in which nature is entangled in racialized, (neo)colonial and neoliberal inequities (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2015; Yusoff, 2015). These perspectives included foregrounding the ways in which pervasive discourses of ‘pure nature’ continue to normalize coloniality in complicated and at times contradictory ways, such as in positioning historically marginalized people as ‘closer to nature’, as ungeographic beings who are out-of-place in nature, or as people whose relations to place are predominantly understood through urban spaces that are viewed as empty of or separate from nature (McKittrick, 2011). As Collard and colleagues (2014) state “Nature is steeped in colonial patterns of power and knowledge. Nature...must be confronted as an artifact of empire” (p. 326).

Brought to the context of early childhood education, these critical perspectives were engaged as a provocation to consider the ways in living and learning in current times of ecological precarity requires ongoing efforts to interrupt the simplifications, erasures and omissions in pedagogical encounters with and conceptualizations of place. Participants were invited to walk the land surrounding the workshop venue, take a photographic image and then use that image as a writing inspiration alongside the following decolonial place-writing propositions: deromanticizing nature by attending to anthropogenically (human-caused) ‘damaged places’; paying attention to the ways in which the more-than-human world actively ‘stories’ places (Calderon, 2014; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015; van Dooren & Rose, 2012); presencing marginalized place stories (Simpson, 2011); making visible asymmetrical human geographies of place; noticing the embodied affects evoked by a place; and, considering possibilities for relating to places with children differently. These propositions invited participants to engage with two key questions: What and whose presences are made visible in this place? What might decolonial, situated, and non-anthropocentric engagements with place look like?

The setting of the workshop in a conference venue set in a valley of mountains surrounded by vineyards and wine farms just outside Cape Town provoked multiple affective intensities, as articulated in material-discursive-embodied stories of legacies of apartheid education and colonial land displacement amidst the paradoxical beauty of the land. Remaining cognizant of the inadequacy of exclusively damage-centered narratives (Tuck, 2009), we discuss the significance of the stories shared in relation to the provocations provided by a politicized methodology focused on attunement to place in both anti-colonial and non-anthropocentric ways. We also discuss the significance of this work in relation to what it might offer to ongoing efforts to decolonize early childhood education within the context of South Africa.

Authors

• Karin Saskia Murris, University of Cape Town

• Vivienne Grace Bozalek, University of the Western Cape

• Sumaya Babamia, University of Cape Town

• Sieraaj Francis, University of Cape Town

• Theresa Magdalen Giorza, University of the Witwatersrand