Decolonizing place in early childhood studies: Thinking with Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies

Abstract

This article aims to center Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies in considerations of place, environment, and “nature” in early childhood studies. We consider how these perspectives might enact knowledge-making that politicizes, unsettles, and (re)stories place-based studies of childhood. In particular, we are interested in possibilities for unsettling the dominance of EuroWestern knowledges in both normative and critical encounters with nature/culture and human/non-human dualisms in environmental and place-based childhood studies, particularly in working from the premise that anthropogenic vulnerabilities, anti-Blackness, and settler colonialism are intimately entangled within North American contexts. While noting the tensions between posthuman geographies, Indigenous onto-epistemologies, and Black feminist geographies, we consider how together they might enrich critical place-attuned early childhood studies. Our intent is to contribute to ongoing dialogues on the urgency of anti-racist, decolonial, and non-anthropocentric approaches within current times of environmental precarity.

Keywords

Black feminism early childhood environment Indigenous epistemologies place

Introduction

Environmental and place-based early childhood education is undergoing a growing interest in North America, such as seen in the proliferation of outdoor education programs, sometimes referred to as forest schools. While rationalizations for these programs are multiple and contradictory, they remain for the most part rooted in idealized and romanticized notions of nature and childhood (Nxumalo, 2015; Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2013; Taylor, 2013, in press). For instance, recent work in early childhood studies has critically examined the maintenance of child-centered nature–culture dualisms and innocent “child in nature” assumptions in many of these programs (Taylor, in press). There is also a gap in situated and responsive engagements with the specific environmental challenges that young children face in their particular locations. Such normative and romanticized nature pedagogies rarely pay attention to the environmental justice issues facing North American nature–cultures and children’s uneven inheritances of these issues.

Situated within current times of ever-increasing human and more-than-human environmental precarity, this article contributes to critical engagements with normalized discourses and erasures in environmental and place-based early childhood education by considering possibilities for challenging human exceptionalism, settler colonialism, and anti-blackness. In examining possibilities for ethico-political engagements with place and environment in early childhood studies, we begin with the premise that, within the context of North America, environmental vulnerabilities, human exceptionalism, anti-blackness, and settler colonialism are interconnected (Tuck and McKenzie, 2014). Accordingly, in this article, we co-theorize with perspectives that critically encounter, generatively engage with, and respond to these situated entanglements.

We begin with a brief review of dominant approaches to knowledge-making in place-based and environmental education with young children within North American contexts. In particular, we consider dominant perspectives of what counts as “nature” and what counts as “normal” experiences of nature within child-centered approaches that recapitulate modernist colonial discourses of a mute, pure, and separate nature. We then consider why conceptualizations of place that pay attention to Indigenous relational presences, Indigenous onto-epistemologies, and past–present land histories within ongoing settler colonial contexts are necessary to decolonize place-based early childhood studies. In particular, we attend to how childhood studies might engage with specific places as storied Indigenous land, foregrounding specific Indigenous knowledges and place relations where both human and more-than-human actors participate in the storying of places. In this understanding, more-than-human bodies, place-specific stories, ontologies, histories, as well as humans are all lively and entangled participants in the shaping of place (Calderon, 2014; Tuck and McKenzie, 2014). Next, we attend to the anti-colonial and anti-racist potentialities enacted by thinking with situated Black feminist geographies of place. We consider how these geographies unsettle both human-centric and universalized views of place and place relations, and we discuss what they might bring to early childhood studies. Finally, we discuss how Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies might “walk alongside” (Sundberg, 2014) other considerations of human/non-human and nature/culture entanglements in early childhood studies, in particular, those drawing from posthuman geographies. We conclude on the significance of undoing humanistic universalisms in place-based early childhood studies.

Modernist colonial perspectives in environmental early childhood education

Modernist oppositional bifurcations of “non-human nature” and “human culture” and their links to the normalization of anthropocentric, colonizing, and extractive relations with the planet have been highlighted by many Indigenous and Black scholars (see, for example, Finney, 2014; Kuokkanen, 2007; Simpson, 2011; Wildcat, 2009). Describing what she terms the “American environmental imaginary,” geographer Carolyn Finney (2014) notes that “[t]he narrative of the Great Outdoors in the United States is explicitly informed by a rhetoric of wilderness conquest, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, and the belief that humans can either control or destroy Nature with technology” (p. 28). This critical perspective brings important insights for reconceptualizing responses to current times of environmental precarity, such as those brought by climate change. For example, this work points to the importance of unsettling dominant discourses that reproduce grand narratives of Eurocentric human-driven solutions and that center a universal human subject of the Anthropocene.¹ Despite these important insights, modernist dualistic conceptions of nature persist and re-emerge, such as under the guise of visions for more sustainable futures (Collard et al., 2015).

