Speculative visions: Stories and slogans for ecopedagogical relations

Abstract

This article examines the implications of two provocative scholarly slogans—Donna Haraway’s “Make Kin Not Babies” and Sophie Lewis’s “Abolish the Family”—for children, childhoods, and ecopedagogies in the early years. Engaging critically with these concepts, the article highlights their potential to disrupt entrenched norms while acknowledging the discomfort and uncertainty they may evoke. It begins by interrogating the normalized centrality of “the family” in early childhood teacher education and childhood studies, arguing that this focus constrains alternative imaginaries of care and justice. The discussion situates Haraway’s and Lewis’s slogans within broader debates, critiquing how idealized family structures often align with humanist stewardship pedagogy, which presumes humanity’s exceptional capacity to save both children and the planet. By contrast, speculative narratives, such as Netflix’s Sweet Tooth, offer opportunities to reimagine the child, family, and future by emphasizing interconnections between humans and the more-than-human world. These stories open space for counter-imaginaries, inspiring alternative communal formations and transformative practices. Ultimately, the article advocates for a pedagogy of discomfort and generous suspicion as ecopedagogical strategies to interrogate existing care structures and envision more equitable and interconnected futures.

Keywords

childhood studies family hybrid children multispecies relations speculative fiction

Introduction

Slogans, by definition, risk oversimplification, but they also serve as powerful tools for succinctly conveying ideas. I have been dwelling with two scholarly slogans, Haraway’s (2016) “Make Kin Not Babies” and Lewis’s (2022) “Abolish the Family,” and their potential ramifications for children, childhoods, and care practices in the early years. Despite my humbling appreciation for Haraway’s work, I admit a certain aversion to her claim. But I am not looking for easy dismissal either. As for Lewis’s interjection, I am concerned it might be prematurely shut out before its transformative potential can be engaged. Long inspired by Boler’s (1999) concept of a “pedagogy of discomfort,” which supports staying with uneasiness, uncertainty, and incommensurability, I am leaning into the learning that occurs at the boundaries of comfort zones. Staying with discomfort entails attuning to others and other ideas in ways that extend openings rather than halt movement. Haraway (2016: 137) has asked “readers to practice generous suspicion,” recognizing that what is put on offer can inspire new thought while also containing “political and ecological mistakes.” This article approaches these slogans and the ecopedagogical worldings they invite questioningly and generously.

In the first section of this paper, I trouble the taken-for-grantedness of “the family”¹ in early childhood education and childhood studies. I am not implying that the family is an infrequent topic but signaling the reverse; the family is so fundamental to these fields that thinking outside of it feels nearly impossible. Next, I map out the larger contexts of “Make Kin Not Babies” and “Abolish the Family” and their implications for reframing environmental justice. I include both a review of Haraway’s (2016) and Lewis’s (2022) texts and some critical responses they have generated. This is followed by discussion of the significance of speculative stories in the “public pedagogy of the Anthropocene” (Sheldon, 2016: 150). Here, I examine the familialism of post-apocalyptic climate change stories in addition to the functions of the figure of the child in this genre. I consider the catchphrases in relation to ecopedagogy through a speculative story of child-animal figures in a postapocalyptic world where familiar arrangements of production, consumption, and reproduction have been upended. Netflix’s Sweet Tooth (Mickle et al., 2021-2024) is not so much a pedagogical tool for teaching children in the classroom, but an offering of pedagogy itself. Lastly, I offer ecopedagogical implications for the slogans and speculative storytelling in ways that bring previous sections together.

Situating the family

The family features prominently in my primary areas of study, early childhood teacher education and childhood studies. Arguably, the family is one of its “proper objects” (Butler, 1994), after children and childhood. But what exactly is the family? The family is much more elusive than first seems. My common sense understanding of family as a group of people, often biologically related, who provide care has been expanded exponentially. Barrett and McIntosh (1991) note, the family is an ideology. It is also a social and economic institution organized around close kinship relations (Barrett and McIntosh, 1991). Lewis (2022) argues that the family, through its privatization of care, is the primary unit responsible for survival in an unequal society with limited social safety nets. The family, as traditionally understood, serves as the prototype for loving relationships, rooted in the mythic concept of the “maternal bond” and bio-child (The Care Collective, 2020). It has been idealized as a self-sufficient unit, confined to a physical household, requiring little support from the state (Griffiths and Gleeson, 2015). It is where potential wage workers grow and develop competencies of capitalism, privatized responsibility, and gendered divisions of labor. The family serves as a crucial support system for capitalism—it is its life system, buffering individuals from economic pressures. However, the traditional family ideal is not universal or timeless.² It is a product of historical and cultural contingencies, often masking inequalities and serving as an alibi for oppressive and imperialist structures (Sánchez, 2022).

