Touching Is Worlding: Examining Ethics and Politics of Touch in Child-Animal Relations

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Research After the "Animal Turn": Speculative and World-Making Multispecies Encounters

Abstract

The objective of this presentation is to examine touch and co-becoming of bodies in touching encounters between children and other than human animals while contemplating the significance of the ethics and politics of touch in relation to environmental education.
The theoretical framework draws from conceptualizations of the body as processual, in movement, and emerging from more-than-human relationality (Despret, 2004; Manning, 2007; Blackman, 2012). Further theoretical and methodological influences come from multispecies inquiry (van Dooren et al., 2016), dance literature and feminist ethics of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). We activate the idea of narratives as “versions” (Despret, 2016) to map the relational becomings and the non-innocent caring relations of human children and gerbils.

The methods and empirical materials. The empirical part was conducted as a multispecies ethnography in a comprehensive school, which has an educational zoo built in a greenhouse housing dozens of bigger animals belonging to more than 20 species. Through an analysis using written, video and photographed materials and a feminist storytelling approach, the study looks closely at situations in which bodies touch each other. The specific focus is on stroking events between humans and gerbils involved in caring practices.

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view. The interspecies encounters in the greenhouse become illustrated as moments of material-semiotic interplay, a dance of a kind, in which stories continuously give birth to versions of bodies, thus conditioning and orchestrating touch. On the other hand, we suggest that touch is not only a way to gain knowledge about the other or about the world, but it is itself worlding. Knowing and not-knowing are implicated both in the emerging versions of bodies and in bodies that are “not-yet” – virtual bodies and stories open for speculation.

In terms of environmental education, our study points at a way of reassessing the value of children sharing their lives with other animals (such as pets). Within multispecies co-living, the ethics of not-knowing and the politics of taking a decision can co-exist. The according pedagogies could begin, instead of a fixed notion of what caring touch is (able to do), from an understanding of touch as ultimately risky and uncertain.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work. The study contributes to research on touch illustrating how both humans and nonhuman animals participate in the politics of regulation and boundary-making when engaging in touching dancing events. Through the notion of multispecies co-existence as precarious dance, the innocent and idealized imageries related to childhood, child-animal relations, and pedagogies of care become disrupted. These are imaginaries that constantly evoke nostalgic pasts referring to the all-too-simple nature/culture binary (e.g., Taylor, 2011).

Authors

• Tuure Tammi, University of Oulu

• Riikka Hohti, University of Helsinki