Black feminist geographies question the universality of the category of human in colonial human/non-human binaries. These perspectives consider how disrupting the colonial human/non-human binary requires attention to those who were and continue to be dysselected from belonging within the category of human (Wynter, 1992, 2003). In these perspectives, colonialism and anti-blackness are implicated in hierarchical humanisms that racialize and dichotomize the human and non-human, placing those seen as outside the category of “fully human” along a linear trajectory to “civility” and “humanity,” albeit with contextually contingent effects and affects in different colonial encounters (Wynter, 2003).

Early childhood education is one site where colonialist discourses that bifurcate human from non-human persist. For instance, underpinning many programs modeled after the forest schools of Northern Europe is a belief that children’s direct experiences of the natural environment are precursors to developing attachments toward nature and becoming future environmental stewards (Taylor, 2013, in press). In these perspectives, (human)children and (non-human)nature are separate and the focus is on anthropocentric child-centered developmental learning about the non-human environment (Chawla, 2009; Children and Nature Network, 2016; Davis, 2015; Sobel, 2008). Informed by Rousseau-ean logics (Rousseau, 2003 [1762]), there is a paradoxic assumption that children and nature belong together, as sites of innocence and purity, not as always-already entangled and unevenly co-constituted participants in world-making (Taylor, in press). This romantic coupling of children and nature is expressed in the popularity of “nature deficit disorder” as a diagnosis impacting children who have been “deprived” of or separated from nature (Louv, 2008). These perspectives, which also follow Thoreau’s (1992 [1862]) EuroWestern vision of redemptive wilderness, are problematic for many reasons, such as in the recapitulation of modernist conceptions of a non-human “nature” as a separate site awaiting child-centered connection, learning, and discovery. Modernist underpinnings of environmental education inform the dominant North American pedagogical imagination, side-stepping the colonial, raced, and gendered politics impacting accessibility and affordability of outdoor education programs, and they are marked by an absence of critical engagement with EuroWestern assumptions underpinning what counts as “normal” childhood experiences of nature.

Unsettling “place” in early childhood education

While decolonial land-based pedagogy is a vibrant and growing field, particularly within Indigenous education, there is a marked paucity of work in both early childhood education and early childhood studies that firmly centers land as Indigenous in place-based and environmental education in settler colonial contexts (see Pacini-Ketchabaw and Taylor, 2015 for a collection of recent exceptions). Here, we are referring to work that engages these issues in in-depth and non-appropriative ways, beyond consumptive relations with Indigenous knowledges, beyond static representations of Indigenous knowledges, and beyond “understandings of Indigenous peoples as repositories of static forms of cultural knowledge” (Tuck et al., 2014: 1). This work highlights the gap in decolonizing work in early childhood research and practice that does not shy away from grappling with the tensions, risks, and doubts of attempting to situate, complicate, and politicize place-based and environmental education in settler colonial contexts. At the same time, it is also important to underline that these are not easy orientations from which to work, particularly within current times of neoliberal capitalism where anti-colonial efforts are susceptible to capture by de-politicized practices of cultural recognition (Coulthard, 2014).

Ongoing erasures or superficial engagements with Indigenous land and life in place-based and environmental early childhood education within settler colonial contexts ignore the tenet that “place is foundational to settler colonialism” (Calderon, 2014: 33), including situated place entanglements with past–present histories of slave and immigrant labor and with ever-increasing anthropogenic places (Tuck and Yang, 2012). As Métis scholar Zoe Todd (2016) notes, recent hypotheses regarding the anthropogenic impacts of colonization and slavery urge attention

to the interconnections between, first, Indigenous genocide and the violent enslavement of peoples from across Africa, the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas throughout the colonial period, and second, the contemporary economic, political, social, and cultural forces shaping current environmental and power relations. (np)

These contemporary forces include the ongoing impacts of forced and violent removals of Indigenous people from land to create outdoor recreational spaces (Barman, 2006; Finney, 2014).

