Keywords

I begin with Karen Murris’ (2016, 2020) relational pedagogy based on Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology. Her approach reconfigures six well-established genealogical views as ‘bodymind maps’ (2016, p. 109): ‘developing child,’ ‘ignorant child,’ ‘evil child,’ ‘innocent child,’ ‘fragile child,’ and the ‘communal child,’ along with their accompanying interactionalist models: Waldorf, Montessori, and Froebelian. Murris supplants these approaches with “the child as ‘iii’- rich, resilient, resourceful” (p. 119). Murris is well aware of Lenz Taguchi’s work as she is a fellow Norden colleague, calling on her developments, especially when she mentions Deleuze and Guattari. The great strength of Murris’ book is her full force attempt through classroom examples to move the ‘dial’ in childhood teacher education toward a more adequate grasp of the nature|culture entanglement when it comes to children as researchers.

Murris’ trope for the ‘posthuman’ child is through the singularity of a child named Laika. It is an attempt to move away from the modernist ‘child-centered’ discourse where the child-adult developmental binary persists throughout curricular thought toward a position where ‘thinking with and alongside’ children begin to disrupt such ageist pedagogical practices. Murris calls such practices ‘ontoepistemic injustice.’ Children have a voice and are recognized for their own relations ‘with earth dwellers,’ the world of animals and nonhumans they find themselves with, a stance already established preliminarily by Reggio Emilia philosophy of early childhood education. The Posthuman Child, Murris’ doctoral research experiment as a ‘philosopher-in-residence,’ became the basis of her teacher education class in Cape Town, South Africa. It is said to be a ‘labyrinth’ to be followed to help grasp children ‘otherside.’ A qualified youth librarian with a literacy background, Murris, set the grounds to ‘converse’ with three-to-eleven-year-olds. The research took place in a “very affluent town in southern England, in a room that was nicknamed [ironically?] ‘Plato’s Cave.’” Philosophy with children took place through ‘picturebooks.’ Responses (picture drawings, dramatic role-playing) that resulted from their explorations acted as ‘wallpaper’ on the ‘cave walls,’ a reflective reminder what had been the existential issues as the curriculum began to emerge. Murris’ stress was not exclusively on content issues but also on the aesthetic forms that their expressions took—for their ‘materiality’ (colors used, graphic design, the medium such as paper).

Murris’ approach is heavily invested in Karen Barad’s (2007) philosophy of ‘agential realism’ and her methodology of ‘diffraction.’ While concepts from the toolbox of Deleuze and Guattari appear now and again through her writings, the comments are generally taken from Lenz Taguchi’s (2010) own interpretations (discussed in the previous chapter). She ‘deffracts’ the European philosopher of education, Gert Biesta’s three domains of education: schooling or qualification (knowledge, skills, dispositions for the future), socialization (social identity formation), and subjectification (independence from established social order). Biesta’s last category, which is his pitch at creativity of a student/child ‘speaking’ from a ‘uniqueness-as-irreplaceable’ position to bring something new (as strange in relation to the familiar) into the world, aided (as it were) by the ‘judgments’ of a teacher who knows the child’s background and capabilities, is ‘diffracted’ by Murris as still being too humanist in its assumptions. “Reading Barad and Biesta diffractively creates the new idea that subjectification is not only discursive, but, importantly, also material—the materiality of the human and nonhuman bodies involved in producing the event” (p. 28). Murris’ main thrust has been to not only problematize the nature|culture divide and decenter the human through the performativity of her neologism 'iii,’ but also query education along decolonial lines by introducing animistic philosophizing, recognizing the significance of indigenous peoples. Her ‘iii’ (printed in gray) is said to be a quantum entanglement that expresses living without bodily boundaries. Like Lenz Taguchi, subjectivity takes place transversally, between nature/technology and other such binaries. Her ontological turn to ‘iii’ is said to follow indigenous (namely, African ontoepistemologies) ways of knowing.

