Ecuadorean Children's Waste Lifeworlds and Extractive Colonial Logics

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

Abstract

This paper grapples with the question of how research that responds to Ecuadorian children’s waste futures needs to engage with more-than-human/human entanglements while simultaneously emphasizing an anti-colonial politics of human differentiation. Specifically, we argue that responding to the waste crises that Ecuadorian children inherit requires innovative methodologies that pay close attention to the interplay and trajectories of material child-waste relations, and to how environmental threats differentially affect children in the Global South where extractive colonial logics are constantly present.

Conceptually, this paper is informed by a common worlds framework. A common worlds framework is concerned with humans’ relations, but particularly children’s relations, with the more-than-human world. Within this framework, childhood is approached as differentially situated, collective, and relational rather than as a universal developmental life stage that is experienced individually (Taylor, 2013, 2017). The central question within a common worlds approach has clear political and ethical framings. It asks: how do we live well together in the unequal and complex common worlds that we inherit? Specifically, how do we attend to children’s material waste relations when these relations are closely connected with neoliberal and neocolonial projects in the Global South?

The paper is based on a large innovative research project that uses imaginative and experimental ethnography (Elliot & Culhane, 2017) to investigate young children’s entanglements with waste in multiple locales. In this paper, we outline how a group of preschool Ecuadorean children, educators and researchers spent a month engaged in pedagogical encounters with waste in Cuenca. Data sources included video recordings, photographs, children’s art work and field notes.

In this presentation we focus on the collaborative and creative methods that we developed with children to cultivate an ‘ethics of slowing down reasoning’ (de la Cadena, 2003) in order to create ontological openings that challenge the “deep, expansive, and simultaneous crisis of colonialism and neoliberalism – converging in its ecological, economic and political fronts” (de la Cadena, p. 36). We show Ecuadorean children’s creative responses to the problematic quantitative and qualitative growth of waste connected with capitalist accumulation in Cuenca which has taken place since the late 80s with the advent of neoliberalism in Ecuador.

Because the lives and futures of 21st-century children are affected by the entwined social and ecological legacies of (neo)colonialism and the excesses of capitalist modernity, it is imperative to rethink methods that both attend to the more than human and the histories of racial thought that are imposed on conceptions of humanity.

Authors

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Western Ontario

• Cristina Delgado Vintimilla, York University