Unsettling Coloniality in Early Childhood Transdisciplinary Research Practices

• In Event: 67.057 - Common Worlding Methods: (Im)Possibilities of Post-Qualitative Research

Abstract

A growing body of work has illustrated the importance of situating environmental education in current precarious times that disrupt idealized notions of both childhood and nature/environment. Drawing inspiration from feminist postqualitative scholarship, from the environmental humanities, and Indigenous studies, several scholars have critically engaged with ways in which the notion of the Anthropocene, as a current epoch marked by devastating human impact on the earth, necessitates a turn away from romantic conceptions of children and nature (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015; Nxumalo, 2018; Ritchie, 2015). This work supports an orientation towards critical and generative pedagogies that are firmly situated within the messy anthropogenic worlds that young children co-inhabit, and that take seriously the inseparability of nature and culture.
Importantly, this work has brought critical methodological attention toward dominant Anthropocene discourses and “how” such discourses manifest in early childhood settings and across disciplinary boundaries. How, for example, do researchers and teachers resist Euro-Western singular master narratives without substituting one narrative for another? How to attend to the necessity of troubling the human-centeredness that has contributed to the Anthropocene, while avoiding universalizing the human? What might it look like to decentre the human in early childhood research while inhabiting the (im)possibilities of moving beyond the human in early childhood research in an Anthropocene that is marked by continual de-humanization of Black, Indigenous and other marginalized peoples (Mitchell & Todd, 2016; Sharpe, 2016)?

The purpose of this presentation is to engage with the tensions, (im)possibilities and potentials that have emerged from thinking with these questions. Building on feminist postqualitative insights on the potential invigorations of bringing transdisciplinary perspectives into conversation with early childhood practices, we situate our work within urban school contexts in Toronto, Canada and Austin, Texas. We bring these two places/spaces in relation by exploring what else might be made possible through postqualitative “common worlding” (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2018) practices that resist linear methodologies, and universalized colonial human narratives.

Working with still and digital images recorded with a digital SLR camera and wearable cameras, alongside annotated field notes, we offer a transdisciplinary lens into early childhood practices that are implicated in settler colonial anthropogenic worlds. Our creative use of images and text seeks to engage with the situated anti-colonial potentials enacted by our research methodologies as well as the tensions of thinking beyond representations of what it means and what it looks like to be a knowing human, fixed subject in always-already raced and settler colonial worlds.

Authors

• Fikile Nxumalo, The University of Texas at Austin

• Nikki Rotas, Rowan University