Learning to See Climate Change

Irvine, Richard D. G.; Bodenhorn, Barbara; Lee, Elsa; Amarbayasgalan, Dorj

doi:10.1086/706606

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 62 publications

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“…Few ethnographers incorporate children as much as adults when looking at themes that do not particularly concern children and that affect people regardless of age, such as social hierarchies (Toren, 1990), racism (Hirschfeld, 1999), consumption (Chin, 2001), war (Boyden, 2004) or climate change (Irvine et al, 2019). Given that, in most of the world, the proportion of children in the total population is considerable, it takes a deliberate effort on the part of ethnographers to pay such limited attention to people from this age group and to not include children as interlocutors by default, alongside adults, in most ethnographies.…”

Section: Fiansmentioning

confidence: 99%

The others’ others: When taking our natives seriously is not enough

Fians

2023

Critique of Anthropology

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Since Malinowski, taking the natives seriously has been a core issue for ethnographers, as this principle encloses two terms nurturing much theoretical debate in sociocultural anthropology: ‘native’ and ‘point of view’. Yet, this entails a parallel issue: aside from taking one’s natives seriously, have anthropologists been taking other anthropologists’ natives equally seriously? The discipline came to take for granted the legitimacy of Others constituted by discourses of race, sex, class, ethnicity and colonialism. However, anthropology seems to continuously marginalize groups – from children and speakers of ‘invented’ languages to UFO witnesses – whose practices are routinely mocked or dismissed as foolish. This article analyzes certain anthropologists and their ethnographies of unsanctioned interlocutors who were cast aside by scholarship. I argue that ‘taking seriously’ must be not only an experiment that builds rapport between individual anthropologists and natives, but also one that makes room for the natives’ viewpoints to flow within the discipline.

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Section: Fiansmentioning

confidence: 99%

The others’ others: When taking our natives seriously is not enough

Fians

2023

Critique of Anthropology

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Climate change reception studies in anthropology

Wit¹,

Haines

2021

WIREs Climate Change

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The past decade has seen increased anthropological attention to understandings of climate change not only as a biophysical phenomenon but also as a discourse that is traveling from international policy making platforms to the rest of the planet. The analysis of the uptake of climate change discourse falls under the emergent subfield of climate change reception studies. A few anthropological investigations identify themselves explicitly as reception studies; others only mention the term with little explanation. Our review discusses a fuller range of anthropological studies and ethnographies from related disciplines that treat climate change as a discursive reality, which is not independent from how it is intimated through close observations of the environment. The following themes emerged: language and expertise; place and vulnerability; modernity, morality, and temporality; alterity and refusal. The review suggests that the interaction of observation and reception is still not well understood, and that there is scope for more systematic methodological and theoretical synthesis, taking lessons into account from geographies of reading and empirical hermeneutics. By exploring the hermeneutical problem of upholding scientific integrity while being open to other ways of knowing, climate change reception studies' emancipatory potential lie in opening up knowledge spaces for multi‐directional and democratic approaches to living (with) climate change. In closing, we propose an interdisciplinary research agenda highlighting the potential generativity of translation as an idiom for theory and praxis relating to how people come to know climate (change)—through both perceptual engagement with the natural world and interpretations of discursive manifestations. This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate Knowledge

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What Animates Place for Children? A Comparative Analysis

Bodenhorn

Lee

2021

Anthropology & Edu Quarterly

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Drawing on comparative work in primary schools in East Anglia (United Kingdom), Oaxaca (Mexico), and the North Slope of Alaska (United States), we explore what children mean when they say places are "special" to them. Focusing on information gathered during walks designed and guided by these children, we examine the experiential, affective, communicative, and dynamic bases of relationality between children and their surroundings. We set out how effective curriculum design can productively incorporate such knowledge. [child cartography, relationality, animation, environmental learning] In a recent article, Irvine and Lee consider how "play, exploration, and narrative imaginary" underpin the ways in which young East Anglian children talked to them about the significance of their "special places" (2018, 1). The present paper draws on that East Anglian material, bringing it into comparison with the experiences and conversations of young people from Oaxaca, Mexico, and the North Slope of Alaska, USA. By doing so, we expand several key concepts in that article. How do we understand children's engagement with their landscapes as "relational"? How might notions of "animation" broaden our understanding of such engagement? What role does materiality play in the enlivening process? And how might these understandings support a curriculum design that takes the existing specialized knowledge of its students seriously? Recent research demonstrates a significant decrease in the amount of time that children spend outdoors, a diminished knowledge of wildlife, and a sense of disconnect with "nature" (e.g., Hillman 2006;Karsten 2005;Malone 2007; Waite et al. 2016). Our research turns this on its head, exploring what in fact connects children to their surroundings across cultures. Here we suggest that "relationality" and "animation" as modes for understanding child/place assemblages support a nuanced comprehension of the continuing importance of taking into account what Ingold (2000) calls "dwelling places" for children's senses of being/identity.If we as anthropologists and educationalists understand better how place becomes meaningful to children, we can contribute to curricula designed more effectively to engage young people's curiosity and intellect through this connection. We argue the relational way in which places become animated for children emphasizes the need-in anthropology as well as in education-to recognize cultural specificity even as we see commonalities threading their way across our study sites. This, in turn, points to the need to take children's unique experiences seriously. Recognizing this aligns with current efforts to decolonize the curriculum, especially as it destabilizes a Eurocentric take on "powerful knowledge." Ardoin makes a strong case for the need to see senses of place (or place itself) as being multidimensional with sociocultural, political, economic, psychological, and biophysical dimensions (2006). And indeed, we find that the notion of place is highly

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Learning to See Climate Change

Abstract: uses the term: "the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made?"

Cited by 4 publications

References 62 publications

The others’ others: When taking our natives seriously is not enough

The others’ others: When taking our natives seriously is not enough

Climate change reception studies in anthropology

What Animates Place for Children? A Comparative Analysis

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