Pets that Have ‘Something Inside’: The Material Politics of in/Animacy and Queer Kin within the Childhood Menagerie

In this paper, we seek to unsettle and extend understandings of what constitutes the contemporary family in Western minority world society and consider the material politics that follow from such a reconceptualization. We do this by offering a situated exploration into the caring relations and shared biographies that routinely evolve between children, other than human animals and toys within the family home. An emergent field of scholarship (Hohti and Tammi 2019; Taylor 2011; Malone 2015) reveals child–animal relations to be charged with various pedagogical and ideological assumptions, which we argue are partly exported to the relations that form between children and their toys. We undertake a close examination of the relationalities between humans and a range of toys as a means to explore the ways in which care and liveliness materialize in childhood play and what this means for our conceptualizations of ‘the family’. We put to work the idea of queer worlding (Haraway 2008; Osgood and Andersen 2019) and animacy (Chen 2012) alongside Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017, 2011) feminist ethics of care. We then specifically focus on the materiality of robotic toys to illustrate some crucial connectivities and erasures to examine how the queer human–animal and animate–inanimate boundaries are reworked and negotiated in childhood play. These processes create a shift in understanding what matters in children’s lives and how materiality and affective forces co-constitute the posthuman family. This paper engages critically with the ambivalences and tensions that emerge within the domestic menagerie and extend to a planetary scale in ways that are inherently political

Touching is Worlding : From Caring Hands to World-Making Dances in Multispecies Childhoods

In this article we analyze the phenomenon of touch to discuss care and knowing within child-animal relations. The empirical part was conducted as a multispecies ethnography in a comprehensive school with an educational zoo built in a huge greenhouse. Storytelling, Despret’s idea of “versions,” and insights drawn from dance are used to take a close look at touching events between the research participants. From observations of caring hands and the material-discursive dimensions involved in stroking, the article moves on to consider ways of knowing and not-knowing that intertwine and are produced in touch. Finally, touch is discussed as a complex worlding dance that always takes more than two.In this article we analyze the phenomenon of touch to discuss care and knowing within child-animal relations. The empirical part was conducted as a multispecies ethnography in a comprehensive school with an educational zoo built in a huge greenhouse. Storytelling, Despret’s idea of “versions,” and insights drawn from dance are used to take a close look at touching events between the research participants. From observations of caring hands and the material-discursive dimensions involved in stroking, the article moves on to consider ways of knowing and not-knowing that intertwine and are produced in touch. Finally, touch is discussed as a complex worlding dance that always takes more than two.Peer reviewe

Pets that Have ‘Something Inside’: The Material Politics of in/Animacy and Queer Kin within the Childhood Menagerie

In this paper, we seek to unsettle and extend understandings of what constitutes the contemporary family in Western minority world society and consider the material politics that follow from such a reconceptualization. We do this by offering a situated exploration into the caring relations and shared biographies that routinely evolve between children, other than human animals and toys within the family home. An emergent field of scholarship (Hohti and Tammi 2019; Taylor 2011; Malone 2015) reveals child–animal relations to be charged with various pedagogical and ideological assumptions, which we argue are partly exported to the relations that form between children and their toys. We undertake a close examination of the relationalities between humans and a range of toys as a means to explore the ways in which care and liveliness materialize in childhood play and what this means for our conceptualizations of ‘the family’. We put to work the idea of queer worlding (Haraway 2008; Osgood and Andersen 2019) and animacy (Chen 2012) alongside Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017, 2011) feminist ethics of care. We then specifically focus on the materiality of robotic toys to illustrate some crucial connectivities and erasures to examine how the queer human–animal and animate–inanimate boundaries are reworked and negotiated in childhood play. These processes create a shift in understanding what matters in children’s lives and how materiality and affective forces co-constitute the posthuman family. This paper engages critically with the ambivalences and tensions that emerge within the domestic menagerie and extend to a planetary scale in ways that are inherently political

Insect-Thinking as Resistance to Education's Human Exceptionalism : Relationality and Cuts in More-Than-Human Childhoods