This layered understanding of the family has not been foremost in my university teaching of early childhood education. Influenced by anti-bias approaches (Derman-Sparks et al., 2020), the dominant framing of the family I have drawn upon can be characterized as multicultural pluralism wherein previously marginalized groups are brought into a preexisting norm. In other words, it is about more family rather than contesting the family as an institution, history, and discourse.³ Anti-bias approaches to the family include practicing culturally sensitive communication with families, sharing and celebrating family rituals, displaying family photos on the walls, and facilitating connections among families. I give readings on respecting diversity and assignments where students collect picture books to this effect, including those featuring queer families and intergenerational households who have long been excluded from these spaces. To be clear, I am not advocating against the inclusion and celebration of diverse family forms. This is still difficult and necessary work as there is a “hierarchy of difference” amongst family forms that reflects broader societal beliefs and biases (Robinson, 2013). Nevertheless, my intention here is to ask: what else than the family?⁴ Machado de Oliveira (2021: 96) describes “hospicing modernity” as recognizing “the eventual inevitable end of modernity’s fundamentally unethical and unsustainable institutions, but sees the necessity of enabling a ‘good’ death through which important lessons are processed.” I propose that early childhood teacher education might take seriously the possibility of hospicing the family, and that Haraway and Lewis provide rallying calls to get started.

Connective threads linking early childhood teacher education and childhood studies involve a rethinking of care and justice. Robinson (2013: 34) deconstructs how the family has been storied as a sacred space “constituted in opposition to the public world” (p. 34). In the private sphere of the family, children are purported to be shielded from the corrupting influences of public politics and their politicization and agency disavowed. Care can be controlled. This can be seen in the continued influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and nature discourses in early childhood education. However, the figure of the innocent children kept pure in/by nature has also been troubled (Cutter-Mackenzie et al., 2019; Taylor, 2013), particularly when it comes to engaging with the ecological challenges children face today. The climate crisis has made the necessity of reconfiguring ways of caring more essential than ever. Childhood studies scholars have opposed compartmentalized views of the childhoods (e.g. nature vs culture; private vs public; being vs becoming), and formulated worlding perspectives that promote “ecological justice by teaching the arts of living respectfully and responsibly on a damaged planet” (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020: 3). In conversation with this worlding work (Malone and Crinall, 2023; Nxumalo and Ross, 2019; Osgood, 2021), I see generative potential to decentre the family (alongside scholarship that decenters the child) as another stubborn tether to the sort of humanism that perpetuates ecological damage and delimits care practices, something I will return to later in an analysis of Sweet Tooth.

Haraway’s appeal to “Make Kin Not Babies”

The slogan “Make Kin Not Babies,” from Haraway’s (2016) book Staying with the Trouble and related works (Clarke and Haraway, 2018; Haraway, 2015, 2018; Strathern et al., 2019), emerged as a response to pressing ecological challenges of our time, provoking heated discussion and critical examination. Haraway supports her call by arguing that the world is already abundant with humans, asserting that those most in positions of consumptive privilege should prioritize forging kinship bonds beyond the couple dyad. The larger implications of her proposition challenge traditional notions of reproduction and family, urging the care-full cultivation of “oddkin” over bio-centric procreation (Haraway, 2016: 2). By urging a shift toward prioritizing alliances across species boundaries, Haraway emphasizes the need for multispecies relationality to address urgent ecological concerns. For me, “Make Kin Not Babies” signifies a radical departure from traditional modes of thinking about kinship as tied to the traditional family. It prompts me to reconsider the dominant human-centric narrative of family belonging; it demands non-genealogical and cross-species kin making that has import for both early childhood education and childhood studies. Haraway calls for the cultivation of kinship based on responsibility and solidarity and envisions speculative approaches to parenting and adoption practices that could scale up to real global consequence.