Karen Malone (2018), in her place-based research, Children in the Anthropocene, worked with children as co-researches in the slums of La Paz, Bolivia, and Kazakhstan (extended to Papua New Guinea, the Cook Islands, and Australia in other writings). She presents what has come to be known as a ‘common worlds’ notion, the indivisibility of human and nonhuman real-world assemblages as forwarded by Bruno Latour and adopted by child-researchers such as Affrica Taylor (2013; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2019). The children of La Paz, who shared their drawings of their city and surrounding landscape, were deeply imbued with indigenous spiritual beliefs of the Pachamama (Pachma meaning ‘cosmos’ and mama meaning ‘mother’). In the Andean ontology, the Pachamama is a goddess—the Mother Earth who sustains life on earth. Water, Earth, Sun, and the Moon ‘are’ the Mother Earth for Quechuan cosmological entities. Bolivia passed the world’s first law to grant new rights to Nature in honor of this animist orientation. In sharp contrast, the children of Kyzylorda and Aktau, Kazakhstan drawings of their city’s environment were imaginary illustrations of yearning to be in a clean and natural space in their cities. The stories reveal concerns and fears of the retreating Aral Sea, contamination of air, clean water, and their desire to escape into a traditional village life that is away from harsh desert sun, denuded streets, and apartment blocks. Malone interprets these desires as a clash between the historic traditional nomadic life where kin groups were central to the way of life and the advent of forced urbanization. The patterns of movement and the freedom of movement are very different in these two ecological assemblages, as are animal relationships: child–dog (‘becoming-dog’ in Bolivia), and (perhaps?) child–horse (‘becoming-horse’ in the Kazakh imaginary given that historically horses were tamed and formed for their nomadic way of life; however, this is not explored by Malone).

Malone and colleagues (Malone et al., 2020) extend her earlier analysis by applying the same coterie of posthumanist feminist theorists (Barad, Braidotti, Haraway, Bennett, sometimes Grosz) to articulate the relational ontologies of ‘childhoodnature,’ a signifier that is becoming ubiquitous in relation to rethinking the child-nature complex. More emphasis is placed on Bennett’s ‘thing-hood’ than previously, as the animation figures of Pinocchio and Little Otik are discussed as being actants that “speak to us” (Malone et al., 2020, p. 67; Tesar & Arndt, 2016). The performative aspects of intra-relationality by children are forwarded as is Mãori indigenous learning where “people are not only of the land, but they are the land, and that the land is people” (p. 197, original emphasis). Malone and her colleagues also raise the question of how AI, in this case one iPad introduced in a rural Mãori kindergarten where traditional knowledge of their wairua (spirit) displayed on the fence surrounding the kindergarten, modified their understanding of their local ecology. As one could say, the iPad was an assemblage breaker (pp. 205–208) as tradition and technology clashed.

Like Murris’ research, art (drawings) and texts were the choice of children’s expressions. The broad push is to reject anthropocentric views of nature and reject the view that humans are superior to nature; rather, the child in/with/as nature presents the challenge to rethink the benefits of biophilia. What remains somewhat disconcerting—given the health benefits of being in nature and owning pets as is widely reported—is the disparagement of such practices as being anthropocentric. Malone et al. (2020) position themselves against this initiative. “[N]ature is denigrated to a mere recourse for human consumption, in this case a remedy to improve the quality of child human lives” (p. 108). What’s wrong with that? The complaint is against a romanticized stereotype of Western childhood. In addition, if bodies are affected in these exchanges, it is the phenomenon that needs to be theorized. The experiential exchange has already happened below the level of consciousness. Childhoodnature confronts issues that surround a pandemic like COVID-19 where such a relationship within its biopolitical ramifications becomes strained. A Chinese city under lockdown is not going to have children in the streets. Some parents will never allow their child to be vaccinated, even when it will save its life. What happens to issues surrounding biophobia? Intruding into animal niches—distance as relationality rather than the desire of porous interaction and interconnectedness—ends in death. The new mRNA vaccines work at the invisible molecular levels of DNA. Are we ready to reject that level of techno-knowhow as not being superior enough when it comes to becoming ‘infected’ (affected) by the ‘love’ of the virus for us? The irony cannot be overstated. Difficult issues such as bodily boundaries remain paradoxical. They are open, porous, and vulnerable. A choice without a choice in regard to bioprotection.

