Encounters With Food Waste in Studio Spaces: Activating Responsibilities to Matter

• In Event: 21.040 - Children's Common Worlds in Times of Climate Change and "Post-Truths"

Abstract

The purpose of this poster presentation is to highlight a waste food art studio as a space that orientates children to pay attention in new ways to the more-than- human world. Through collaborative studio encounters children become oriented to thinking differently about food waste, to research with human and food waste, and to their movements, responses, and engagements within the vibrant intra-activity of bodies, beings, and things, initiating new modes of thought (Pacini-Ketchabaw, Kind, & Kocher, 2017).

Our inquiry is situated within a common worlds framework (see www.commonworlds.net) and understanding art as experimentation (O’Sullivan, 2006). Latour’s (2004) concept of common worlds refers to an understanding of the social to include all constituents of our worlds--nonhuman life forms, forces, and entities. This poster uses an actively inclusive more-than-human framework to resist the onto-epistemological division that is often perceived between sociocultural contexts and natural environments in order to reimagine and engage with/in 21st century pedagogical practices in times of ecological precarity.

To activate these imaginations and complexities we rely on a/r/tography (Irwin & Springgay, 2007), art practice as research (Sullivan, 2006), and visual methodologies as they enliven ways that language, images, materials, bodies, and situations play together and produce particular perceptions and understandings. Art and art making is something other than representation or individual act. As collective experimentation, educators, children, materials act on and act with each other, producing ways of being and knowing. What matters is not what is represented, but what is activated in and through creative studio practices (Kind, 2018).

Data for this poster is drawn from a multispecies/visual ethnography conducted in Vancouver, Canada as part of a larger international research project researching children’s creative and unique responses to climate issues. A/r/tographic methods such as drawing, material experimentation, installation, video composition, and other forms of collaborative artistic creation were used to document children’s relations to each other and with food waste. In addition, pedagogical documentation artefacts were created that highlight collaborative studio art curriculum that invites children to attend to ways things function and move together, corresponding with the human and more-than-human in mutual and reciprocal engagement.

This work is significant to support sustainable living practices at times of food and waste crises. Further, this poster examines environmental early education curriculum when learning is understood as more than an anthropocentric phenomenon in which knowledges are produced in the encounters that occur with humans, non-human beings, and matter (Kummen, 2019).

Authors

• Kathleen Kummen, Capilano University

• Sylvia Kind, Capilano University

• Laurie Kocher, Capilano University