Haraway’s catchphrase intertwines with broader socio-political issues, most visible in the companion call to “Make Kin Not Population,”⁵ which evokes, even as Haraway disavows, unequal distributions of livingness that come attached to human numbers. Anticipating criticism, Haraway (2016) offers a response.⁶ Haraway (2016: 209) clearly states that the “inalienable personal right to birth or not to birth a new baby is not in question” and that coercion is always wrong. She notes that a misplaced fear of immigrants drives pronatalist rhetoric in many countries with low birth and high consumption rates and asserts that her position aligns with #BlackLivesMatter. She maintains that marginalized communities require freedom and support to grow their populations. However, Haraway is steadfast in her insistence that human numbers be taken seriously, regardless of how uncomfortable it may make others. With almost 8 billion people on Earth and many more projected, Haraway (2016: 208) insists that this carrying capacity “cannot be borne without immense damage to human and nonhuman beings.” Neglecting discussions surrounding human population amounts to denialism, Haraway contends, and refuses a crucial aspect shaping our collective future. Haraway (2016: 208) makes the claim that avoiding population talk can be “partially compared to some Christian climate-change deniers: beliefs and commitments are too deep to allow rethinking and refeeling.” Haraway knows her twin slogans are going to spark outrage, but she remains resolute.

Haraway (1997: 36) has long insisted that we must “cast our lot for some ways of life and not others.” Whose worlds is “Make Kin Not Babies” for? As mentioned, my fields of study are indivisible from children; children, those both literal and figurative, are their disciplinary conditions of possibility. While not a nuanced articulation, I felt hit by Haraway’s “Not Babies” just as I did by the comparison to Christian climate-change deniers. Haraway holds an influential position in the scholarly discussions I engage with, and her work has been profoundly generative for many—including myself. Articulating my discomfort feels just as scary as taking on the family in early childhood education. Can I hold onto Haraway’s idea that the responsibility for children belongs to everyone, not solely parents, while also querying why children are the target of her slogan and population its ghost? Practicing “generous suspicion” invites critical reflection, and the subsequent engagements begin this with “Make Kin Not Babies.” Mattheis (2022: 512) focuses on the babies evoked by Haraway’s phrase and cautions that it reflects “adultist constructions of children as passive kin ‘being made’” instead of co-participants in the making of futures. What sorts of speculative stories might children create? What are their kin-making practices? Appleton and Glabau (2022) agree that making kin non-biologically is necessary, but that Haraway seems to largely “ignore the fact that making kin—biological or otherwise—has been a privilege that white women have historically enjoyed. For other women, kin-making has been severely denied.” Subramaniam (2018) urges serious engagement with the ideas but warns that behind the babies is a “specter of overpopulation continues to re-invoke xenophobic white anxieties of the black and brown hordes that knock at the West’s doors.” How do we attend to the racialized and colonial histories of number discourses and reproductive politics while also welcoming the queer potential of Haraway’s making kin?

Behind every slogan lies a depth of meaning and a complex set of ideas that require further exploration, and some of Haraway’s interlocutors do not think she digs deep enough into population politics. I think we can recognize the ironic intent of Haraway’s taglines while still doing the work of placing them in fuller context. Historically, population policies have been directed toward particular places and particular faces. Murphy’s (2017: 41) work on the economization of life problematizes the reconfiguration of the biopolitical motive of “some must die so that others can live” to the Anthropocene relevant “some must not be born so that future others might live more abundantly (consumptively).” She elaborates on how population transformed into a calculable concept used by nation-states to boost economic productivity during the 20th century. This meant that certain bodies became a problem for which coercive sterilization, enforced birth control, border walls, colonialism, restrictive health care, racist violence, and even education, were posed and non-innocent managerial solutions. Murphy’s work fiercely contests any evocation of (over)population discourse. “Population points the finger at masses,” she explains, “rather than distributions and accumulations, at people rather than economy” (Murphy, 2017: 137). Haraway’s evocation of babies and population as cause with effect of climate crisis may lack nuance in this regard.

Population growth alone does not lead to environmental degradation, including most measures of the Anthropocene Great Acceleration (Steffen et al., 2015). In other words, the ecological impacts of human activity are not equivalent to the increase of human numbers (Ojeda et al., 2020).⁷ This is because factors like technology, distributions of wealth, health care access, and exploitation of resources play a more significant role in driving environmental damage, including increased carbon emissions (Ojeda et al., 2020: 32). Sasser (2018: 150) stresses that measurable, “direct environmental impacts driven by human numbers are nearly impossible to tease out because they are not, and never have been, simply biological—they are the result of biological, and political, and economic, and technological and cultural processes and practices.” While population might seem far from the concerns of child-related disciplines, it cannot be ignored that children make up the actual bodies of population discourses. While on a global scale, the world has already reached peak child (United Nations, 2024), this is not equally distributed. For example, by 2050, Africa will be home to 1 billion children, accounting for two out of every five children born globally (Hajjar, 2020). To make the shift “from working for social justice to working for ecological justice” (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020: 3), there is a crucial need to look “beyond the Western horizon” (Silova et al., 2018) when it comes to learning new ways to care and practice justice.