While recent articulations of place-based education bring attention to settler colonialism and unsettle anthropocentrism (Greenwood, 2013; Gruenewald, 2008), these situated approaches remain on the periphery of early childhood studies and early childhood education. Furthermore, recent scholarship on land education has argued that reconceptualizations of place-based education, despite recognition of Indigenous claims to land, often serve to re-enact colonial relations to land through universalizing discourses such as reinhabitation that reinforce settler emplacement (Tuck et al., 2014). Next, we turn to the potentials of relating to place stories that center Indigenous land in early childhood environmental education. We discuss how relational place stories hold potential to challenge modernist, anthropocentric settler colonial place relations while attending to children’s differential situatedness within specific places. We are particularly interested in what attention to Indigenous relational presences amid ongoing colonialisms might mean and might enact toward decolonizing place-based and environmental early childhood education. If place is intrinsic to settler colonialism as an ongoing structure (Wolfe 1999), it matters how place is conceptualized and enacted in place-based and environmental education in settler colonial contexts. Accordingly, the following section puts forth conceptualizations of place that aim to create movement toward unsettling the absent presences of indigeneity in dominant early childhood place-based research and practice.

Indigenous places, storied places, and place stories

Many differently located Indigenous knowledges are rooted in the intrinsic relationality of humans and non-humans within the particularities of specific places. Relationality encompasses complex relations to the earth, cosmologies, living and non-living beings, and all other matter. For example, Aboriginal worldviews in what is now Australia center “relatedness with not just people, but … Ancestral country, and the animals, plants, skies, waterways” (Martin, 2007: 20). With this inextricable interdependence and interconnectedness comes a responsibility to live in ethical relationality with more-than-human others, where humans are not figured in hierarchical order in relation to others (Martin, 2007).

In these understandings, human life involves an ongoing immersion in different expressions and experiences of reciprocal relatedness. Similarly, many African philosophies of becoming emphasize enmeshment with human and non-human others, through an ethic of multiple belongings or, as Wangoola (2000) explains, in community with “the living, the unborn, the dead, and nature as a whole” (p. 271). Ukama, in the Shona language of the peoples of Zimbabwe, refers to understandings of existence as human relatedness with the entire universe, all aspects of which are understood as having a spirit, as dynamic forces that create effects on each other (Le Grange, 2011). These forces include the Creator, one’s ancestors, the elders, family, community, and more-than-human others, such as the land, including crops, waters, skies, and animals. Together, they form active influences and sensed presence in one’s everyday life. Importantly, in these ways of knowing, humans are neither separate from nature nor superior to nature.

These differently located Indigenous knowledges emanate from the creation stories of particular places, and are presented here to highlight how thinking with and relating to place as intrinsically storied is an important part of reconceptualizing and decolonizing place-based early years education. Thinking of place as storied might serve as entry toward discussions of and encounters with specific Indigenous place relations, including specific Indigenous cosmologies and relationalities with more-than-human others in specific lands. The repetition of specificity is intentional. While the preceding discussion illustrates that many Indigenous knowledges are rooted in inextricable human and more-than-human relationships, Indigenous “relationships to land and place are diverse, specific, and un-generalizable”; enacting precise teachings that are firmly rooted in particular places (Tuck et al., 2014: 8).

Importantly, more-than-human bodies, specific stories, ontologies, histories, as well as humans are all lively and entangled participants in the shaping of place (Cajete, 2000; Calderon, 2014). However, this active participation occurs within inequitable relations that create certain obscurances and erasures, such as colonial imaginaries storying place as a mute site awaiting settler inscription and capitalist property-making (Byrd, 2011; Cameron, 2011; Tuck and Yang, 2012).

Re-storying places through orientations that disrupt settler colonial imaginaries suggests a move toward looking beyond innocent perspectives of children’s place experiences and instead orienting toward explicitly politicized enactments of and dialogues with place. These dialogues with place critically encounter settler colonialism’s ongoing erasures and foreground more-than-human worlds (Simpson, 2011). Furthermore, attention to place specificities is important in confronting the effects of the Anthropocene; as Tsing (2015) notes, the “Anthropocene may always be global yet is also always parochial, perspectival and performative” (np). As such, place dialogues in critically oriented early childhood studies need to be specifically situated in particular place encounters within the geopolitical and geohistorical specificities of settler colonialism. Importantly, politicizing place stories also necessitates creating interferences in colonial and neocolonial discourses that position nature as meaningful only through human ways of knowing (Watts, 2013).

