Introduction to Symposium: childhood studies in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

Childhood studies scholars have increasingly sought to examine the complex entanglements of children's lives with nonhuman materials, animals, plants and earthly processes. Doing so has enabled new insights into children's relationships with global challenges such as climate change. Now, researchers from many disciplines are reflecting critically upon whether such challenges can be obviously ascribed to human activity, suggesting that we are entering a new (geological) epoch: the Anthropocene. The present collection of papers offers a range of empirically-informed, critical and theoretical analyses of the (possible) relationships between children and the Anthropocene. This paper frames the key debates covered in the symposium, introducing recent scholarship in childhood studies and opening out critical reflections on the term ‘Anthropocene’. It also provides an introduction to the papers making up the symposium.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• climate change
• common worlds
• new materialism
• posthumanism
• earth systems

Anthropogenic changes to the earth’s geo- and bio-spheric systems have attracted a great deal of scientific attention. The extraction and burning of carbon-rich fossil fuels, together with intensive industrialisation and large-scale agriculture, have precipitated these changes and left indelible deposits in the geological record. Monitoring these changes, at the beginning of the millennium, Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) suggested that we are now moving out of the stable state of the Holocene epoch and into what they proposed should be called the Anthropocene: the epoch of ‘Man’. Scholarly debate about the Anthropocene proposition has gathered momentum. Since 2010, it has spawned a cascade of interdisciplinary debates, the establishment of a number of dedicated Anthropocene peer-reviewed journals and academic book series, and a plethora of peak international Anthropocene-themed conferences, addressing key issues such as anthropogenic climate change and mass species extinctions. Debates amongst geologists – the main protagonists in assessing evidence for the Anthropocene – have centred around whether human impacts on massive, complex earth systems are sufficiently significant that a new epoch can be identified (Lewis & Maslin, 2015). There is now compelling evidence to suggest that the earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene.

The very idea of the Anthropocene issues a challenge for scholars in many disciplines. Across the social sciences and humanities, many are calling for an interruption to the ‘business-as-usual’ of research and scholarship. They claim that the Anthropocene requires a paradigm shift in understanding what it means to be human, a reframing of our sense of relative power ‘over’ whole-earth systems, and, therefore a radical reconsideration of the relationship between the social and natural worlds, fates and futures (Gibson, Rose, & Fincher, 2015; Hamilton, 2016). At the same time, increasingly, feminist, queer and critical race scholars are questioning the epistemological and political bases of the term ‘Anthropocene’ (see Taylor, 2019). They warn that this term can simply re-affirm and normalise human dominance, obfuscate differential human responsibilities and impacts, and justify the ramping up of technocentric and Western-centric responses (Åsberg, 2017; Hamilton, Reid, van Gelder, & Neimanis, 2020; Haraway, 2016; Stengers, 2015; Yusoff, 2018).

When it comes to children and childhoods, the Anthropocene has emerged as a figure of uncertain and precarious futures, requiring new kinds of thought and action. It is young people themselves who have identified anthropogenic climate change as a paramount crisis. Indeed, we write this introduction in the wake of several months of world-wide mass student strikes for climate action (the #fridaysforfuture #climatestrikes). The striking students have made it very clear that it is their futures that are at stake on our rapidly warming planet. They also point out that they have taken this initiative because world leaders are not responding fast enough to the climate scientists’ predictions and this has created a ‘climate emergency’ (Thunberg, 2019).

Despite the recognition that children are particularly vulnerable to social and environmental threats (UNICEF, 2019) and play central roles in mitigating against these threats (Jeffrey, 2012) – their agency is still under-valued by politicians and scholars. Since the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005–2015), children’s precarious futures have been acknowledged within ‘Education for Sustainability’ (EfS) curricula (see Mycock, 2019). However, even though the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development coincided with the upsurge of interdisciplinary Anthropocene debates, and associated calls for a paradigm shift in our thinking about sustainability, EfS did not engage with them. Furthermore, as some environmental education scholars have pointed out, the focus upon sustainable development during this decade effectively obscured pressing ecological issues and replaced them with predominantly human-centric concerns (see, for instance, Kopnina, 2012, p. 699).

To date, only a small proportion of educational scholars has engaged with the Anthropocene debates, let alone begun to address the epistemological challenges that they pose to the modernist ‘progress’ and ‘development’ paradigms underpinning Western education (Taylor, 2017). As we note below, within childhood and educational studies, there have been efforts to engage creatively with, and to theorise, children’s relationships with more-than-human worlds. However, the sheer scale and complexity of the Anthropocene – either as an earthly epoch or analytical device – has, as yet, proven a challenging one for scholars in those disciplines.

Although the Anthropocene appears to entail universal changes in whole-earth systems, the effects of such changes are likely to be patterned unequally in both geographical and social terms. Similarly, even though all twenty-first-century children will inherit these Anthropocene futures, more consideration needs to be paid to how particular groups of children, in particular places, will become entangled with anthropocenic change in different ways. Intersectional studies can help us to do this (Lloro-Bidart & Finewood, 2018) but much more needs to be done. As one example, questions of race – as they intersect with childhood – have not been adequately addressed thus far in Anthropocene debates (see also Trafí-Prats, 2019). It is therefore time for the fields of childhood studies and education to engage more fully with, and to contribute more directly to, the broader Anthropocene debates.