What “Make Kin Not Babies” might look like in practice has mostly been speculative. Haraway (2016) offers the “The Camille Stories: Children of Compost” where every child is born to at least three parents and the decision to have children is largely a community one. In a speculative twist, the human who births a baby chooses a precariously existing animal species of their home region, called a “symbiont,” for the child to become-with. In the world of the Children of Compost babies are “rare and precious,” and over five generations the global population takes up these reproductive practices and numbers massively fall (Haraway, 2016: 138). Haraway (2016: 136) offers her story as “a pilot project, a model, a work and play object, for composing collective projects,” not as a finished exercise, but as an invitation to envision a world where kinship extends beyond genetic ties, fostering a sense of collective care and responsibility across species lines. Lewis (2017: 8) points out, however, that this “fable” or “utopia of 2-3 billion human beings is supposed to arise from a choice, simply, to not make babies.” This choice is problematic. Reducing practices of reproductive justice to choice for Murphy (2017: 140) is a failure “to address the racist and economized infrastructural distributions of value that unevenly diminish and assist the possibilities for sustaining life more generally.”

In addition to the Camille stories, Haraway (2018) has played with the “partly joking” proposal of reproductive tokens in her efforts to envision “Make Kin Not Babies.” People in high-consuming, polluting states would get one token and need to collect ten to birth a child (Haraway, 2016: 75). You can give up your token and become a co-parent and forfeit future biological baby making. Regions or social classes with lower consumption rates require two or three tokens to reproduce, while communities that have experienced genocide are allocated credits to replenish and care for the “disappeared” generations. In this scheme, parents would proliferate; human numbers would be well below replacement rates. There would be no militarized enforcement of the token scale; instead, “the idea and all sorts of culturally specific practices related to it spread by infection, persuasion, and the joy of oddkin making” (Haraway, 2016: 75). Like the challenge to choice above, I worry about joy as a change motivator. I am reminded of Ahmed’s (2010) problematizing of happiness as social justification for gendered exploitation and perhaps the killjoy figure would be a better point out the limits of bio-kin reproduction.

Dow and Lamoreaux (2020: 476) inquire about how the “Make Kin Not Babies” might move from the discursive to the material: how can it “be further situated in capitalist political-economy and structures of inequality, rather than individual decisions to make or not make babies?” Instead of babies or population as taglines, they insist on a kind of ecopedagogical awareness that “requires a recognition that the kinship system that accompanies global capitalism and its buttressing ideologies of class, gender, race, nation, ability, and sexuality, is one of the drivers of climate change and environmental degradation” (Dow and Lamoreaux, 2020: 487). Although I resonate with the critiques so far, I remind myself that a “pedagogy of discomfort” involves being receptive to others and other ideas in ways that foster further exploration. I remain deeply convinced of the importance of speculative imaginings as a theory of change (Benjamin, 2024; Tuck, 2018). Hester (2018: 62) contends that “kin-making, over and against baby making” only “makes sense when understood as a means of prioritizing the generation of new kinds of support networks.” For me, this invites a turning toward the importance of speculative ethics for generating the “new,” including new arrangements of care and new pedagogies for climate education. Queer feminist poet Rich (1993: 242) calls the first “revolutionary question. . .what if.” What if children were cared for in multigenerational, multispecies arrangements? What if the family was not thought of as a refuge from climate change, but a vision for communizing care? The Camille Stories and the tokens are not a road map. Rather than dismissing Haraway’s speculative turn, however, I suggest approaching it alongside texts such as Lewis’s manifesto for family abolition. Together, these revisions of the family propose new what ifs.

Lewis’s call to “Abolish the Family”

Calls to “abolish the family” are often met with misunderstanding. However, like Haraway’s defense of her slogan, family abolitionists can anticipate critiques while outlining alternative ways of organizing care relations. These include: family abolition is not an attack on individual families but targets the family as an institution (Weeks, 2023); it is “not about not making babies, it is about transforming social, economic and environmental arrangements” (Dow and Lamoreaux, 2020); it is not about “breaking up individual families but about radically changing the society that makes the family structure necessary, about creating a society in which everyone is cared for” (Sánchez, 2022: 9). To abolish the family does not consign to destruction without alternatives. In other words, “to abolish is not the same as to destroy,” what we need to consider is “what is superseded, and what is preserved, in the movement to abolish the family” (O’Brien, 2020: 361). To abolish the family does not ignore our affective investments either. Lewis (2022: 23) clarifies that it is “not our collective desire for care that I am criticizing; it is the insufficiency of the vehicle we have at our disposal for that desire’s realization.” Practices of love and care include subverting normative ideologies that cause harm as much (if not more) than healing. According to Lewis, family abolition does not subtract care; rather, it transforms it.