Anna Hickey-Moody et al. (2021) make the case that childhood for the Anthropocene era requires a ‘posthuman civics.’ Chapters are presented in such a way that a colonial and patriarchal historical understanding of modernist notions of public life (i.e., notably, Jürgen Habermas), civics and citizenship is presented to differentiate what they see as the necessity of shifting toward a posthuman civics that takes into account the nonhuman (more-than-human others). This is especially important for pedagogy of course. The issue of posthuman citizenship and civic society that expands on the current modernist account has been widely explored and commented on. John Hultgren (2017) provides an exceptional overview of these issues, raising how the question of the posthuman cyborg (although transhumanism is not raised) already raises the question of how the ‘body’ of citizenship is to be defined. Not only do we have the ‘thing power’ of materialism entering the body (following Bennett) but also the materiality of nonhuman actants such as the range of bacteria, minerals, and chemicals that make up the human biome, and now the new mRNA vaccines, which appear to be a category of their own within biopolitical discourses. In relation to the artificial actants (pace makers, artificial prothesis, breast and teeth implants, the list continues to grow), these are all linked to the multinational companies that sell these products, raising questions at to new rights and freedoms, given that all bodies are ‘porous,’ questioning humanist anthropocentrism that sets the agenda for citizenship within a nation state. Nation state sovereignty is no longer the case; ‘differentiated citizenship’ (or ‘graduated citizenship’ in anthropologist Aihwa Ong (2006) terms) reconfigures the contours of inclusion when it comes to a global market. Some citizens are more privileged than others in their ability to cross borders. Hultgen, referring to Giorgio Agamben, reiterates the stakes of what the historical divide between nature and culture has meant politically: ‘Citizenship’ with all its contested privileges is founded on inclusive exclusion. All that belongs to Nature is not subject to ethical and political primacy. Rather, it is subject to the exercise of sovereign power that defines what is human uniqueness, relegating the nonhuman to the status of resources, while social Others (slave, barbarian, plebians, women, children. racial minorities, foreigners, and ‘savages’) are constructed as parts of nature (animalizing the human) or at odds with it (monstrous, savage).

Posthumanist ecological citizenship within the framework of Bennett’s ‘distributive agency,’ or Barad’s agential realism, presents issues concerning ethical response-ability that are so often called forth by many educators. The argumentation against human exceptionalism, at the same time summoning a particular human responsibility, raises even more issues. Can you have politics without a (human) subject? If ‘everything’ nonhuman is thought of as having political potential, and given the claim that the connectedness of everything has an effect on ‘something’ (e.g., Bennett, 2005), then response-ability as an aspect of political agency becomes questionable. Understood as conjoined action (human and nonhuman) means that human agency is partial, relative, and, above all, dependent on the coaction of nonhumans (on ‘congregations’). If human agency is ‘less intentional’ than once thought, it also means humans are only partially in charge of the effects that agency is said to bring about. Perhaps then it becomes a question of a moving scale where limits are reached as to how much intentional control there is by ‘human’ action within an assemblage where technologies are constantly changing to bring about new affordances? Just when is the nonhuman ‘more powerful’ and overwhelming, as Timothy Morton (2013) would suggest—as hyperobjects that are beyond the capacity for control. Hyperobjects are everywhere; one only has to think of the nonhuman environment of a cathedral in the way its milieu engulfs its parishioners through its vibrating materiality when various ceremonies are performed (mass, weddings, funerals). Such a decentering, however, seems, rather trite in one sense, as the excess of control is a given in any situation. There is also the unintentionality of environmental action. Throwing away one toothbrush seems harmless but is multiplied by an unknown number globally, and we have an issue. The withdrawal from mastery that ‘distributed agency’ suggests presents a danger that the meaning of what is political drops out if ‘everything’ is political (Joronen & Häkli, 2017; Häkli, 2018).

Hickey-Moody et al. (2021) developed childhoodnature research for posthuman civil citizenship through two projects over a period of four years: Interfaith Childhoods and Scaling the City. They emphasize, incessantly, that these projects provide new insights and are to be considered quite apart from the usual research with children as they insist that it is the children’s worlds that are presented through the participatory art-research projects (drawing, 3D work, paper mâché, video, photography) as they respond to the ‘agency’ of matter and political landscapes through intra-active experiences. They make the startling claim: “childhood projects are posthuman because of their focus on the interconnections between bodies, the children’s bodies, those of the godwit birds or the body of the city” (p. 63). Child perceptions “are already posthuman [simply by virtue? ]; they are always already connected with and in relation to the more-than-human” (p. 64, added emphasis). One is hard pressed to see these two projects more than just exemplars of neo- or post-phenomenological research that is pervasive in arts-based research. Material agency is understood in the way an ‘object looks back,’ what catches the eye of children that they then interact with. These are taken as "unexpected outcomes"(p. 71). They provide a simple example of one of the workshop participants. Rather than making future cities with his peers, this boy became enamored by technical gear (the digital camera and iPad) and was drawn to photograph only blue boxes. The arts-based research presented is more of a reportage and the (inadvertent) interpretation of the children’s artworks that developed in these two large-scale projects was perhaps necessary as this research was funded and thus the results accountable. However, such interpretations become questionable. For example, a self-portrait of a boy in a rock formation as if he is ‘camouflaged’ in the environment “like a bird, fish, or insect might” (p. 159) is read as an “embedded position within a network of other equal, perhaps more important actors: sea, rocks, sky, sand” (ibid.). This approach is representative of the inferences that are constantly made in such ethnographic research. It strains the agency of 'things.'

