Countering the conceits of the Anthropos: scaling down and researching with minor players

ABSTRACT

The naming of the Anthropocene (or epoch of Man) portends precarious futures for twenty-first century children. In deciding how best to respond, feminist scholars warn against perpetuating the heroicism and grandiosity of Man-to-the-rescue scripts. Instead they suggest paying close attention to what is already going on in the world beyond the dominion of Man, and refiguring our place in this more-than-human world by telling different kinds of stories. The author responds by recounting minor stories from a common worlds research project about a group of young Australian children's confronting encounters with wild European rabbits. These stories illustrate how assumed-to-be minor players are quietly getting on with the job of inheriting and cohabiting damaged worlds without recourse to human heroicism and dominion. She argues that by scaling down, researching and thinking with minor players outside of the main game, childhood studies is well positioned to counter the conceits of the Anthropos.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• conceits of Man
• minor players
• common worlds research
• childhood studies
• feminist refiguring
• scaling down

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Tonya Rooney, my co-researcher in the ‘Walking with Wildlife in Wild Weather Times’ project, for all the helpful observations and discussions about children and rabbits. Thanks also to Peter Kraftl for reminding me about Cindi Katz’s (1996) ‘minor theory’ essay and for encouraging me to think more carefully about scale, agency and intentionality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Much of this research has been generated by members of the Common Worlds Research Collective (2018), an international network of feminist, childhood scholars and educators who share a common interest in human / more-than-human relations, and a commitment to finding ethical ways of recuperating and cohabiting anthropogenically damaged worlds.

2 Sympoiesis is an ecological term for a complex living ecosystem. As distinct from the self-reproductive and therefore predictable notion of autopoiesis inherent in evolutionary theory, sympoiesis denotes ‘complex, self-organizing but collectively producing, boundaryless systems’, which ‘have the potential for making dramatic and surprising changes (Dempster, 2000, pp. 1, 11).

3 Haraway has various favourite names for feminist refigurations. She intermittently refers to them as bag-lady story telling (following Ursula Le Guin's carrier bag fictional writing method) and SF (which collective stands for string figuring, science fiction, and speculative feminism). Most of her publications include some kind of reference to these methods, but for recent applications and explanations, see Haraway (2016, pp. 117–125, 177–178).

4 This is the same figure that Lovelock and Margulis popularised in their 1960s ‘Gaia hypothesis’ that the earth is a complex, self-regulating system, and which Latour (2017) also reclaims in his critiques of the lacunae of the Anthropocene.

5 Millei and Rautio (2017) also make a case for conducting slow research with children that is sensitive to the details of their interactions with the world. They do not reference Stengers but they do pick up on similar earlier challenges posed to children's geographers by Horton and Kraftl (2006).

6 Our ‘walking with’ methods draw inspirations from the more-than-human spin that Instone (2015) puts on Ingold’s (2007) theorisations of walking as an embodied mode of wayfaring and weather worlding. Noting that not only humans walk, Instone suggests that by paying attention to the ways in which our paths intersect with those of other species, we might be able to embark upon ‘wayfinding’, or of finding new conjoined pathways, in ecologically uncertain times.

7 For additional stories from the Walking with Wildlife in Wild Weather Times research project, see Rooney (2018a, 2018b).

8 See also Rose (2004, 2011, 2012), van Dooren (2014), and van Dooren and Rose (2012).

9 The site is commemorated by a sculpture of a traditional burial platform, made by Indigenous artists Dion Mundine and Fiona Foley, called ‘Ngaraka: Shrine for the Lost Kooris’. Koori is a generic name for Aboriginal people from south-east Australia.

10 For stories about children becoming with kangaroos, see Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2017).

11 The mention of rabbits stealing the native animals’ children is a provocative reference to the state sanctioned practice of removing Aboriginal children from their families and an acknowledgement of the devastating impact of white settler policies upon Indigenous communities.

12 For a detailed critique of eco-nationalist tropes in Australian and Canadian children's literature and popular culture see Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2018).

13 The book ends with the provocative question: ‘Who will save us from the rabbits?’

14 For detailed critiques of the ways in which anti-rabbit eco-narratives use redemptive violence to turn Australian children against rabbits, see Wright (2012, 2014, 2017).