Lewis (2022) faces these misunderstandings head on in Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation. In her text, Lewis provides a provocative rethinking of the family, challenging its entrenched role in contemporary society and advocating for its abolition. She critiques the prevailing belief in the necessity of the heteropatriarchal nuclear family (and its non-hetero variations), arguing that alternative forms of reproduction and kinship are not only possible but crucial for a more just and equitable society. Beyond disregarding the family, Lewis (2022: 13) showcases broader reimagining of care, community, and socioeconomic organization that already exists in “micro-cultures which could be scaled up if the movement for a classless society took seriously the premise that households can be formed freely and run democratically.” But abolishing the family is not easy or a quick fix. It entails transforming multiscale relations to foster loving solidarities to create “a world sustained by kith and kind more than by kin” (Lewis, 2022: 26). This vision has much import for child-related disciplines that focus on the family and justice. For example, family abolition might encourage a rethinking of early learning and care programs far beyond “babysitting” services or secondary, privatized care provision for working families. Valuing early childhood educators has long been an argument in scholarship (Arndt et al., 2020; McLeod and Giardiello, 2019; Moss, 2010; Osgood, 2016), and family abolition offers an alternative framework divorced from “the logic of work” and replete with possibility for advocacy.

Additionally, family abolitionists deconstruct the “familialisation of society” (Barrett and McIntosh, 1991: 31), which can be “explained in terms of the frequency with which the family is so fully equated with intimacy, care and solidarity themselves that to be anti-family is understood to be anti-relational” (Weeks, 2023: 437). That is perhaps why the “making kin” slice of Haraway’s (2016) slogan is the part she deems most difficult. Weeks (2023) further elucidates two fundamental aspects of the family that are conditions of possibility for what is outlined thus far: the couple form and bio-genetic-centered kinship, which naturalize hierarchy along gendered and classed lines. The family relies on the naturalization of kinship to sustain the privatization of care and reinforce individualism, allowing children to be perceived as possessions (Weeks, 2023). The assumption that children benefit most from the guidance of two biological parents, with some additional adults lending support, contributes to a quasi-legal, yet naturalized belief that “the creation of the familial romantic dyad. . .this act of authorship in turn generates, for the authors, property ‘rights’ in ‘their’ progeny—parenthood—but also semi-exclusive accountability for the child’s life” (Lewis, 2022: 12).⁸

For Lewis and other collaborators, abolishing the family involves refusing the end result of “the nuclear family [that] turns children into property” (Olufemi, 2021: 144). Barrett and McIntosh (1991) outline how parents, being the primary caregivers and financial providers for their children, often feel entitled to make decisions about how their children are raised. While this may seem like common sense, it points to current issues and debates, particularly with conservative movements and schools. One notable example is the current discourse over “parental rights” and children’s gender expression.⁹ Contrary to the belief that the family is a safe place for trans and queer youth, research shows that these youth are frequently subjected to abuse and sometimes abandoned by homophobic and transphobic parents (Peter et al., 2021). The family is where abuse can be “hidden from view by the expectation that it is the place where they are most protected” (Rowbotham, 1973: 57). The family is a contemporary and historical technology of trauma for many.

King (2018: 70) points out that reformist critiques of the family always hold on to some elements of the normative and liberal Western understanding of the family. Consequently, the family persists as “a site of violence and dehumanization that threatens to engulf Black sociality,” and therefore cannot be rehabilitated in ways that eliminate anti-Blackness. Given this, King (2018: 79) refers to the family as a form of “borrowed institutionality,” where, in an anti-Black world, the family provides temporary recognition but still denies genuine intelligibility as properly human. The whiteness of much family abolition ignores the deliberate disruption of Black families during slavery, a strategy used to maintain control and reproduce capital: Partus sequitur ventrem—the child follows the belly” (Hartman, 2016: 166). So long as the systems and infrastructures of this world are unchanged, a reformed family would “probably be little different from the household patterns and ideology that we know as ‘the family’ at present” (Barrett and McIntosh, 1991: 158). So, to abolish the family is to eradicate what hooks (2012) captures as “transnational white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (p. 6). In other words, the goal is not to “transform not the family—but the society that needs it” (Barrett and McIntosh, 1991: 159). Its roots are deeply entrenched in racialized capitalism and settler colonialism.