Should such incidents and artworks, and there are many when one teaches art in classrooms, be seen as ‘posthuman’ in any sense more than experiential occurrences that postphenomenological research has already embraced? Here, I am thinking of the anthropic confrontation of the world developed by Merleau-Ponty (1968) of Visible and Invisible, where nature|culture is given a new reading: “Nature as the other side of man (as flesh, nowise as matter)” (p. 274). Postphenomenology becomes “a whole new philosophy of nature, as world, as flesh” (Rechter, 2007), extended to technology through the writings of Don Ihde (a development that is fully examined in volume 2). This seems consonant with Hickey-Moody et al. (2021), who maintain that children are “always already posthuman” (p. 64, p. 188) in their perceptions despite their calling on Braidotti, Barad, Bennett, and Deleuze and Guattari. In contrast, consider the ‘reflection’ of Christopher Schulte (2016), who recognized the performative imaginative play that surrounded the drawings of two children: Kyle and Scott. When Schulte asked Scott why his sketch of a robot was covered in ketchup, he answered: “Because it’s a ketchup robot machine.” Schulte goes on to ask: “Sounds like a messy robot machine…and ‘How does the robot clean off?” This resulted in Scott inventing a solution by picking up an ‘orange marker cap’ to ‘dry up’ the ketchup, which was contagious enough of an idea for Kyle to get his own ‘dryer roller.’ Schulte’s point is an obvious one: he felt he hadn’t ‘listened’ to Scott, nor had he given him enough time to answer his questions. The resultant imaginative play demonstrates that such incidents are quite common, as it is (perhaps) more difficult to get past the usual conventional responses to children’s drawing.

Should Scott’s attraction to the ‘orange marker cap’ be seen as ‘agential’? It certainly ‘called’ on him to be used in his imaginative play. Schulte’s story is a cautionary tale for teachers, but as Dennis Atkinson (2022) has shown throughout his key writings in art education, such ‘incidents’ abound in art classrooms when teachers become sensitized to them. Developmental theories by postwar art educators such as Victor Lowenfeld have now dropped out. One of the worries that does not come through in many of these research projects with children is any discussion of the exchanges and affective transferences that take place with children as co-researchers as to the particular themes prompted and content of artworks described and interpreted. Schulte’s ‘cautionary tale’ is exemplified by the writings of Lisa Blackman (2012), who provides aspects of transference that are generally overlooked: the power of suggestion, power of personality, tonality of voice, and so on. While the researcher is said to be included in these two research projects by Hickey-Moody and company, and there is certainly wide agreement among them that transferences of affect are crucial, there is little sense as to just ‘how’ adult coresearchers are included in these assemblages of desire, or what transferences took place. The idea of being co-creators, especially when this pertains to artworks, seems disingenuous.

The British ‘art and the built environment’ movement in the 1980s (Adams & Ward, 1982) had already developed a base for civic citizenship for school children where there was no nature|culture divide. The curriculum was ‘ecological aesthetics’ avant la lettre, as it included design initiatives such as Free Form, where urban spaces left abandoned would be renewed through local initiatives. The ecological approach was obvious. Pedagogically, it attuned children to the nature–culture topologies in urban landscapes through sensitivity ‘walks’ (which are now common) and where the aesthetics of ‘touch’ were broadly conceived, which included recording neighborhood soundscapes. Mapping, such as Rousell’s (2021, pp. 1–25) notion of ‘immersive cartography,’ was well established—a practice that many eco-artists utilize, exploring scales, space, movement, aesthetic sensing paths, gestural mapping as to how children interact with spaces they know—especially playgrounds, skate parks, and swimming pools. These initiatives had all been done in the 1980s. This movement was a forerunner for such urban politics, as presented by Scaling the City Project, where art galleries displayed by children are encouraged to draw attention to their concerns and imaginary worlds. Such initiatives have become well-integrated, almost standard fare in many art education programs. Of note is Olivia Gude’s twenty-five–year-long engagement with youth through her Spiral Curriculum (online and archived) in Chicago (affiliated with the School of Art Institute of Chicago and University of Illinois). This is yet another example of a ‘niche’ smooth space creation, as the curriculum was developed in Gude’s own studio, away from the school institution, although strongly interacting with it.

