Affrica is a founding member of the Common World Childhoods Research Collective (http://commonworlds.net/).
Members of this international network conduct research that focusses upon children's relations with the more-than-human world (with other species, with materials, with place). Affrica experiments with new pedagogies, new methods and new conceptual frameworks that reassemble rather than divide human and nonhuman worlds.
This chapter draws on our multispecies ethnographies in Australia, Canada and Hong Kong to illust... more This chapter draws on our multispecies ethnographies in Australia, Canada and Hong Kong to illustrate the strategies and challenges of decentring the human in more-than-human research practice. The fact that the research is conducted within the child-centred field of early years education complicates this endeavour. We reflect on our attempts to shift focus away from the researcher and child as the central becoming-knowable subjects about animals and refocus on complex, entangled, mutually affecting and co-shaping child-animal relations. We explain how and why reconfiguring childhood and pedagogy within a common worlds framework that assumes multispecies entanglements helps us to make this shift.
This interdisciplinary article draws upon human geography to bring fresh new perspectives to the ... more This interdisciplinary article draws upon human geography to bring fresh new perspectives to the relationship between two commonly conflated concepts: ‘childhood’ and ‘nature’. Childhood studies scholars have gone a long way towards retheorizing childhood beyond the ‘natural’ and the ‘universal’ by pointing to its historical and cultural construction. However, as yet, not enough attention has been paid to childhood’s key
... 171 Positions of power are also overturned when Margie, as horse, invites Peter to ride her a... more ... 171 Positions of power are also overturned when Margie, as horse, invites Peter to ride her and then retracts the invitation in a vociferous ... Wood, E. (2004) Developing a Pedagogy of Play, in A. Anning, J. Cullen & M. Fleer (Eds) Early Childhood Education: society and culture, pp ...
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2013
In this article, we explore some alternate ways of approaching childhood and learning by taking t... more In this article, we explore some alternate ways of approaching childhood and learning by taking three short forays into what Donna Haraway calls a ‘post-human landscape’. This exploration takes us beyond the horizons of orthodox educational approaches, in which the individual child is typically seen to be developing and learning within his/her (exclusively human) sociocultural context. The post-human landscape relocates
This chapter draws on our multispecies ethnographies in Australia, Canada and Hong Kong to illust... more This chapter draws on our multispecies ethnographies in Australia, Canada and Hong Kong to illustrate the strategies and challenges of decentring the human in more-than-human research practice. The fact that the research is conducted within the child-centred field of early years education complicates this endeavour. We reflect on our attempts to shift focus away from the researcher and child as the central becoming-knowable subjects about animals and refocus on complex, entangled, mutually affecting and co-shaping child-animal relations. We explain how and why reconfiguring childhood and pedagogy within a common worlds framework that assumes multispecies entanglements helps us to make this shift.
This interdisciplinary article draws upon human geography to bring fresh new perspectives to the ... more This interdisciplinary article draws upon human geography to bring fresh new perspectives to the relationship between two commonly conflated concepts: ‘childhood’ and ‘nature’. Childhood studies scholars have gone a long way towards retheorizing childhood beyond the ‘natural’ and the ‘universal’ by pointing to its historical and cultural construction. However, as yet, not enough attention has been paid to childhood’s key
... 171 Positions of power are also overturned when Margie, as horse, invites Peter to ride her a... more ... 171 Positions of power are also overturned when Margie, as horse, invites Peter to ride her and then retracts the invitation in a vociferous ... Wood, E. (2004) Developing a Pedagogy of Play, in A. Anning, J. Cullen & M. Fleer (Eds) Early Childhood Education: society and culture, pp ...
Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2013
In this article, we explore some alternate ways of approaching childhood and learning by taking t... more In this article, we explore some alternate ways of approaching childhood and learning by taking three short forays into what Donna Haraway calls a ‘post-human landscape’. This exploration takes us beyond the horizons of orthodox educational approaches, in which the individual child is typically seen to be developing and learning within his/her (exclusively human) sociocultural context. The post-human landscape relocates
In the face of the multiple existential threats we have brought upon ourselves, this background p... more In the face of the multiple existential threats we have brought upon ourselves, this background paper calls for education to be reimagined and reconfigured around the future survival of the planet. To this end, we offer seven visionary declarations of what education could look like in 2050 and beyond. These declarations proceed from three premises. Firstly, human and planetary sustainability is one and the same thing. Secondly, any attempts to achieve sustainable futures that continue to separate humans off from the rest of the world are delusional and futile. And thirdly, education needs to play a pivotal role in radically reconfiguring our place and agency within this interdependent world. This requires a complete paradigm shift: from learning about the world in order to act upon it, to learning to become with the world around us. Our future survival depends on our capacity to make this shift.
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