Lively Dialogues: Resituating Emu Relations in a Contemporary Open-Range Zoo

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

Abstract

In early childhood education, it is common for young children and their teachers to take excursions to local zoos. Zoos are often perceived as educational places, where children learn about wildlife, habitats, conservation, and preservation. However, rarely are these educational experiences problematized to question the developmental, colonial, racial, and gendered knowledges that zoos construct about human-nature relations. Zoos are not innocent nature spaces to learn about animals, instead they are highly political nature-culture places that function to classify, control, and separate out the non-human from the human. Zoos have also been tasked with providing a way to combat species extinction through ‘captive’ breeding programs.

We build on Kay Anderson’s (1995) cultural critique of the practices employed in an Australian zoo, and show how boundary making practices and domestication are at play in zoos, sustaining developmental, colonial, gendered, and racial logics. We draw inspiration from feminist environmental humanities scholars (i.e., Gibson, et al. 2015; Plumwood, 1993) and how they teach us the necessity to resituate the human in ecological terms and to resituate the non-human in ethical terms (Plumwood, 2007, as cited by Rose, 2015, p.3). With these two resituating tasks in mind, we argue that these are required if we are serious about changing the effects of human inequalities of racism and sexism requiring that teachers attend to ethico-politico considerations and understand the zoo as more than just an innocent and natural back-drop for children to play in, master, or learn about.

This paper is situated within a common worlds framework that draws from Bruno Latour’s notion of bridging the natureculture divide. In particular, this framework contests anthropocentric, Euro western categories that aim to divide, rank, and relegate more-than-human others to the margins. Thinking through a commonworlds framework also generates spaces for attending and attuning to how humans are in relation with more-than-human others in settler colonial organized places, such as the zoo.

We draw from a year-long multispecies inquiry that took place in an open-range zoo on Wurundjeri Country in Victoria, Australia. We share a series of situated, non-innocent, and lively multispecies dialogues with Emus that address the ways in which boundary making and domesticating practices are always happening at the zoo. These dialogues work to shift the focus from human exceptionalism by foregrounding multispecies relations that draw our attention at the zoo. We then grapple with desiring, evading, embracing, and Emuing practices as ways to resituate these multispecies relations. Our multispecies dialogues do more than describe a “typical” early childhood zoo outing. Instead, they activate ethico-political practices that are vital for developing a logic of connection. A logic of connection is necessary for producing anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-sexist pedagogies as it puts at risk and undermines the hyper separation of nature and culture, woman and man, black and white, adult and child. This underpins how early childhood educators can understand and use these categories to describe our past and how they inform our present.

Authors

• Mindy Blaise, Edith Cowan University

• Catherine Hamm, La Trobe University