The Spiral Curriculum could be considered ‘posthuman’ in the way it is defined by Hickey-Moody and company as ‘always already,’ as students explored their own issues and worlds. The ‘refuge homes project’ (Hickey-Moody et al., 2021, 2021, pp. 153–165), for instance, would be consonant with Gude’s approach. Why should the blurring together of ‘natural’ and ‘constructed’ worlds be labeled posthuman? Other than perhaps the simple recognition of an integrated environment as part of conscious lived-life (worlding). Or, as a ‘collective’ as forwarded by Bruno Latour (2004a, p. 238), which is understood as a “procedure of collecting associations of humans and nonhumans” to replace the humanist orientations of community and society. Civic responsibility with children in these two projects overwhelmingly strives for “values [that] can be enacted, such as sharing, care, support, friendship, helping, and learning” (p. 93), as “an ethics of care” (p. 188).

In summary, the takeaway when it comes to doing research with children as collaborators within the Anthropocene in all of the above authors is simply this: it appears that posthumanism is a phenomenology in an expanded field where the lived experience of children is sensitized to the ecological (nonhuman) assemblages they are living in to rethink their world from their own positions to decenter their anthropocentric views. The connective relationships that are in complex play are said to be all performative acts of one degree or another. The ethical and political implications (injustices) of these intra-active intrarelational agencies are then identified and supported on the grounds that they promote a more horizontal than a hierarchical vertical research endeavor. All this is ‘messy,’ stemming from the idea this research is always emergent—one never knows quite where it will end up, or how each incident offers a new beginning—as life unfolds. Assemblages are viewed in what are second-order cybernetic systems that delineate a ‘world’ (worlding) that emerges as expressed (partially) through the arts (predominantly visual expressions). Walking with children in landscapes, using photographs, video captures, stories, and picture books are the usual ways to gain insights into their worlds. ‘Worlding’ is generally borrowed from Haraway (2016) as it refers “to becoming the way in which earthlings/living beings/entities/forces make and remake the world by affecting each other.” The sensorial ecological pedagogies and the examples that are usually given are essentially phenomenological accounts (description of sense impressions) and inferences of what the researcher is sensitizing themselves to by listening carefully, paying attention to detail, using poetic language to describe and capture what is going on, and writing careful narrative descriptions of the encounters of children with animals. Children’s anthropomorphic descriptions are highlighted, as are their descriptions of the places they live and play. Significantly, the combination of the visual, verbal and written are all in play. The naïve notions that hold so much attention in arts education, such as developmental stages, visual realism, and the emphasis on meaning, are decontextualized and omitted as the basis for children’s artistic engagements. The emphasis is placed on the performative processes. The temporality of the unfolding performance, speech, gesture, word, and image become crucial. In this regard, the brilliant writing of Dennis Atkinson (2022) in art education has already done this. The characterization of a democratic posthumanism for these developments would not be inaccurate (Ferrando, 2020).

Querying Childhoodnature Research

The cadre of researchers presenting this new paradigm of childhoodnatures draws heavily from foremost, Karen Barad’s agential realism, followed by an interspersion of Deleuze|Guattari, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, and Donna Haraway, squarely on feminist new materialism. More often than not, the theoretical premises are all brought together and used conveniently when the need arises to advance the argument. The authors who research with children claim that they are indeed developing Deleuze and Guattari concepts, most notably assemblage theory, and in some cases ‘concept creation.’ All these authors initiate some form of art production as their claim to elicit children as researchers as their imaginaries are ‘entangled’ with the ‘nonhuman.’ The above authors all move away from the romanticized culture–nature relationship of biophilic anthropocentric environmental education and its neoliberal roots. My position of worry or query is to take note that a particular interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari is undertaken that appears to dovetail with Karen Barad’s agential realist theory and, in some cases, with Bruno Latour’s (2004a) actor network theory (ANT). While overcoming the nature–culture binary, these authors revive a form of structural relationism (now called intrarelationality after Karen Barad), misunderstanding, or perhaps avoiding the more radical concepts developed by Deleuze and Guattari such as event, anorganic life, and ‘becoming imperceptible’ (becoming indeterminate). In brief, Deleuze and Guattari deterritorialization is tempered to forward posthumanist ethical values of care and response-ibility of place, not unlike Andrew Stables (as reviewed earlier), who would have wished it.