How might this call for a politicization of place through stories that bring contestations of place into view, and that attend to nature and culture as inseparable, be put to work in early childhood studies and early childhood education?

Perhaps one entry point might be for educators and researchers to inquire, alongside children and the Indigenous peoples of a particular place, how these places might be known and experienced differently through stories that highlight marginalized Indigenous stories of place and attend to the vibrant more-than-human relationalities of place. These place stories can potentially interrupt absent presences in pedagogical encounters with “nature” on stolen Indigenous lands. For instance, in a recent study on children’s everyday forest encounters in British Columbia, Canada, a Stó:lo (one of the Coast Salish First Nations of this unceded land) story of the red cedar is set alongside children’s encounters with logged ancient red cedar tree stumps, and alongside settler colonial logging histories of this particular mountain forest (Nxumalo, 2015). This living place story acts to interrupt erasures of Indigenous histories, ontologies, and epistemologies from this particular place and everyday encounters therein. This place story also interrupts dominant understandings of the forest as a “wild,” empty, and uninscribed space awaiting children’s discoveries. Furthermore, when situated within the material and discursive relations of and affectivities enacted by the logged cedar tree stumps, this situated story brings into view ongoing colonial territorializations in this particular place.

While stories that unsettle colonial relations with place are suggested here as an opening to different and unsettling relations, it is important to remain cognizant of how certain stories might act to situate non-Indigenous educators as the transmitters of Indigenous knowledges (Calderon, 2014). Both research and educational engagements with place stories require an ongoing critical engagement with what stories of place are made visible, which stories remain invisible, as well as the whys and hows of these obscurances. In other words, it is important to continually interrupt the benignity of place stories, and it may be necessary to refuse certain stories, such as those that focus on lack or damage (Tuck, 2009; Tuck and Yang, 2014). Working with these place stories, as someone not Indigenous to a particular place, also creates many frictions. For instance, is acknowledging the risks of working with Indigenous knowledges enough within ongoing settler colonialism? What might it mean for settler educators to encounter and tell such stories in places where the absences of Indigenous children, families, and educators are intimately connected with ongoing settler colonialism? Who can tell the stories of this place and the “more-than-human” things in it? These frictions also highlight the important challenge of conceptualizing pedagogies of place that trouble ongoing settler colonialisms through histories and stories without appropriating or “museumifying” Indigenous knowledges and without co-opting them toward settler colonial emplacement (Tuck and Yang, 2014). Attempts to (re)story educators’ and children’s place relations can “obscure the fact of Indigenous erasure and resilient, radical relationship to that selfsame land” (Tuck et al., 2014: 9). While these tensions and questions bring no universalized and neat resolution, they work to bring necessary complexity to pedagogies of “inclusion” in settler colonial spaces. This complexity necessitates critical considerations of the ways in which acts of “inclusion” reproduce or create marginalization and exclusions. That is to say, inclusion, in its (neo)liberal formations, can (un)intentionally re-enact reified, appropriative, essentialist, and tokenizing colonial relationships.

While staying with these tensions and the limitations of place stories, we nonetheless see them as holding potential to trouble taken-for-granted settler colonial relations and encounters in early childhood research and pedagogical contexts. For example, in enacting a decolonial orientation to attending to children’s place-learning, educators might consider how place can be encountered as more than a mute backdrop for children’s discoveries. They might also seek out the unsettling effects of pedagogies that foreground multiple stories of human and more-than-human belonging in and displacement from a place. Educators might take seriously that the storying of places occurs within inequitable relations that create certain erasures and shift their pedagogies accordingly. Such a decolonial ethics of unsettling presences and absences requires political choices, such as questioning what or whose knowledge counts in the making of a place and which past and present inhabitants of place count. Indigenous place stories matter for reconceptualizing place relations within children’s inheritances of neocolonial relations, social injustice, and ecologically damaged places.

