Uncommon Worlds: Toward an Ecological Aesthetics of Childhood in the Anthropocene

Abstract

In addressing the need for a more robust engagement with aesthetics in posthumanist studies of childhood and nature, this chapter makes some tentative steps towards an ecological aesthetics of childhood that is responsive to Whitehead's speculative philosophy. In doing so, the chapter takes an alternative theoretical approach from much of the 'common worlds' scholarship that has emerged in recent years, while making the case for a new aesthetics of childhood that is responsive to the accelerating social, technological, and environmental changes of the Anthropocene epoch. Our approach foregrounds the singularity of children's aesthetic experiences as relational-qualitative 'intensities' that alter the fabric of nature as an extensive continuum held in common. We therefore argue that every moment in the life of a child is an uncommon and unrepeatable occasion through which the common world of nature is felt, perceived, and experienced differently. This eco-aesthetic approach is developed further through the analysis of photographs taken by children as part of 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 in New South Wales, Australia. Rather than working with images as representations or analogic signifiers for children's experience, we analyse how each photograph co-implicates children's bodies and environments through affective vectors of feeling, or 'prehensions'. This leads us to reframe aesthetic notions of image, sensibility, perception, and causality in relational terms, while also acknowledging the individuation of childhood experiences as 'creaturely becomings' that produce new potentials for environmental thought and behaviour.

Children’s Carbon Cultures

“…In this article, we have presented some initial creative, methodological routes into re-organizing relationships with carbon and energy cultures through arts-based research with children. Existing empirical research has focused on children and young people’s scientific understandings of carbon, particularly in the broader context of climate change or global warming (Cutter-Mackenzie & Rousell, 2019; Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2020). Such research can risk positioning children as limited, erroneous, and highly influenced by the media in their understanding of carbon and climate change more broadly.…”

Aesthetic Post-Phenomenological Inquiry: A Compositional Approach to the Invention of Worlds

“…Similarly, De Freitas (2017) affirms that perception engages in continuous modulation and folds back into previous material and embodied happenings. Perception as a path toward becoming does not occur because we reorient our attention to more-than-human worlds, as research on childhood studies influenced by the new materialisms dominantly implies (Rousell & Cutter- McKenzie, 2019). It happens because a body becomes progressively extensive and porous over time blurring strict logical categories and depersonalizing.…”

“…In this article, I think on how the ontological reorientations that articulate urbannaturechildhoods research can be attained via aesthetic processes of making, looking, talking, and relating to art. As Rousell and Cutter-McKenzie (2019) note, “[An] aesthetic dimension . .…”