Tracking and Rabbiting: Following Minor Waymakers

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

Abstract

The purpose of this poster presentation is to show how our common worlding tracking and rabbiting methods, which follow minor “waymaking” encounters between young children and local wildlife, help us to circumvent the trap of falling back into major or dominant “knowledge burrows” (Boscacci, 2018). In our respective Canadian and Australian studies, we refuse to burrow into hollows that might tempt us to fashion new heroic tropes out of old settler colonial mastery narratives. We remain particularly wary of mainstream environmental education and research that unwittingly reinscribes binary settler scripts, by mobilizing eco-nationalist stewardship tropes, and positioning settler children as future environmental protectors and saviours. To avoid digging ourselves into the deep holes and gallantries of such settler conceits, we refocus upon attending to and learning from ordinary everyday multispecies interactions taking place on the surface of our common worlds. Eschewing major routes and triumphalist tendencies, our tracking and rabbiting methods deliberately follow seemingly insignificant encounters and exchanges between assumed-to-be minor players.

Our presentation draws upon feminist science studies and environment humanities critiques of, and alternatives to masculinist, heroic and anthropocentric environmental stewardship discourses (Haraway 2016; Stengers 2016, Tsing 2015). More specifically our poster provides a visual and narrative response to Boscacci’s (2018) multispecies uptake of Ettinger’s (2006) concept of “wit(h)nessing”. It does so by paying attention to the affective and multisensorial dimensions of more-than-human encounters and exchanges that unsettle anthropocentric ways of knowing and offer us a glimpse into otherwise ways of collectively recomposing or remaking worlds. Our common worlding tracking and rabbiting methods are more-than-human, collaborative and relational. They lead us into spaces of uncertainty, vulnerability, and surprise. In these spaces, we find that many young children have the capacity to be fully present with local wildlife, to wit(h)ness how their lives are entangled, and to viscerally apprehend their mutual vulnerabilities. These intimate sensitivities help us, in turn, to cultivate a similarly “passionate immersion” in the lives and deaths of more-than-human others (Tsing, 2015).

Our research also reveals that pre-school aged children who are not yet fully interpolated by the binary (dis)orderings of dominant neo-colonial environmental narratives are more likely to pursue connection with other-than-human beings than to seek recourse in human dominion. We have much to learn from them. The significance of our research lies in the contribution it makes to unsettling major/dominant settler-centric modes of knowing about the environment in order to save it, by counter-proposing minor/alternative/otherwise ways of knowing and remaking with other-than-human common world partners.

Authors

• Affrica Taylor, University of Canberra

• Narda Nelson, University of Victoria