This charge is also directed to the new signifier ‘childhoodnature’ that is said to do away with nature–culture binary by a collection of writers who contributed to the massive Research Handbook on Childhoodnature: Assemblages of Childhood and Nature Research (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, et al., 2020), many who belong to the Australian-based Childhoodnature Collective and are authors mentioned in the previous chapter. Throughout the handbook, there is a particular normative understanding of assemblage. Although it is a key Deleuze–Guattarian concept, many authors follow its sociologically developed version by Manuel DeLanda (2016) or its more spiritual-affective version by Jane Bennett’s (2020) study of Walt Whitman, where it becomes a complex aggregate of an ecosystem. Assemblage becomes an ‘entity’ that grows in scale and complexity as components are added to it. Barad’s ‘relational materialism’ that ends up as an ‘apparatus theory’ does much the same. Relationality or connectivism is stressed. Their entanglement is ‘rarely’ (if ever) deterritorialized as a relation within a zone of indeterminacy where child/children become imperceptible, their perceptual categories shaken. This is when an assemblage undergoes a radical change. Child/children are, in such an occurrence, transformed to a point of difference in their becoming. Events described by childhoodnature researchers come across as phenomenological descriptions rather than transversal transformations.

This is precisely what we find in many of these essays where there is an inclusivity forwarded that ‘adds’ the nonhuman with the human, the later ‘disappears’ (said to be ‘horizontal’ rather than ‘vertical’ after Jane Bennett) into the aggregate formed, but there is no questioning as to the asymmetry that is formed. What do you do with the ‘diagonals’ if you maintain such a ‘biologically natural’ Cartesian geometry (walking up right with the primacy of vision), the very geometry that is said to be overcome through these approaches? Bodily comportment is not usually interrogated, and the technologies that mediate perception of ‘worlding’ are not fundamentally discussed. Most often, the assemblage becomes a ‘mapping’ of identifiable power relations of the entities that are said to be in ‘play,’ closer to Foucault than to Deleuze rethinking of Foucault’s thought. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the diagram, especially in Guattari’s rethinking along asemiotic lies, is a ‘mapping’ of forces beneath that are blocked. In distinction, childhoodnature assemblages become emergent ‘wholes’ formed now through the intrarelations (Barad) of their parts. Such an orientation is not the assemblage in the order of Deleuze and Guattari, at least not how it is being argued here. It runs closer to Haraway’s (e.g., 2016) understanding of a specific materialization of complex ecologies or ‘worldings’ that overlap at times and places where human presence and perception are called on, which is then captured through text (as ‘phenomena’ in Barad’s framing).

Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of haecceity to suggest a more gaseous state of affairs where a deterritorialization takes place in a zone of indiscernibility. The assemblage theory of Jane Bennett and Manuel DeLanda has been strongly contested by Ian Buchanan (2020) in their avoidance or downplay of desire, deterritorialization, and Guattari’s contributions, with a failure to recognize the importance of the virtual. Try as they might, it seems childhoodnature authors slip into a common-sense notion of assemblage as a complex aggregate of heterogeneous entities (human, more-than-human, nonhuman) held together through intrarelations, where ‘mesh’ (‘enmeshment’), for instance, begins to replace or supplant ‘rhizome’ (e.g., Bengtsson, 2020, pp. 138–139), as it seems more ‘substantive’ and relational in connecting two or more entities. This appropriation comes from the Object-Orientated Ontology of Tim Morton (2011, 2017), who has no use for Deleuze and Guattari, as he has to defend the fractal ‘object’ through a misguided reading of Oedipus and his misunderstanding of the Anti-Oedipal position. Morton (2012) seems fixated on the Neolithic as the source of Anthropocene woes. The structuralist relational version of Bruno Latour’s ANT of “common worlds” is often conflated with a complementary understanding of what is an assemblage, as is Karen Barad’s ‘agential realism,’ a neo-deconstructivist orientation that addresses emergent ‘phenomena’ (their intrarelationality) discursively, again structuralist in its relationality and connectivity than a processual understanding of ‘becoming.’