A central question threaded throughout Lewis’s (2022) manifesto is “whose family are we abolishing?” (Chapter 2), which highlights a criticality that many perceived to be lacking in Haraway’s recent work. Lewis (2022) emphasizes that making kin has historically been a privilege experienced by white women, while racialized individuals have been denied reproductive freedom, often coercively. The effects are not just historical. In today’s neoliberal climate, privatized and insular care can clasp on to “a paranoid form of ‘care for one’s own’” that fuels hard-right populism worldwide, including xenophobic attitudes toward migrants (The Care Collective, 2020: 21). For example, the US government decision to forcibly separate children from their parents at the southern border and put them in cages is not family abolition—it is racist enactments of whose families (and lives) are valued.¹⁰ Ecofascist conspiracy theories blame birth rates in the Global South for unsustainable population growth resulting in disastrous environmental issues (Hancock, 2022). Antinatalism and ecofacism have become intertwined (Anson, 2020; Taylor, 2020), in ways that return to the important critique of Haraway’s population proposal shared above. Population control measures are often advocated that carry the shadow of forced sterilization practices; for example, Sexual Sterilization Acts in Canadian provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, which forcibly sterilized Indigenous women in state care without their free informed consent, and were not repealed until the 1970s (Leason, 2021; Stote, 2015).

Furthering the settler colonial critique, TallBear (2018: 145) traces the co-emergence of settler forms of sexuality, family, and private property in Indigenous communities. “It was not always so,” she instructs, “that the monogamous couple ideal reigned.” Prior to colonization in the US and Canada, many Indigenous nations were matrilineal societies and the “fundamental social unit. . .was the extended kin group, including plural marriage” (TallBear, 2018: 148). Settler land distribution rules mandated that women must be in Christian-heterosexual-monogamous marriages to obtain land (K’é Infoshop Collective, 2019). These laws, along with the institution of marriage itself, marginalized women and children, treating them as the property of men. The horrors of residential schools, forced adoptions of the Sixties Scoop, and the current epidemic of child removals under the guise of child protections (e.g. more Indigenous children are in “care” now than at the high point of residential schools) are undeniable proof that, again, not all families are valued. Reproduction can be a danger to the state and family status quo.

Carby (1982: 213), among others, has critiqued the white feminist universalization of the family: “We would not wish to deny that the family can be a source of oppression for us, but we also wish to examine how the black family has functioned as a prime source of resistance to oppression.” The family is not one thing; its primary function may be capitalistic protectionism, but that is not its only role. Weeks (2023: 437) interjects, “to say that the nuclear family form was imposed on communities with different practices of care and sociality is not to say that it was simply replicated.” Families can be figurative and literal barriers against a racist world; they can shape shift in response to violence and need (King, 2018). They can provide refuge from oppressive forces like police, social welfare agencies, and immigration authorities, while also protecting and sustaining language and cultural practices (King, 2018; Weeks, 2023). Nevertheless, and this point is key, the normative family structure that offers sanctuary and survival to many marginalized communities “is the very same white, settler, bourgeois, heterosexual and patriarchal institution that was imposed by the state, society, and capital on the formerly enslaved, indigenous peoples, and waves of immigrants, all of whom continue to be at once in need of its meager protections and marginalized by its legacies and prescriptions” (Weeks, 2023: 436). The family is needed because of this violence, even as it may defend its members against it.

In summary, the family is a complex institution that serves various functions in society, including social reproduction, ideological reinforcement, and economic support. It is a source of joy and trauma; it is a place of refuge and risk; it is both a choice and inherited. It operates within larger systems of power and inequality, perpetuating certain social hierarchies while masking its own constructed nature. Advocating for alternative forms of kinship and care, Lewis and her family abolition comrades can push those of us in child-related disciplines to imagine a queerer world where children are everyone’s responsibility, and on that point, I think Haraway and Lewis are aligned. “To affirm family abolitionism,” Weeks (2023: 434) explains, “is to be willing to play the long game” even as our struggles are more and more urgent. This long game returns me to Machado de Oliveira’s (2021) hospicing proposal, that insists on sustained care as new forms of relationality gather strength. This care is not separate from justice, including the intersection of social, ecological, and reproductive justice.

