From Child–Animal Relations to Multispecies Assemblages and Other-Than-Human Childhoods (original) (raw)

Childhood Animalness: Relationality, Vulnerabilities, and Conviviality

2018

This paper traces how animals have been and are reduced to mere objects for use in child development, examining historical and contemporary trends in developmental literature. We alternatively present scholarship that delves into children’s and animals’ subjective encounters and intersecting worldhoods as critical of more anthropocentric developmental psychology models. We utilize continuity as a model that emerges from our field work in order to make various suggestions about the ethics that emerge from children’s embodied experiences with animals, including felt senses of vulnerability, death, and precarity. Finally, we finish the chapter by outlining potential pedagogical directions that encourage deeper reflections about the precariousness of childhood lives, lived differently and J. Russell (*) Department of Animal Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, USA e-mail: russellj@canisius.edu L. Fawcett Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, T...

Editorial: Child-Animal Relations and Care as Critique

Journal of Childhood Studies, 2020

Childhood scholars have for some time worked toward the idea that instead of being situated in their own micro worlds, waiting rooms, or margins, children should be viewed and accounted for as full participants of society. This special issue aligns with this aspiration, while broadening the notion of what counts as society. It asks how to live and care in a society that does not consist of adult human individuals only, but instead counts children and other-than-human animals in the realm of the social and the societal. By inviting authors to think about child-animal relations and care, we wish to shed light on the ways in which other animals are relevant for human children’s lives, and vice versa, and to argue for the importance of these relations for society in the conflicting times we live in now.

Posthuman Pedagogy of the Common Worlds of Children and Animals – From Independence to Relationality

Nauki o Wychowaniu. Studia Interdyscyplinarne

The author’s intent is to describe the concept of pedagogy of the common worlds of children and animals embedded in the framework of posthuman philosophy. In its assumptions, the child’s essence is tightly connected to non-human beings, individuals and forces, existing in the common worlds of life. Children and animals living in those worlds are not beings separated from one another, but relational and causative ones, affecting and influencing each other. The pedagogy of the common worlds of children and animals is broadly understood as an educational practice, which allows children to maintain non-hierarchical relations with animals during interspecies encounters. It offers children an unconventional way of discovering, exploring and acting, because it allows them not to learn “about” the world, but rather to learn together “with” the world. Staying in heterogeneous common worlds and establishing deep relations with them is hence connected with the need to care about the common goo...

One animal among many? Children's understanding of the relation between humans and nonhuman animals

2012

How do children come to understand the relation between human and nonhuman animals? This relation is central to endeavors as diverse as scientific reasoning and spiritual practice. Recent evidence reveals that young children appreciate each of the two concepts-human and non-human animal. Yet it remains unclear whether they also appreciate that humans are indeed part of the animal kingdom. In this study, we adopt a cross-cultural, developmental perspective to examine children's interpretation of fundamental biological concepts, focusing on children from three distinctly different US communities (urban European Americans; rural European Americans and rural Native Americans (Menominee) living on ancestral tribal lands) that vary in their habitual contact with the natural world and in their cultural perspective on the human-nonhuman animal relation. Using structured interviews, we trace 160 children's understanding of concepts including 'human,' 'mammal,' and 'animal', and the relations among them. We include 5-to 6-year-olds (who have had relatively little formal science education) and 9to 10-year-olds (who are well into a Western-science curriculum). The results reveal a surprising convergence across all communities: At both ages, children in all communities largely deny that humans are animals. The younger children strictly maintain the uniqueness of humans; the older children accept that humans are mammals (and that mammals are animals) but nonetheless deny that humans are animals. The implications of this finding for our understanding of early cognitive and language development, early

Children€s Wild Animal Stories and Inter-species Bonds

Canadian Journal of Environmental Education, 2002

In this paper, I discuss the contemporary dilemma of animals disappearing from the minds and direct experiences of many human beings in Western culture, and the implications of this dilemma for the fields of child development, environmental education and biological conservation. As part of a larger research project, I explored kindergarten and grade 5 children's (N = 177) ideas and stories about three common, familiar and wild, Canadian animals-bats, frogs, and raccoons. In the research process, I attempted to attend to the methodological decisions I made along the way. I reflect upon trends in the children's wild animal stories, and questions they raise about anthropomorphism, kinship, and inter-species bonds. Résumé Dans ce document, j'aborde le dilemme contemporain de la disparition des animaux de la pensée et de l'expérience directe de plusieurs êtres humains de la culture occidentale ainsi que les implications de ce dilemme pour les champs du développement infantile, de l'éducation environnementale et de la conservation biologique. Dans le contexte d'un plus vaste projet de recherche, j'ai exploré les idées et les histoires d'enfants (177) de la maternelle et de la 5e année portant sur trois animaux sauvages qui nous sont familiers au Canada : la chauve-souris, la grenouille et le raton laveur. Au cours de la recherche, j'ai tenté de prêter attention aux décisions méthodologiques que je prenais chemin faisant. Ma réflexion porte sur les tendances de la littérature enfantine sur les animaux sauvages et les questions qu'elles soulèvent à propos de l'anthropomorphisme, de la parenté et des liens interspécifiques.

Decentring the Human in Multispecies Ethnographies

This chapter draws on our multispecies ethnographies in Australia, Canada and Hong Kong to illustrate the strategies and challenges of decentring the human in more-than-human research practice. The fact that the research is conducted within the child-centred field of early years education complicates this endeavour. We reflect on our attempts to shift focus away from the researcher and child as the central becoming-knowable subjects about animals and refocus on complex, entangled, mutually affecting and co-shaping child-animal relations. We explain how and why reconfiguring childhood and pedagogy within a common worlds framework that assumes multispecies entanglements helps us to make this shift.

'A Dog who I Know Quite Well': everyday relationships between children and animals.

Children’s Geographies, 2011

Adult discourses often represent relationships between children and animals as beneficial for children's psycho-social development or as reflecting a 'natural' connection between children and animals. In contrast, this paper draws on recent work in sociology and geography where human-animal relationships are seen as socially situated and where conventional constructions of the human-animal boundary are questioned. Focussing on children's own perspectives on their connections with animals, it is argued that these relationships can also be understood within the social and relational context of children's lives. This relational orientation to children's relationships with animals might significantly enhance our understanding of children's lives, and might also open up ways of thinking about the place of animals in children's (and adults') social lives. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14733285.2011.562378

The greenhouse effect: Multispecies childhood and non-innocent relations of care

This article examines the relations between human children and other than human animals in a multispecies ethnographic study conducted in an unofficial educational zoo established in a greenhouse in a lower secondary school. The specific focus is on the practices in which the students become responsible carers of animals. The analysis employs the theory of care (de la Bellacasa) and a storytelling approach (Haraway) to develop the concept of multispecies childhood and to offer ways to account for the complexities of lives shared across species. Keywords Child-animal relations, education, more-than-human, multispecies childhood, multispecies ethnography, zoo, bag lady storytelling