Barad’s diffractive methodology is a version of neo-deconstruction wherein language and materiality come together (‘matter matters’) from the perspectives of researchers who usually cross-read two (sometimes more) theoretical positions as they (deconstructively) see fit. Data are said to ‘speak’ to them (where it glows, shines) in ways that open up new possibilities, vistas, and ideas. The neo-deconstructive orientation entangles binaries, especially nature|culture as a key binary that is being reworked within the post-Anthropocene era. The question is whether Barad’s phenomena are judged only after they emerge. The reduction of ontology to relations comes close to the onto-theological grounding of being by claiming that all such relations are infused with epistemology and ethics. The difficulty of trying to do away with anthropocentrism is that it seems oddly reinstated through her ‘methodology.’

Barad’s agential realism makes the enormous claim that disregards Heisenberg’s warning in the 1950s. By siding with Bohr, quantum theory does not allow us to gain access to a reality uncorrelated to any human subject. As Barad (2007) puts it, “The new mathematical formulae no longer describe nature [phenomena] itself but our knowledge of nature [phenomena].” By following Bohr, the apparatus of measurement yields that knowledge is communicated discursively: matter is discursive. Barad’s Bohrian quantum theory (QT) rules out any physical realism. Einstein does not find a place in her writings, nor do other proposed QT positions, especially Bohm for instance, who had challenged Bohr. Agential realism commits itself to a constant neo-deconstruction that is ethically informed without the possibility that a physical realism would present the planet as being ‘indifferent’ to human undertakings, a position entertained by Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour. These themes are revisited in the quantum section of the second volume.

Perhaps what is quite odd is that these childhood authors call on the Anthropocene through a relational process of materiality and seem to overlook that there are phenomena (à la Barad’s agentic realism) that exit outside of human scope, influence, and intervention. What is further odd is that all the children’s research via art expressions presents more varied versions of correlationism. Relationality is simply between the child and its environment that ‘draws’ their attention—affects the child phenomenologically. Childhoodnatures envisions ‘hybridity’ (drawing on Latour, 2004b) and ‘relationality,’ whereas Deleuze and Guattari speak of haecceities and lines of flight: “A becoming is neither one nor two, nor the relation of the two it is the in-between, the border or the line of flight or descent running perpendicular to both” (1987, p. 293). Here, the line is a ‘disjunctive synthesis’ between two heterogeneous sets of differences. Becoming is a constant temporal motion of physical material (as energy and force) without division or boundary that produces an animate world without divisions, dualisms, or static objects. The childhoodnatures movement, with its emphasis on ‘place,’ seems to be closer to the Heideggerian notions of ‘dwelling’ and a more phenomenological understanding of ‘being-in-the-world’—a more static relational undertaking despite the rhetoric and gesture to Deleuze and Guattari, as there are constant slippages into the ‘object’ or ‘entity’ of the assemblage. The affective ‘encounter’ of becoming is rather pedestrian, if not banal in what is considered change. Perhaps that’s the point? The theories culled to support such a position are suggesting something much more radical. While affect is certainly in play throughout this entire handbook, it is more often understood as ‘feelings’ and ‘emotions’ in their humanist sense than to its more controversial understanding of disruption, hesitation and even delerium, which point to anxieties and fears that are not smoothed over. If intrarelationality is used to claim the idea of one body affecting another—where precisely is the phenomenon that dramatizes the stark consequences of such encounters? Put another way, Deleuze and Guattari’s example of the orchid and the wasp is one where both ‘change’ one another. This does not seem to be the case with so many childhoodnature exemplars. Becoming an animal loses its political edge and comes closer to the ‘ethological proxemics’ of animal studies.

Childhoodnature research with children that explore ‘becoming-frog’ or ‘becoming-hen’ faces a certain conditionality. The schemas for these animals have already been well established. Do disturbances or destructions take place in this research? Do they happen on microlevels that escape us? Maybe. The preschematic ‘stage’ of child development, let us call it the very bridge that happens when a child is trying to grasp a perceived object, results in personal schemas or a variety of them where it is difficult to tell what is precisely being drawn. This is illustrated in the Handbook on Childhoodnature by Iris Duhn and Gloria Quinones (2020), where (a 3 to 4)-year-old Silva’s preschematic drawings of her four chickens are shown and discussed (p. 97). The construction EnaSilva is a childhood nature figuration, a hybrid of the hen and Silva that exemplifies ‘kinship making’ (following Haraway) through the horizontal relationship that emerges when Silva encounters the hens. The difficulty emerges when the preschema age becomes ‘representational.’ When schemas are established of all four hens, then the struggle to break these representations becomes the pedagogical challenge. This is where such research reaches its limits. Perhaps the best exemplar of presenting the case of positioning childhood within the post-Anthropocene is developed by David Rousell and Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles (2023), who confront many of my queries in their own way as they draw from the same literature as I do. I particularly support the Whiteheadian perspective raised in the ecological aesthetics of childhood as addressed in the following chapter. 