Reproductive justice not reproductive futurism

The family’s hegemonic function is to ensure reproductive futurism. It is the continuation of genetic lineage, the passing down of values, and the perpetuation of societal norms through the socialization of its youngest members that yoke the figure of the child to the family’s durability as an ideology, institution, and structure. Coined by Edelman (2004) and given an eco-attuned twist by Sheldon (2016), reproductive futurism promises bio-kin replication and human species continuance into the future. With climate crisis all around, the child is simultaneously massively vulnerable and the safeguard against apocalypse (Sheldon, 2016). Yet because this future and the child are figures of the horizon—never quite graspable and always on their way to something else (e.g. adulthood, tomorrow)—there is little urgency in abolishing what does so many children harm. Much like the family, then, the child of reproductive futurism represents the symbolic encapsulation of “an imagined proper, natural, and secure social order” that never was or will be (Out of the Woods Collective, 2015: para. 12). The child that Edelman (1998: 21) rages against as the heteronormative “renewal of the barren world through the miracle of birth” is more and more difficult amidst ongoing environmental destruction. This is why I urge a refusal of reproductive futurism for a robust pedagogy of reproductive justice that takes lessons from family abolition, one that insists on a “distributive reproductive politics” that is “not just the baby” (Murphy, 2017: 109) but is also not “Not Babies.”

Reproductive justice, Murphy (2017: 142) outlines, “is the struggle for the collective conditions for sustaining life and persisting over time amid life-negating structural forces, and not just the right to have or not have children.” This conceptualization of reproductive justice is in lock step with other ecological, anti-transphobic, anti-racist, and anti-colonial movements. As Murphy (2018) argues, reproductive justice entails persistent efforts to actively create conditions that scaffold life in the face of entrenched structures that deny it. Murphy (2018: 102) raises the question of which concepts “might be relinquished to pave the way for alternative approaches to creating a politics of reproductive justice.” Which relationships should be dismantled, rejected, or hospiced? What should be abolished? Based on my review thus far, I believe that population and the nuclear family could be on that list. How can we think reproduction “without also reproducing the worst of reproductive futurity” (Hester, 2018: 55)? Part of this entails moving from anthropocentric framings toward more-than-human alliances.

Sturgeon (2010: 103) conceptualizes “environmental reproductive justice” as a term connecting ecological, planetary, and social justice issues. Adding in environmental muddles up understandings of bionormative reproduction that are tied to familiar imaginaries. Sturgeon (2010: 108) presences how “reproduction is a materialist and a planetary issue—that is, all reproduction comes with consequences for the global environment, economies, and social practices.” This requires moving from an idea of reproduction understood as human fertility or procreation within the family to reproductive politics on a planetary scale. To build up the concept of planetary reproduction, Sturgeon (2009: 104) turns to popular animated tales of environmentalism written for children, which associate “homosexuality, evil, and environmental destruction, coupled with an anxiety about the successful reproduction of white middle-class families” behind a surface-level promotion of “liberal racial equality.” The nuclear, white, suburban, middle-class family is presented as “natural, normal, and the best for the planet” (Sturgeon, 2009: 104), even in stories bereft of humans and featuring animals. Insufficient attention, Sturgeon argues, is also given to the links between this family form and consumptive complicity. When this family structure is presented as a guarantor of planetary survival, instead of a major contributor to its destruction, a scenario results “in which we are promoting environmental damage by naturalizing heteronormative patriarchy, preventing us from imagining and putting in place alternative ways of living more lightly on the earth” (Sturgeon, 2009: 107).

Often in speculative texts of climate crisis, the failure to care on a planetary scale is exceptionally performed through the displacement of the heteronormative bio-family: this can be called the familialization of post-apocalyptic storytelling. Planetary precarity, despite the ecological disaster unfolding, largely takes shape as a failure to maintain the hegemonic family form and is rectified by a fierce commitment to bio-kin survival. The parental bond—focused on care from the adult toward the bio-child—acts as a concentrated unit to think about climate change. Care for the planet and care for the future are performed by way of care for the child (Ashton, 2022). Familial relations serve as “a psychological and emotional touchstone” wherein the planetary is reframed “as a question of one’s responsibility for one’s children” (Johns-Putra, 2016: 524). If the bio-bond is strong enough, care-full enough, and durable enough then just maybe there is a possibility of survival amongst the Anthropocene-induced ruins.

