ICS Seminar Series

Abstract

In this presentation I examine the complexities of children’s everyday lives drawing on cases in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan and La Paz, Bolivia. I acknowledge that to collapse human/nonhuman, nature/culture binaries, is to recognize the means through which exceptionalism as a human condition continues to act out in the everyday relations of self with other species; and the ethical decisions posited when humans position themselves as master of all living things. As an unsettling ontology and rupturing of past ‘humanist’ paradigms, the Anthropocene brings our attention to our bodies ‘humanness’ as neither exempt nor exceptional to those we are acting/being/dying in relation with. I draw on the concept of assemblages as espoused through the work of Delueze and Guarratri where assemblage theory is viewed as the ordering of bodies/things/entities to create entangled worldings. I also work with Donna Haraway’s notion of relational natures of difference and Karen Barad’s tools of diffraction - not to map where differences appear but rather map the affects of difference and therefore its potential to disrupt and unsettle. In my reconfiguring I am queering ‘childhood’ and ‘nature’ through key concepts of porosity and kin. This conceptual analysis is a performance of diffractive theorising as the means for considering potentialities for children and childhood on a damaged landscape.

Biography

Professor Malone researches in urban ecologies, environmental education and early childhood studies with a specific focus on children’s encounters of damaged urban landscapes. The majority of her research has been conducted in majority world nations funded by the United Nations and she is currently leading her own global research project Children in the Anthropocene. This international research is using postqualitative research with young children and their families from a variety of geographically diverse locations. She has predominantly utilised critical, participatory and poststructuralist theory in her theoretical and philosophical work but, in more recent times, has been engaging conceptually with critical posthumanism and vital (new) materialism. Professor Malone has attracted over 1.6 million dollars in research grants, awards and consultancies and has published 7 books and close to 100 publications. Her latest book is: Children in the Anthropocene published in early 2017. Her latest grant and research interest focuses on very young children’s encounters with landscapes pre-language through the concept of ‘sensing ecologically’. She recently published an edited collection for Springer with Son Truong and Tonia Gray Reimaginging Sustainability in Precarious Times. This edited book builds on her leadership in environmental education in a range of education settings focusing on the human/nonhuman connections of the material world.