One of the more disturbing questions is the avoidance of capitalist critique. Chilhoodnature studies raise the anthropomorphic ‘thing-power’ assigned to objects and artifacts as they are drawn from the work of Jane Bennett. It becomes difficult to distinguish the ‘aestheticization’ that pervades picture books. The fictional animals that are introduced play into the commodification of the nonhuman and the ‘animism’ that appears to be quite acceptable as forms of anthropomorphism prevalent in indigenous cultures. Perhaps what is most extraordinarily is how little attention is given to the more worrisome aspects of the Anthropocene in regard to the devastation of animal habitats through capitalist expansion. A stronger case needs to be made for the propaedeutic accomplishments of care and responsibility to place a check on capitalism in the way media exploits animals. What of Disney-like ideological animation? Given the media bombardment of talking-digitalized animals, this seems difficult. The world of Pokémon GO has mixed reviews (Wagner-Greene et al., 2017; Wallin, 2018).

In the Hickey-Moody book on art-based methods, there is a very small section called “threat of the Anthropocene” (Hickey-Moody et al., 2021, p. 156), which covers the displacement of refugees (the standing reserve for capitalism for cheap labor, becoming ‘illegal’ without papers and citizenship so that they work for ‘nothing’). The research on child-refugees is focused on “empathy” and loss of their homes—exemplifying what home means to them. In the following section, “unnatural publics” (pp. 158–164), a few pages present the overarching theme of children “saving the planet by stopping climate change” (p. 162). It feels forced and almost exploitive. We are back to Greta. In the childhoodnature’s Handbook (2020), the section on the Anthropocene (chapters 24–32) offers no mention of the ‘threat’ of capitalism. The discussion seems to have been overlooked as there is only a paragraph here and there over its thousand-plus pages. The handbook is organized as a question of ‘cenes.’ This section does this through eight contributions which broadly speak to four ‘cenes,’ namely: children in the Anthropocene—child-cene; woman in the Anthropocene—gyno-cene; cities as sites of the Anthropocene, city-cene; and relations with the more than human—kin-cene” (p. 495). No Capitalocene. Kinship with deadly viruses and poisonous spiders, snakes and the like, and the question with what species can we realistically ‘live’ with seem absent as well. The 1000 plus pages avoid such a confrontation, which points to the difficult ecological problematic of the Anthropocene. Where such disruption does appear, it almost seems lost and insignificant, as the justifiable quest is for interspecies relationships that somewhat tame in their impact on children’s psyches. At the same time, should this be otherwise? Deep down, we want our children raised in a loving world of support … me included. It goes without saying indigenous cultures in tropical rainforests perceptions of becoming-plant or becoming-animal face a wide range of affective responses where ‘taboo’ (their form of pathogen-avoidance) restrictions apply. What is the under-recognized dimension of human–nature relationships in urban environments—biophilia—manifests itself in the hyper-extermination practices of pests, an avoidance, especially of insects and other mild disconnections from nature. There is even a name for it: the “urbanization-disgust hypothesis” (Fukano & Soga, 2021).

End of Childhood?

Two striking images of thought: The first comes from the Japanese television show Old Enough, where two-to-five-year-olds run errands for their parents to pick up food and goods at grocery stores (all under careful surveillance of course). The second: children born and dying in refugee camps; shock blankets wrapped around kids as they are rescued from sinking dinghies crossing the Mediterranean Sea, the drowned bodies of children washed on beaches. Infants and children dying in Gaza, collateral damage as the Israel army roots out Hamas. Childhood innocence and safety have all but disappeared in these extremes. In drought-ridden Australia, 25% of the children surveyed believed that the world would end before they grew up (Coyle & Van Susteren, 2012, p. 17). Any number of never-ending picture books have now come out as how to ‘educate’ them: Old Enough to Save the Planet, What a Waste, Here We Are, What We’ll Build, We Are Water Protectors, Saving Earth, The Mess We’ve Made, The Earth and I, Growing Sustainable Together … the paradox of a gerontomorphic neoteny?