Speculating Ecologies: Invented Species as Real Relations

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 20
  In Roundtable Session: Educational Research After the "Animal Turn": Speculative and World-Making Multispecies Encounters

Abstract

Valtteri is a six-year-old child who has been intensely interested in animals from a very early age. On the surface his interest seems to take a perfectly anthropocentric shape, however: he is focused on identifying, categorizing and representing animals. His special interest lies in inventing make-believe animals. His interest is of the kind that it falls off the radar in his current social and cultural context: it is not “real” enough for school, and it is too anthropocentric and not embodied enough to be a “real” multispecies relationship.
The objective of the wider study this paper comes from, is to address children’s relations to other animals from the viewpoints of children themselves. To flesh out significant elements of these relations and to increase knowledge to help sustain the kinds of animal relations that matter to children. Valtteri’s case, highlighted in this paper, is exemplary in that his animal relations matter to him intensely yet have gone unrecognized as such within the cultural frames on offer.

The perspective(s) or theoretical framework to Valtteri’s speculations come from scholars using posthumanist or postqualitative approaches. That is, focusing on speculation as generative and future oriented (e.g., Haraway, 2016; Braidotti, 2010; Nordstrom & Ulmer, 2017). Rather than deeming Valtteri’s speculations as not real or as not knowledge, these approaches help us to realise the ways in which his animal relations – the inventing of species – are real, are knowledge, and produce “riddles of between spaces without clear answers and incite possibilities of futures to come” (Nordstrom, 2018, 7).

Modes of inquiry and materials or data for this study follow recent advances in multispecies inquiry, focusing on multiple assemblages (Nordstrom, 2018), multiple relations (Tsing 2012), connections and interdependencies (Hohti & Tammi, forthcoming). These multiplicities materialized as Valtteri visited me for six times during one spring. Main materials include our recorded conversations and his drawings of invented animals; incidents like our online shopping – a breeding nest for my budgies – and the ensuing nestlings further in the spring became materials as well.

The results or insights gained include an understanding of Valtteri’s invented animals as a form of speculative ecology – a fine tuned expertise in inventing the not-yet-real or the otherwise real, based on his extensive knowledge of existing species and their ecologies. It also became clear that there is little to no space in the cultural frames of Valtteri’s context for him to continue and sustain this kind of relation.

The scholarly and societal significance of Valtteri’s speculated ecologies is premised on the assumption that we need to think differently about learning and about knowledge: as directed at the future which is still to be speculated. Ecologies are at the core of generative re-invention as they serve as the rubric under which speculative plans are made (Zani, 2013). To understand Valtteri’s speculative practice as real and as mattering would require reassembling the social (Latour 2005) and engaging social horizons of hope (Braidotti, 2010, 2015) in learning and education.

Author

• Pauliina Rautio, University of Oulu