Safe for Whom? A Multispecies Ethnography of Care and Danger in a Chinese Kindergarten

• In Event: AERA Poster Session Sunday 7:45 am
  In Poster Session: Childhoods, Materials, and Critical Learning Encounters

Abstract

This multispecies ethnography explores how safety and danger are co-constructed through children’s interactions with a stray cat, materials, and institutional policies in a Chinese kindergarten. Drawing on posthumanist and common worlds theories, the study shows how “safe” was enacted through situated care, design iteration, and children’s embodied observations. A later biosecurity intervention reterritorialized these practices, replacing relational ethics with categorical exclusion. Using diffractive and assemblage analysis, the study highlights safety as a material–discursive effect rather than a fixed condition. Findings offer conceptual, methodological, and practical insights into multispecies care, educational risk governance, and the role of documentation in negotiating institutional boundaries.

Author

• Bonan Liu, University of Muenster