Black places and Black feminist geographies of place

There is a growing presence of critical work on the presences and absences of Black life in environmental and geographic dialogues about current anthropogenic times. Marisa Parham (2015) names this as necessary considerations of how “Black haunts in the Anthropocene” (np), foregrounding not only the unevenness of present environmental precarity along racial lines but also the ways in which the past has been experienced differently through geohistories of racial slavery. We focus on Black geographies because they center place and space as key signifiers of materialized and spatialized inequity. In other words, Black geographies consider how past, present, and future “Black spatial matters matter” (Shabazz, 2015: 3). Spatialized inequities were at work in illegal dumping of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in mostly Black Warren County, North Carolina; in the regional and national collective blind-eye turned toward the Black residents of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina; in the recent poisoning of children through lead-contaminated water in Flint, Michigan; and many more (Pulido, 2016).

While noting the centrality of slave plantation histories to understanding “the geographic management of blackness, race, and racial difference” (McKittrick, 2011: 953), Black feminist geographies also bring important complexity to understandings of North American Black relations to place in normative views of plantation slave labor histories. For example, Dianne Glave (2010) makes visible African American environmental place stories which demonstrate historical in-depth Black knowledge (such as knowledge of soil chemistry) and respect of land, including making visible environmental aspects of prominent civil rights narratives. Glave (2010) also unsettles dominant narratives of Black land relations through stories of Black sea-men, such as Olaudah Equiano, Harry Dean, and William B. Gould.

In another example, Tiffany Lethabo King’s (2016) brilliant article discusses how colonial and humanist “scopic regimes” (p. 1) have over-determined representations of Blackness, Black geographies, and Black humanity through laboring bodies. She draws on a framework of Black “fungibility” to reconsider Black relationships within plantation landscapes as not only subject to dehumanizing settler-master imaginaries but also as a mode of troubling Enlightenment human/non-human boundaries, relations, and symbolic economies. Through an illustrative analysis of spatialized representations of Black bodies in the film Daughters of the Dust and a colonial map titled Map of South Carolina and a Part of Georgia, she eloquently makes visible how a “focus on the fungible flux of Blackness can temporarily arrest the tendency to assume that Black life always-already orients itself around the human as the center of space and life” (p. 2). In the film analysis, King focuses on the imagery of porous hands, stained by Indigo processing on slave plantations, to consider how the socio-materialities of Indigo chemicals seeping into Black bodies, might be read as a refusal of “Cartesian separations of human from non-human life forms” (p. 8). King’s work neither erases nor transcends the violence of slave plantation life and its ongoing effects on spatialized Black life in contemporary North America. Instead, staying with these uneven inheritances, her decolonizing work inspires us to remain on the lookout for non-anthropocentric, embodied, and speculative Black relations to space and place.

Another example is found in Zora Neale Hurston’s (1937) novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, where protagonist Janie Crawford’s understandings of her Black womanhood are often described through her spiritual relationship to pear trees and material relationship to land under a post-reconstruction Florida sharecropper economic system. The final scenes, in which Janie and her husband Tea Cake attempt to survive life-threatening flooding in the Everglades wetlands (“the muck”) after a hurricane, illustrate the complexities of Black embodied knowledges of and relationships with land amid violent material and discursive landscapes. This story enacts disruptions of a disconnectedness between Black life and land while keeping in view the agency of nature and the challenges of navigating life in racial landscapes.

Mirroring the relative absence of scholarly work on Black environmental imaginaries (Finney, 2014; Holland, 2002; Outka, 2008), Black feminist geographies are largely absent from critical dialogues about place and environment in early childhood studies. Despite this absence, we see them as providing possibilities for early childhood educators and scholars to think through young children’s place relations in ways that trouble nature/culture and human/non-human binaries and that critically interrogate deficit or empty views of Black people’s relations to so-called natural places. Perspectives from Black feminist geographies bring new possibilities for relating to place, land, and space through “a decolonial poetics that reads black dispossession as a ‘question mark’” (McKittrick, 2013: 5; emphasis added) and thereby imagines otherwise Black futurities that refuse Black life as ungeographic or placeless. These futures do not aim to erase the endurances and ever-shifting formations of the violences enacted by past–present plantation histories, yet inquire into affirmative anti-colonial Black futurities through geographies of persistence and inventiveness (McKittrick, 2013).

Relations to place and more-than-human lifeworlds within the context of North America are situated past–present geographies of anti-Blackness, whether or not these are immediately apparent. This includes the absence of Black bodies from certain urban outdoor places, and the hyper-surveilled containment of Black bodies within places of environmental abandonment and decay (Shabazz, 2015). At the same time, Black feminist geographies teach us that encounters with and experiences with Black geographies are complex and cannot be contained within stories of damaged place relations, surveillance, and absenting (King, 2016; McKittrick, 2011).

