61.044 - Big Little Lies: Contradictions, Distortions, and Fictions in Human-Animal Education

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

More-than-human inquiry is expanding rapidly across academic disciplines, including education. Yet given the rapid expansion of this scholarly mosaic, there is a risk that “the animal question” (Wolfe, 2003) or, more accurately, the animal questions, and animals themselves will become obfuscated or re-relegated to the background. This is a particular concern within educational research, where clear tensions persist between the anthropocentric purpose of education (i.e. the cultivation of human subjects) and the scholarly movement to broaden onto-epistemological inquiry beyond the merely human. In this symposium, a global constellation of scholars illuminate diverse and revealing pedagogical constructions of human-animal “truths” and “fictions,” interrogating the entanglements, ruptures, contradictions, as well as possibilities, across a range of educational sites.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Environmental Education

Chair

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Western Ontario

Papers

• Science Education in the Global Animal Economy: A Schizoanalytic Inquiry - Helena Pedersen, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

• Saving Bilbies: Eco-Nationalist Narratives, Australian Settler Children, and Endangered Native Animals - Affrica Taylor, University of Canberra

• H. G. Wells and Interspecies (Re)Encounters: Challenging the Anthropocentric Gaze of Literary Education - John William Drew, The University of Western Ontario

• Learning to Question Animal Ownership in Child-Animal Relations? An Ethnography of Child-Horse Encounters - Pauliina Rautio, University of Oulu

• Living the Animal Turn: Multispecies Pedagogical Encounters - M.J. Barrett, University of Saskatchewan

Discussant

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Western Ontario