A Feminist Posthumanist Multispecies Ethnography for Educational Studies

Animal Magic, Secret Spells, and Green Power: More-Than-Human Assemblages of Children's Storytelling

“…Further, the movement toward posthumanist thinking has also criticized as an attempt by humans to "argue themselves out of the picture" (Braidotti & HlAnajova, 2018, p. 95) at a time when climate change caused by the impact of human civilization requires urgent human action. Theorists working with critical posthuman perspectives contend that it is precisely because our human-centric ways of operating in the world have significantly contributed to environmental degradation that a fundamental shift in perspective is required (Bennett, 2010;Lloro-Bidart, 2018;Murris et al, 2018;Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor, & Blaise, 2016;Parnell, Downs, & Cullen, 2017;Rotas, 2015;Steffen, Broadgate, Deutsch, Gaffney, & Ludwig, 2015;Taylor, 2017). Embracing a critical posthumanist stance, this research responds to the charge for humans to consider how we might live well with human and non-human others (Taylor & Giugni, 2012) (Barad, 2003;Latour, 2004b) in early childhood education, and how children might produce those ways of mattering with the more-than-human.…”

“…Van Dooren and Rose (2016) pointed out that "the intention here is not to slip into the hubris of claiming to tell another's stories but, rather, to develop and tell our own stories in ways that are open to other ways of constituting, of responding to and in a living world" (p. 85). In this vein, multispecies ethnographies are being used as a way to attend to research with the more-than-human (Haraway, 2008b;Lloro-Bidart, 2018;Pacini-Ketchabaw et al, 2016;Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015). For instance,…”

No Happy Endings: Practicing Care in Troubled Times

“…Common worlds scholars have argued that it is "timely for early childhood scholars to make a greater contribution to broader 'more than-human' or post-humanist conversations that have been gathering momentum in the social sciences over the last couple of decades" (Taylor, Pacini-Ketchabaw, & Blaise, 2012, p. 81). Multispecies inquiries (e.g., Hohti & Tammi, 2019;Lloro-Bidart, 2018;Pacini-Ketchabaw, Taylor & Blaise, 2016;Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015) offer one compelling approach to attend to research with the more-than-human. For example, Fikile Nxumalo and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw (2017) enact multispecies ethnography in considering the implications of classroom pet pedagogies; they call for "radically different ways of viewing our relationships with more-than-human others" (p. 1423).…”

“…For example, Fikile Nxumalo and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw (2017) enact multispecies ethnography in considering the implications of classroom pet pedagogies; they call for "radically different ways of viewing our relationships with more-than-human others" (p. 1423). This critical posthumanist practice (Barad, 2011;Braidotti, 2013;Lloro-Bidart, 2018;Murris et al, 2018;Rice, 2016;Rotas, 2015;Snaza, 2015) advances a framework of relational learning with material, place, human, and nonhuman actors as opposed to a child-centered and exclusively human social framework. Experimental multispecies/posthumanist methodologies work to shift our perspective away from solely human ones and make space for nonanthropocentric ways (Bell & Russell, 2000) of seeing and being both in classrooms and in the larger world.…”

So what for other animals? Environmental education research after the animal turn

“…Some environmental education researchers have sought ways to take into account such considerations, such as by incorporating a 'view from all fours' (Hatch 2007, 37). Multispecies ethnographies and common worlds approaches are promising methodological approaches for understanding the complex mingling of humans and more-than-humans and how interspecies relationships are co-created (Gannon 2017, Lloro-Bidart 2018, Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2017. However, even in studies that seek to highlight other animals' subjectivity and agency, animals often remain on the margins, just one element in a human-dominated setting rather than as a focus of investigation in their own right.…”