Stories for Unsustainable Waste Futures: Common World Textile-Child Pedagogies

• In Event: Common World Pedagogies for the Anthropocene: A More-Than-Human Take on Environmental Education-as-Collective Action

Abstract

This presentation visually narrates common world pedagogies of textile-child relations. The objective is to illustrate Jane Bennet’s (2010) concept of vibrant matter that cultivates ecological ethico-politics for unsustainable waste futures (Hird, 2012).

Bennet’s (2015) concept of vibrant matter acknowledges that humans and waste materials exist in entangled relationships and affect one another. Provocatively, she says that no matter exists outside of relentless relational and intra-active networks. Our lives are inextricably entangled with the materials that we call waste as we both contribute to the production of waste materials and are affected by their movements and transformations (Hird, 2013). These perspectives demand a new kind of environmental pedagogy.

Inspired by these premises, I visually narrate creative common world practices focussed on keeping waste materials in sight and in mind and responding to the process of material transformations. Particularly, I draw on pedagogies that explore the different environmental possibilities and challenges that fabrics offer. Fabrics comfort and clothe us, hold histories and stories, yet present particular ethical problems in terms of mass production and disposal. Fabrics are not quite as easy for children to handle and, depending on their composition, break down more slowly.
I draw on a collaborative common worlds project in which children, educators and researchers used an arts-based visual methodology to document (through photograph and film) the transformation of textiles and refigure our relationships to them.
The intent of the visual narrative is to illustrate how we might shift practices away from learning about recycling and reusing fabrics, towards recuperative common world pedagogies of entangled material-child relations based on, what Hird (2012) calls, an ethics of environmental vulnerability. In Hird’s terms, we must learn to “consider ourselves as vulnerable to, and with, our environment as latecomers to life’s already long-established flourishing and failing within a volatile landscape” (2012, p. 464).

The consumerist approach to materials characteristic of Western societies is not only damaging to the environment but also unsustainable. This paper is significant because it responds to the pressing environmental issue of waste futures that we bequeath to young children in our consumerist society. By mobilizing Bennet’s notion of vibrant matter, this presentation creatively uses political understandings of waste in common world pedagogies to enact new forms of collective action.

Author

• Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, University of Victoria