This article discusses the "more-than-human" turn in qualitative inquiry and education, engaging with the critiques presented by philosophers, animal studies scholars, and educational scholars toward the "too easy" adoption of an inclusive relational ontology. Based on Barad's concept of re-turning, the article develops a methodology of insect-thinking, which folds memories as well as scientific and "low theoretical" sources in and out the analysis to re-narrate child-animal encounters as entangled with place, time, class, poverty, displacement, imagination, and planetary futures. Insect-thinking produces irritations and interruptions to the human exceptionalism that underpins educational research and childhood studies. Based on conflicts, avoidance, and violence in child-insect relations, the authors discuss "cuts in relationality" and propose insect-thinking as means to approach more-than-human worlds as both shared and incommensurable.Peer reviewe

Classroom matters : Research with children as entanglement

The subject of this thesis is everyday life in the school classroom with a focus on what matters to the children. The classroom is understood as a more-than-human context consisting of combinations and gatherings of material things, bodies, time, space and ideas. The study is located at the intersection of education, interdisciplinary childhood studies, narrative and ethnographic studies, and informed by the "material turn" of social sciences. The empirical part took place in a third- and fourth-grade class where the researcher was the class teacher. An approach called "classroom diaries" was developed in which the 10-year-old pupils wrote their observations, thoughts and stories freely. The nomadic analysis departed from the question, "What is happening in the classroom?" and proceeded through repeated readings and retellings, working with writing as inquiry. The fragmented, controversial and messy writings of the children challenged the teacher/researcher to find non-representational ways of engaging with data. The study consists of a summary part and four research articles. First, the analysis focuses on children's voices in stories that intertwine in classroom interactions. By defining three inter-related analytical spaces, the study illustrates how children s voices are not unitary or "authentic" , but emergent, constructed in reciprocal processes of telling and listening, and contingent on their social, discursive, material and physical environments and power relations. Second, the study presents the narrative approach of Children writing ethnography ("classroom diaries") as a way of engaging with children' s lives in the classroom and in research. Nomadic thinking serves to enable one to see the children's writings as emergent knowledge and to embrace the connectivity among the writings, the classroom reality, the child-ethnographers and the research, which are seen as mutually producing one another. Third, the thesis examines time and children in the classroom. The concept of entanglement is activated to bring time into connection with matter and space. The analysis concentrates on a music lesson and the musical instrument the recorder about which two children write. The recorder is seen as organising actions in the classroom, producing intense moments of now and various enactments of children and adults. The notion of time as a neutral, "outside" parameter is unsettled and both children and time are seen as hybrid. Fourth, the study develops the idea of research with children as an entangled practice. It presents a post-qualitative analysis that attempts to center children's views throughout the research and seeks to do so in ways other than through representation. The study draws attention to classroom assemblages involving time and things, as well as to temporality and materiality as parts of the research process. The study suggests engaging with children's open-ended narration by retelling and responding. These engagements highlight particular situations, the unpredictable and strange qualities of children's lives, and the significance of "tiny" things in educational environments. The study suggests that an open-ended narrative space allows children to produce rich and thought-provoking knowledge about what matters to them in the school classroom. The idea of entanglement can be employed to engage with that knowledge in ways that do not reduce the complexities of children's lives. Keywords: classroom, Children writing ethnography, voice, matter, time, space, entanglement, nomadicLapset kertovat, mitä luokassa tapahtuu Tässä väitöstutkimuksessa tarkastellaan lasten elämää koululuokassa. Tutkimuksen lähtökohtana toimi kysymys "Mitä luokassa tapahtuu?". Lapset kirjoittivat havaintojaan, tarinoitaan ja ajatuksiaan omassa luokassaan niin kutsuttuihin luokkapäiväkirjoihin. Tämä avoimeen kerrontaan perustuva lähestymistapa kehitettiin peruskoulun kolmannella luokalla, jossa tutkija toimi tuolloin luokanopettajana. Tutkimus osoitti, että kun kerrontaa ohjaillaan mahdollisimman vähän, esiin nousee lapsille merkittäviä asioita. Tutkimuksessa nämä asiat olivat usein materiaalisia ja pienen tuntuisia, ohikiitäviä, hassuja ja ristiriitaisia, kuten kirjan sivut, istumapaikat, jalkapallokortit, kynät, vitsit, hiusten silittely, kouluruoka ja zombietarinat. Tutkimuksessa esitetään, että näillä asioilla ja tavaroilla on väliä ja ne vaikuttavat lasten olemassaoloon ja oppimiseen, vaikka niitä ei ole aina osattu huomioida kasvatuksen tutkimuksessa. Tutkimus painottaa laajaa käsitystä kasvatuksesta: kasvatus koostuu muustakin kuin ihmisten asettamista tavoitteista. Tutkimus valottaa koulupäivän tavallista ja siksi usein huomaamatonta puolta, ja toisaalta lasten elämän "villiä" , arvaamatonta ulottuvuutta. Tutkimuksessa myös kehitetään lapsuudentutkimuksen lähestymistapoja ja esitetään, että osallistava lapsuudentutkimus voidaan käsittää runsaana ja polveilevana kietoumana, jossa erityinen huomio annetaan asioille ja tapahtumille, joita lapset itse pitävät tärkeinä. Kietouman ajatus vie tutkijan lähelle tutkimusaihettaan ja välttää liiallista ennalta rajaamista. Analyysi eteni muistelemisen, kertomisen ja uudelleen kertomisen prosessina, jossa käytettiin kokeilevia kirjoittamisen strategioita. Lasten kirjoittama aineisto haastoi tutkijan menetelmälliseen ja teoreettiseen pohdintaan. Tutkimuksessa käytettiin posthumanistisia ja uusmaterialistisia teorioita, jotka painottavat yksilö- ja ihmiskeskeisyyden sijaan koululuokan hetkittäin muuttuvia heterogeenisia yhdistelmiä. Nämä yhdistelmät synnyttävät monenlaisia ja muuttuvia lapsuuksia. Lapsuutta ja koulua ravistelevat tällä hetkellä isot muutokset kuten digitalisaatio, leikkaukset ja opetussuunnitelmauudistus. Tämän takia opettajien ja muiden aikuisten täytyy olla entistä tarkemmin kuulolla sen suhteen, mitä lasten elämässä tapahtuu. Tutkimuksessa kehitetty luokkapäiväkirjat (lapset etnografeina) -lähestymistapa voi auttaa ymmärtämään lasten elämän monitahoisuutta. Sitä voi soveltaa koulutoiminnassa, ja sillä voidaan tuottaa lapsinäkökulmaista tietoa yhteiskuntaan, opettajankoulutukseen ja tutkimukseen. Väitöskirjan neljässä eri osatutkimuksessa syvennytään lapsen äänen tematiikkaan, koululuokan aikaan ja tilaan sekä lapsinäkökulmaisen tutkimuksen nomadiseen metodologiaan

