The greenhouse effect: Multispecies childhood and non-innocent relations of care

Abstract

This article examines the relations between human children and other than human animals in a multispecies ethnographic study conducted in an unofficial educational zoo established in a greenhouse in a lower secondary school. The specific focus is on the practices in which the students become responsible carers of animals. The analysis employs the theory of care (de la Bellacasa) and a storytelling approach (Haraway) to develop the concept of multispecies childhood and to offer ways to account for the complexities of lives shared across species.

Water as method: Explorations of locally situated environmental issues together with preschool children

“…They drew attention to the water's relations to and connections with everything, and that everything living shares water, paraphrasing Chen, MacLeod, and Neimanis (2013). This argument can be related to previously mentioned studies that focused on investigating human and animal relations in a school and a preschool context (Hohti & Tammi, 2019;Nxumalo & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2017).…”

Pets that Have ‘Something Inside’: The Material Politics of in/Animacy and Queer Kin within the Childhood Menagerie

“…To queer this connection involves not only deconstructing the essentialized nature of childhood but also 'the essentialized nature of nature' (Taylor 2011, p. 421). Specifically, child-animal relations are understood through a discourse of innocence that binds these two categories to keep them firmly on the 'nature' side of the nature/culture binary (Hohti and Tammi 2019).…”

“…More generally, growing up in the West today involves heavy socialization towards human exceptionalism (Pedersen 2010), whereby humanity becomes defined through superiority and separation rather than relatedness between humans and other-than-human animals (Hohti and Tammi 2019;Grusin 2015). Bunyak (2019) discusses the histories of animals in homes, specifically the ways in which middle-class families in the United States considered keeping pets as a moral act, cultivating virtues of kindness and sympathy within children.…”

“…The blog written by a parent above recommends that LLP birds provide an initiation towards having a 'real' pet. The idea that animals can aide emotional and moral development by teaching children to care and take on responsibility are central to pedagogical child-animal relations (Hohti and Tammi 2019), and the child-animal-robotic toy continuum in the quote suggests that care and responsibility can be exercised across animate-inanimate animal worlds. However, the emphasis on the benefits of contact with animals (e.g., improving learning, emotional skills, enhancing well-being in classrooms) leaves the human-animal binary, human exceptionalism, and the related essentialized notions of what is 'natural' in children's and animals' lives, undisturbed.…”

“…However, the emphasis on the benefits of contact with animals (e.g., improving learning, emotional skills, enhancing well-being in classrooms) leaves the human-animal binary, human exceptionalism, and the related essentialized notions of what is 'natural' in children's and animals' lives, undisturbed. The pedagogical goal of care itself is seen as innocent, nothing but beneficial and pure (Hohti and Tammi 2019).…”