Stories for Multispecies Mortal Entanglements: Common World Rat-Child Pedagogies

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

Abstract

This presentation explores the pedagogical significance of an unsettling encounter between young children and a dying rat along an everyday walking path, located outside of a childcare centre on the Lekwungen and SENĆOŦEN-speaking territories of southern Vancouver Island. In particular, it foregrounds the rat-child moment and subsequent reverberations as evidence that “bodies of things are dynamic, existing in relation to each other, and it is in the dynamic of this relationship that subjectivities are formed and transformed”(Somerville, 2010, p. 340). This presentation offers a visual exploration of places of death as lively and productive sites for ‘new story’ emergence, identified by Donna Haraway (2015) as sorely needed in the so-called Anthropocene era.

Thom van Dooren (2015) conceptualizes death beyond simplistic notions of good/bad, wherein death resides “inside tangled processes of multi-species becoming, everyone is food for someone else, and nobody, no species, lives forever” (p. 51). Unlike other species teetering on the brink of extinction, rats thrive with(in) the excesses of human abundance; as reviled scavengers, they exist outside of eco-angst, conservation narratives afforded to other species. Despite this reality, the dying-rat-child encounter emerges as a deeply affective, partially recuperative moment (Haraway, 2015). In the face of living together on a damaged planet, the way life and death entanglements are narrated carries “means and consequence of their own telling” (van Dooren, 2015, p. 55). Inspired by Haraway, Plumwood, and van Dooren’s call for new narratives that reject the destructive modus operandi of anthropocentrism, this presentation takes seriously the generative power with(in) early childhood-multispecies relations as a conduit for rethinking the way that meanings reveal themselves in unexpected ways, challenging everyday taken-for-granted assumptions.

Drawing on Common Worlds practices, I visually narrate focused, collective efforts to make visible they way that young children’s lives are co-shaped, not only by the species we encounter on a regular basis, such as worms and deer, but also by those who remain largely invisible until we “meet-with” them through a breach in otherwise hidden, destructive patterns of relating (Haraway, 2008; Hird, 2012). I offer rat-child relations as an extension of a collective, multispecies inquiry to engage the audience with questions about our life and death entanglements within toxic assemblages (waste, poison), ethics of care, and the affect of death in ecologically challenged lifeworlds.

Anthropocentric approaches to ‘managing’ the environment have, at best, failed to promote sustainable futures. This paper is significant in its response to urgent environmental issues and the necessity of re-conceptualizing our relations with plants and animals outside of the mistaken human-centric belief that nature is a controllable project. By engaging with Common World pedagogies, it examines the messy, relational everyday intimacies that co-constitute children’s lives.

Author

• Narda Nelson, University of Victoria