Taking up the challenge to bring insights from Black feminist geographies into conversation with place-based and environmental early childhood studies can take this work in a multiplicity of enriching directions in situated time–place–space locations. One such possibility would be to consider, within a particular place, what kinds of pedagogies might trouble “Black narratives of un-belonging” (McKittrick, 2002: 28) and erasure in certain places? For example, while not within the field of early childhood studies, we are inspired by the work of the Black/Land project which is foregrounding Black relations to land by collecting, (re)remembering, and presencing Black land stories that interrupt views of Black life in North America as ungeographic while also refusing to dwell only in tales of damage-centered Black relations to land (Black/Land Project, 2013; Tuck et al., 2013).

How might such stories be made visible in encounters with particular places with young children? What might emerge from seeking out immigrant and Black land stories with children? For instance, while many stories of Black/land relations in North America are of displacement and destruction—such as Hogan’s Alley in what is now Vancouver, Canada (Compton, 2010), and Africville in what is now Nova Scotia, Canada (Nieves, 2007)—within these stories are also stories of survival, reciprocity, community, and refusal.

Alongside presencing situated Black land stories and relations, another possible inspiration to early childhood studies drawn from Black feminist geographies is to seek out and create artistic/creative interventions as another form of (re)storying places in ways that disrupt Black placelessness. For example, educators can draw inspiration from Black speculative fiction and Black poetics in seeking out and co-creating with children place-based and environmentally attuned literary representations that situate Black childhoods in places, including “nature” in ways that unsettle deficit or absented depictions of Black children (see examples in Capshaw, 2014; Grosvenor, 1970; Jordan, 1972). Ruha Benjamin (2016), arguing for the importance of Black speculative fictions in activating generative futurities, underlines the interruptive effect of such stories in their potential to

reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of the social world … [and] experiment with different scenarios, trajectories, and reversals, elaborating new values and testing different possibilities for creating more just and equitable societies. Such fictions are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible. This is not to say that imagining alternatives is sufficient, or that all things possible are even desirable. But how will we know if we do not routinely push the boundaries of our own thinking, which includes the stories we tell about the social world. (p. 2)

Unsettling deficit depictions of Black childhoods might include attuning to the ways in which specific depictions of Black children in “nature” strategically draw on child–nature couplings to resist images of Black children as out-of-place in nature² or resist discourses of Black childhoods undeserving of the attribute of “innocence.” These strategic forms of representation can be seen as resistant and performative worldings that simultaneously make visible the workings of anti-black representation and perform otherwise possibilities. Jackson (2016) describes such interventions as enacting “speculation as an intervention into and as theory, intensifying speculation’s performance as theory and theory’s performance by blackness” (p. 5). Put another way, while tropes of White innocent settler children in “pure” nature replicate colonial binaries (Taylor, 2013), for Black childhoods, these images from Black imaginaries can instead act in anti-colonial and anti-racist ways. These contradictions reveal the importance of attending to the fraught, contingent, and situatedness of troubling racialized nature/culture and human/more-than-human divides.

Black feminist geographies politicize, question, and shift what typically counts as knowledge both in early childhood research and in pedagogical practices. Bringing these perspectives to early childhood studies interrupts the privileged position of Eurocentric theoretical realms and brings complexity to representations of Black environmental experiences. The perspectives on place and place relationalities that have been discussed in this article see this work as a necessary intervention by taking seriously the question of how particular places might be known and experienced differently with young children through attention to marginalized stories and relations to place, vibrant more-than-human relationalities of place, and affirmative place relations for those typically seen as not-belonging in certain places.

Posthuman geographies: Fractures, resonances, and potentialities

In resonance with Indigenous knowledges and Black feminist geographies, posthuman geographies trouble nature/culture dualisms, including Enlightenment discourses that construct an autonomous human subject, separate from more-than-human natures (Castree and Nash 2006; Whatmore, 2002, 2006). Posthumanisms have been put to work in multiple ways to interrupt the privileging of the human in knowledge-making. For instance, posthumanist perspectives have contributed to critical perspectives that examine ongoing exclusions within the category of the “Human” by making visible the unevenness (along gendered, classed, and raced lines) of embodied experiences of the world (Braidotti, 2011, 2013). Posthuman or “cyborg” geographies also foreground important ethical questions in considering the implications of technoscience and always-ongoing disruptions of human/non-human boundaries (Coyle, 2006; Haraway, 1997).

