The grass is moving but there is no wind: Common worlding with elf/child relations

Abstract

Drawing from the post-qualitative research in the dissertation, Animal Magic, Secret Spells, and Green Power: More-Than-Human Assemblages of Children’s Storytelling (Molloy Murphy, Animal magic, secret spells, and green power: More-than-human assemblages of children’s storytelling. https://doi.org/10.15760/etd.7318, 2020), this article mobilizes common worlding pedagogies (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 23(4), 507–529, 2015) to research elf-child relations in an early childhood community. Informed in part by an assemblage of 1970s animated holiday specials, a cherished classroom book coauthored by an elf, (Fróði, What does it take to see an elf? The Elf Garden, 2018), and the popular commercial figure “Elf on a Shelf,” the 2–5 year-old child participants in this study practiced thinking and playing with elves using storytelling as a method of research and knowledge production. In this 12-week study, children’s elf figurations and stories offered a window into the complex and shifting more-than-human assemblages that constituted their everyday school life. The children’s relational encounters with elves were complexified at the nearby Children’s Arboretum where we discovered evidence of elves both living and dead. In the arboretum’s meadow, the children signaled the presence of elves to one another by saying, “the grass is moving but there is no wind.” These elusive and compelling figures came to be vital participants in the more-than-human socialities (Tsing, Anthropology and nature (pp. 27–42). Routledge, 2013) of our school community. Though entangled with Eurocentric/Euro-Western ideations in ways that deserve interrogation, the children’s process of attuning to elves generated new ways of “becoming witness” (Rose & van Dooren) to the land and its past/present inhabitants and envisioning just and caring relations with the more-than-human.

Contributor

Dr. Angela Molloy Murphy was an early childhood educator from 1990-2020 when she joined the University of Melbourne as an early childhood lecturer. A member of the Common Worlds Research Collective, her post-qualitative research enacts critical posthumanism, feminist new materialisms, and experimental arts practices to research the relational narrative processes of children and the more-than human. She argues that we are in need of stories that acknowledge the entangled, more-than-human nature of justice, stay with the trouble of oppression and environmental degradation, and imagine creative possibilities for thinking and relating “otherwise.”