This Symposium will be the first to provoke such direct engagement and contribution by asking: what might the figure of the Anthropocene provoke within twenty-first-century childhood studies and education?

Certainly, whilst intersections of (young) age with other forms of social and geographical difference should be attended to in analyses of the Anthropocene, there is also a need to examine inter- and cross-species differences and entanglements. To hold all of these forms of difference together is hard work (Horton & Kraftl, 2018). Yet scholarship in childhood and educational studies has been at the forefront of theorisations of childhood, ‘natures’ and matter, through the development of multispecies; new materialist, Actor Network and/or posthuman lenses (for instance, Aitken, 2018; Kraftl, 2020; Rautio, 2013; Somerville, 2017; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2018). It is no longer appropriate to talk of human ‘impacts’ on the environment; or of forms of environmental learning ‘about’ a somehow detached nature; or to assume that children require some kind of ‘reconnection’ with certain kinds of natures that are ‘out there’, as many of the nature-deficit-theses insist (Kraftl et al., 2019). Thus, Gallagher (2019) and Hadfield-Hill and Zara (2019) call for, and evidence, new ways of formulating children’s relationships with the very stuff of the earth: as geological agents and subjects caught in relations of what Yusoff (2016) calls ‘geopower’.

By implication, a focus on childhoods and education in the Anthropocene requires not only conceptual and methodological experimentation, but new forms of collaboration and (re)presentation. Isolating the ‘impact’ of children in the geological record is virtually impossible: rather, a suite of experimental and qualitative techniques, carefully sourced and integrated from several disciplines, is best suited to articulating how children’s everyday lives are entangled with/as the Anthropocene (Section B: methods). Critically, as Taylor (2019) demonstrates in learning-with children, rabbits and museums, and Weldemariam (2019) in thinking-with children and bees, this does not necessarily mean the repurposing of Anthropocene grand narratives ‘from the perspectives of children’, but the telling of smaller, emplaced, local stories that imagine how the world might be otherwise. In these forms of what Haraway (2011) calls ‘speculative fabulation’, it might be possible to attend to and learn about deeper connections with past country as well as posit a range of possible futures that are committed to caring about the proliferation of interspecies difference.

The papers for this Symposium were carefully selected and curated from two linked events, organised by the symposium Editors, and both supported by the Children and Childhood Network at the University of Birmingham, UK (https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/ias/CCN-UoB/Children-and-Childhood-Network.aspx). The linked events were a Childhood Studies in the Anthropocene International Conference and Graduate Student workshop, both held in June 2017. Responding to the broad question asked above, the special issue includes a range of Anthropocene-attuned (and Anthropocene-critical) perspectives on the following questions and issues. Authors write from a number of disciplinary perspectives, working with a range of (new) materialist, post-humanist and/or nonrepresentational theories.

• Epistemological issues: How might the figure of the Anthropocene interrupt and/or reconfigure our thinking about twenty-first-century childhoods? If the figure of the Anthropocene signals the death of nature as we knew it, how might this prompt us to rethink the powerful epistemological connections that have been made between childhood and nature? How might these extend or challenge recent theorising in a ‘new wave’ or ‘infra-paradigm’ of childhood studies, that is concerned with questions of ‘more-than-social’ childhoods?

• Ontological issues: How might children’s lived experiences and relations with other species and entities within their local environments help us to think differently about human being in the Anthropocene.

• Ethical issues: What are our responsibilities, as childhood scholars, to address the intergenerational and environmental justice issues posed by the Anthropocene? What do these mean for new (or established) modes of public engagement?

• Material issues: How might the Anthropocene configure new materialities of childhood – from the composition of children’s bodies, the food they eat and their health, to children’s engagements in processes such as raw material extraction, the construction industries, the processing of waste and the generation/consumption of energy? How might forms of relational or ‘nexus’ thinking enable us to adequately broach such entangled materialities in ways that also attend to the particularities of being young, in the first part of the twenty-first century?

• Political issues: What are some of the political implications of the figure of the Anthropocene for the study of twenty-first-century childhoods? How might this figure be deployed to further particular political agendas and/or to expose existing power relations?

• Disciplinary and methodological issues: What new modes of inquiry, what methods, and what inter-/cross-/trans-disciplinary alliances, might be necessary for witnessing how childhoods are entangled with the Anthropocene?

• Pedagogical issues: What new pedagogies might be necessary given the uncertain ecological future we bequeath to children and intensifying concerns for sustainability?