A review of “Posthuman Research Playspaces: Climate Child Imaginaries” - D. Rousell, & A. Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles (2022). Posthuman research playspaces: Climate child imaginaries. NY, OX: Routledge.

Non peer reviewe

Child-Animal Relations and Care as Critique : Editorial to special issue

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.Non peer reviewe

Lasten osallistuminen ja posthumanistinen ontologia : urittuvaa ja emergenttiä kartoittamassa

Peer reviewe

Multiple worlds and strange objects : environmental education research as an additive practice

The paper offers three examples of passionate immersion with strange objects and working with peculiar multispecies assemblages, such as the assemblage of a dove called Romeo and the technology to humidify a greenhouse called 'Princess', or the experiment of orienteering in forests for years, accounting for slips, scratches and tumbles as being taught by the forest - and prioritising these over the more commonplace educational narratives. The paper is structured in a nonconventional way in that most space is reserved for reports from these ongoing inquiries. The authors will each discuss how they situate themselves in relation to strangeness in research and how they proceed methodologically, locating their approaches as postqualitative. The questions each example addresses are: What is a strange object? How do we come across them? What do we begin to do/produce with them? The additive orientation described in the research stories is proposed to be an important constituent for new survival knowledge especially relevant for environmental education, addressing environmental problems as wicked, and demanding approaches that reach beyond methodological divides.Peer reviewe