Creatures of Experience: Toward an Eco-Aesthetics of Childhood in an Age of Climate Change

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Climate Change Learning With Youth and Families

Abstract

In this paper we integrate elements of speculative philosophy (Whitehead, 1978), biocultural theory (Frost, 2016), and climate change education research (XXXX, XXXX, & XXXX, in press) to develop an ecological aesthetics of childhood for the Anthropocene epoch. In doing so, we analyse photographs of ecological environments taken by participants in the Climate Change and Me project, which has mapped children and young people’s affective responses to climate change over a period of three years. Drawing on Whitehead’s (1978) theory of prehension, which proposes aesthetic ‘feeling’ as the basis for relational co-existence, we consider how these photographs evoke the eco-aesthetic sensibilities of children as ‘creatures of experience’, or what Frost (2016) has called ‘biocultural creatures’.

Authors

• David Rousell, Manchester Metropolitan University

• Amy N. Cutter-Mackenzie, Southern Cross University