The papers in this Symposium

In ‘Fugitive Pedagogies: Decolonising Black childhoods in the Anthropocene’, Laura Trafi-Prats addresses a number of the questions and issues raised in this Symposium. Writing at the intersection of Black studies and feminist STS, she uses trans-disciplinary methods and modes of analysis to attend to some of the ontological, political and pedagogical aspects of Black childhoods in the Anthropocene. In a retrospective reflection upon an ethnographic ‘dwelling with trees’ arts-education project in an urban school in the American Midwest, Trafi-Prats draws upon notions of Blackness as a performance of resistance and an ontology of fugitivity, to re-consider what was going on when a group of fifth grade Black students refused to take participate in the ‘outdoor’ aspects of the project. Using her own pedagogical reflections as a model, she calls upon educators to move beyond the standard ‘deficit’ understandings of Black childhoods, and to reconceptualise Black children’s acts of resistance within school as creative modes of refusing racialised reductionism. She concludes that especially in these uncertain times of the Anthropocene, Black ontologies of refusal require educators to abandon the impulse to ‘fix’ matters, and to exceed the limits of humanist pedagogies. Ultimately, Trafi-Prats calls on educators to recalibrate ‘fugitive pedagogies’ that remain open to ‘vulnerability, fragility, incommensurability, and the struggle for articulation’.

Also using cross-disciplinary perspectives, Katherine Mycock draws upon feminist post-humanist and new materialist perspectives to call for a radical rethink of pedagogy in the Anthropocene. In her article, ‘Forest schools: Moving towards an alternative pedagogical response to the Anthropocene?’, she reflects upon the findings of her ethnographic research in two UK forest schools. Mycock questions whether the scientific and experiential curricula of these forest schools simply rehearse the dominant Western epistemological connections that have been well drawn between childhood and nature, or whether they inadvertently afford the space and possibility for children to experience more-than-social, or more-than-human pedagogical encounters in a post-natural Anthropocene world. She concludes that children’s unstructured encounters and intra-actions with forest beings and entities can and do exceed the human-centric notions of learning that are embedded in standard forest school curricula. More importantly, she also affirms that the unstructured moments of children’s ‘worldly relations’ and care that she witnessed in the forest indicate that there is a way forward for alternative, responsive pedagogies in the Anthropocene.

In their article ‘Children and young people as geological agents? Time, scale and multispecies vulnerabilities in the new epoch’, Sophie Hadfield-Hill and Cristiana Zara challenge the global narratives of the Anthropocene. They focus on childhoods in the context of neoliberal Indian urban transformation and reflect upon the Anthropocene’s context-specific configurations and impacts. Drawing on an ethnographic project, the authors show how children and young people witness, cope with, and contribute to epoch changes. Through this process, they theorise that children are geological agents. That is, children are forces capable of geomorphic changes, they are materially and discursively co-constituted within fossil-fueled genealogies, and they are beings who have something in common with the geologic forces that are mobilised and incorporated. Repositioning children and young people within the bios and the geos, they stress temporal analyses that attend to how children’s everyday lives are continually folded into the Anthropocene as ‘the big planetary event’.

Concerned with species extinction as a manifestation of the Anthropocene, Kassahun Weldemariam addresses how to prepare children to understand their relationship with the changing world. In his article, ‘Becoming-with bees’: generating affect and response-abilities with the dying bees in early childhood education’, he explores pedagogical ways of knowing and relating to the dying honeybee. Empirically anchored in the narratives that emerge among young children in a Swedish pre-school after a theatrical ‘bee’ performance, the author argues for pedagogies of ‘becoming-with-others’ in order for children to begin to recognise human vulnerabilities. These pedagogies, the author emphasise, serve as alternatives to the moralising stewardship pedagogies of most environmental education programmes.

Grappling with the very questions of scale that were raised earlier in this introduction, Affrica Taylor’s paper explores what she terms the ‘conceits’ of the Anthropocene. Her paper – ‘Countering the conceits of the Anthropocene: scaling down and researching with minor players’ – offers a critical reflection upon the grandiose narratives that underpin both the identification of the Anthropocene as a ‘global’ epoch of ‘Man’, and of ‘Man’s’ heroic attempts to ‘solve’ the environmental challenges presented within the Anthropocene. Rather than look to the ‘major players’ global actions, the author recounts what she terms ‘minor’ stories from Australian children’s interactions with rabbits – in public spaces, in museums, and elsewhere. In doing so, she asks what might be the ways in which ‘minor players’ (children, rabbits, and others, in different local constellations) might, together, get on with the business of inhering and cohabiting damaged worlds. In effect, those minor stories might offer glimpses of ways to address the complexities of the Anthropocene without recourse to grand or heroic narratives.

Michael Gallagher’s paper ‘Childhood and the geology of media’ also grapples with some of the forms of damage that anthropocentric thought and action have writ on both the environment and children. Rather than turn to analyses of the content of media, or to children’s use of (for instance digital) media, he instead asks whether – via post-humanist theoretical frames – it might be possible to engage in analyses of the geology of media. For the author, this means engaging with the technicality and the physicality of technologies and, especially, the material labour that goes into their making. Taking as a case study children’s involvement in the mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he asks how children are implicated (and, at times, not implicated) in the mining of a substance that is then used in digital devices like mobile (cell) phones around the world. In so doing, the author demonstrates a new conceptual approach to childhood studies rooted not only in questions of materiality – and, as Hadfield-Hill and Zara also show, with geological processes – but with political questions about the agency and rights of children involved in activities like cobalt mining.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).