Of particular relevance to rethinking place-based and environmental education, posthumanist geographic engagements bring important insights to more-than-human others as social, agentic, and political participants in world-making with humans (Haraway, 2008; Neimanis, 2013; Tsing, 2015), particularly where these engagements bring attention to the coloniality of the nature/culture divide (Plumwood, 1993) and to anti-Blackness in histories of nature (Haraway, 1989, 1991). Posthumanist perspectives suggest a shift away from child-centered developmental environmental pedagogies toward pedagogies that bring attention to children’s entanglements within multiple human and more-than-human relations (Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015).

Alongside their resonances with Indigenous philosophies and Black feminist geographies, posthumanisms have been critiqued for some of the ways in which they have been taken up, without attention to their EuroWestern genealogies and location (Sundberg, 2014). One consequence of this absence of location has been a presumptive universalization of the human/non-human or nature/culture divide and consequent erasure of relational Indigenous onto-epistemologies. Feminist geographer Juanita Sundberg (2014) refers to these as “Eurocentric performances … that frame Europe as the primary architect of world history and bearer of universal values, reason, and theory” (p. 34).

Black feminist scholar Zakiiya Jackson (2015) questions whether posthuman theories might perhaps inadvertently reinstate transcendentalist Eurocentrism in leaving largely unexamined, ongoing, and uneven racialized ordering within the normative “human” that these perspectives seek to decenter. Challenging a discourse of “moving beyond the human” in some expressions of posthumanism, Jackson brings attention to the problematics of the ongoing illegibility of differential humanities from within the category of human which continue to contest what counts as “human” in EuroWestern epistemologies. These are necessary interventions amid intimate entanglements of the category of non-human with anti-Blackness in past–present histories. In these ways, Black feminist geographies bring attention to situated uneven geographies in thinking with the posthuman. In relation to place-attuned childhood studies, Black feminist geographies provide ways to decenter humanist child-centered views while simultaneously calling for a responsive orientation and curiosity toward increasing unlivability for marginalized children in the Anthropocene and toward the differential accumulation of anthropogenic inheritances. There are all too many current examples of this unlivability that illustrate the uneven inheritances of the Anthropocene.

Conclusion

In this article, we have engaged with some of the ways we see Black feminist geographies and Indigenous onto-epistemologies as critical to reconceptualizing place-based and environmental early childhood research and practice. While Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies are largely absent from mainstream research and practice in the early childhood field, we see them as bringing much needed politicized attention to place in environmental education, including questions about what counts as “nature” and which children are seen as belonging and “out of place” in nature. We also see these perspectives as a necessary part of developing, within the context of North America, a decolonizing, anti-racist, and situated ethics in environmental and place-attuned early childhood studies. Such an ethics includes noticing and responding to the racialized inequalities enacted by anthropogenic change; deciding which place encounters, stories, and histories to make visible; and, continually questioning what and whose knowledge counts in the making of a place. We have also discussed how Black feminist geographies and Indigenous knowledges might be in conversation with posthumanist theories. While staying with the tensions brought by bringing posthuman perspectives into conversation with differently situated Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies, we have discussed how together they bring important disruptions to and complexity to the category of the human, subverting taken-for-granted anthropocentric narratives of “knowing” a place. These perspectives open up potentialities for (re)storying young children’s place encounters in ways that more explicitly engage with questions of racialized environmental (in)justice, human/more-than-human relationalities, as well as past–present settler colonial histories of place. These are necessary movements in ongoing research and pedagogical processes of troubling normative terrains of place-based and environmental early childhood studies.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Fikile Nxumalo is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also affiliated faculty with African and African Diaspora Studies and with Native American and Indigenous Studies. Her research and pedagogical interests are centered on environmental and place-attuned education in early childhood that is situated within and responsive to uneven anthropogenic and settler colonial inheritances.

Stacia Cedillo is a Doctoral Student in the Cultural Studies in Education program at the University of Texas at Austin. She is interested in the situated relationality of the cultural, the scientific, and the human, particularly in teacher education.

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