Kin-Making as Parent Pedagogy: Larger-Than-Life Revelations — Part 1

• In Event: Radical Acts of Parenting and Kinship

Abstract

Kin can be found in unusual and unexpected places. We offer perspectives as parent-scholars on making kin by centering non-human symbiotic (non-optional) relations. The descriptions of symbiotic life sustaining practical-theoretical relations illuminate the importance of parenting pedagogies that refigure presences in early childhood with implications for doing inquiry. We consider with the audience how to define pedagogies within an active interconnectedness of living as sympoiesis, or making-with, living-with, and becoming-with, rather than appropriating everything as a resource (Todd, 2017, Haraway, 2018).

Larger-Than-Life Revelations (Part I)
Within the great acceleration of extraction and exploitation of the earth’s resources, the population of humans is continuing to expand, currently at 7.8 billion but likely to reach 19 billion by the year 2100, setting up our children and other forms of kin on an untenable path towards ecological collapse and mass extinction (UN, 2020). To imagine otherwise while thinking with historical relations of entanglement, we illustrate through specific larger-than-life revelations how ‘weedy’ (Tsing, 2005) human and more than human kinship relations can be. We draw on examples from a river bank and a backyard in our inquiry.
In Part I, the presenters theorize pedagogies and enact praxis in tune with/through their young human kin’s hyper-acute sensemaking. The praxis shifts, rhizomatically, towards wildly different forms of unexpected multispecies kinship, what we call making of (odd)kin, a project of intentional renewing of the ecological more-than-human contract with the earth. Kin can mean kind, but of the same kind doesn’t necessarily mean kin (Haraway, 2016). In the confluence of multi-species and indigenious scholarship (Tallbear, 2018;Todd, 2017, 2018) and kinship scholarship (Haraway, (2016), Benjamin (2018), Tsing (2004), de la Bellacasa, (2017) to help to uncover complex and erased ecologies and ontologies, beyond the cartesian and dualistic forms of overrepresentation of Western man and underrepresented connectedness, relationality to other forms of life and livingness (Nxumalo, 2016; Wynter, 2003).

Author

• Benjamin D Scherrer, University of Massachusetts - Amherst