A major post-apocalyptic trope then involves “the reunification of the heteronormative white family at the center of the drama” (Fojas, 2017: 11). Lothian (2018: 182) discusses how the end of the world often serves as a conventional plot device that can be resolved “through the resolution of a heterosexual family plot,” where “children, and the possibility of children, allow a future for humanity in its current form to be salvaged from the world’s end.” By endorsing a future that mirrors the already past present, true futurity—futurity as a collective project of imagination and innovation—is precluded (Weeks, 2023). Another extension of this is to say that if we save the family, we save the world. A slight twist to Lothian’s insight in that it is not humanity or the family in its present form that is the object of redemption, but humanity and family as it should be. It is an eco-attuned humanity not “guilty of the Anthropocene scar” that should be saved (Colebrook, 2017: 84), which is again why there is such focus on the innocent child in climate fiction and film: “if innocent children are lost, then all of mankind is lost” (Olson, 2024: 92). Instead, as Jobbs (2024: 122) suggests, we would be better off asking, “What does care beyond the family look like in post-apocalyptic times?” How might family abolition inspire new ways of living on a damaged earth? Rather than reaffirming the imaginary that the parent plus child dyad equals ecological survival, I am most drawn to speculative texts that locate the promise and premise of care outside of the traditional family.

Sweet Tooth’s multispecies alliances

Plugged by reviewers as “a brutal post-apocalyptic drama [that] somehow also manages to be perfect family fare” (Seale, 2023), Sweet Tooth refigures the concept of family for the viewing family in the dual context of COVID-19 and a speculative pandemic. Based on a comic series by Jeff Lemire, the Netflix series presents a world 10 years after “The Great Crumble.” The contagious “Sick” has wiped out most of the human population and continues to threaten the few survivors. Simultaneously, a new population of child-animal hybrids has emerged; all babies born since the outbreak are hybrids who are immune to the virus. Sweet Tooth both actualizes and disrupts post-apocalyptic tropes. Like many stories in this genre, it depicts a world devoid of most technology where human extinction is imminent. It is also a visual naturescape—greenery abounds, snow-capped mountains loom in the distance, and large animals roam freely. For the most part, nature appears untouched by (or perhaps recovered from) climate change. There are few intact bio-families in the series, yet this reworking of family is a constant presence. I am particularly interested in how alternative relationships of care in the series might not quite arrive at a place of abolishing the family, but nevertheless figure “making kin” in differential arrangements that are not capitalistically, genetically, or generationally delimited.

To enter the speculative world of Sweet Tooth is to care for Gus. Gus, a 10-year-old deer-boy hybrid, is the heart and center of Sweet Tooth. From the moment he comes on screen, there is no doubt about his hybrid status. His deer ears are wondrous; his body is not-only human, which makes us curious about his origin story. Eventually, the audience learns that the virus’s origin was a lab experiment gone wrong. There was mutation; there were unintended consequences. Gus, and the audience, find this out when Gus reads his name on a file folder, only it is spelt out as Genetic Unit Series 1: G.U.S. This is in stark contrast to the image of Gus to which we have become attached. The deer-boy invested in is a child of nature, raised away from society deep in Yellowstone National Park by his parental surrogate, Pubba. Care here was privatized in the household and in nature; the child kept innocent. Once humans interrupt their woodsy isolation and Pubba succumbs to the virus, young Gus sets out into the world to find his mother, only to learn later that Birdie, his assumed bio-mom, was the lead scientist that created him. In the adventures that follow, however, we meet other child-hybrids and the Animal Army, along with adult characters who possess neither their charisma nor ethics of care.

As viewers, we are appalled by the human-made origins of the virus and its subsequent destruction, but we are also mourning something else. Gus’s suffering—and our empathy—twine together the discovery that the virus was created and that he has no biological parents. Much of Gus’s hope for his post-apocalyptic world hinged on finding his mother, a journey that leads him to discoveries that shake his ontological core: Pubba is not his father, Birdie is not his mother, and he has no biological parents at all, only a team of scientists who created him using microscopic organisms. Bear, Gus’s trusted teenage companion and founder of the Animal Army, attempts to comfort Gus by sharing that she was adopted, and that does not make her family any less loving or real. Instead of its calming intention, Gus lashes out and tries to get as far away as he can from any human helpers. As he runs through the forest, Gus is joined by a pack of deer who recognize their own kin-kind (S1E7). This moment, along with additional animal encounters, confirm for me that perhaps the nuclear family form is not meant for a future world of zoonotic disease and climate survival.

In season two, a collection of child-animal-hybrids forms a multispecies kin group, illustrating a bond that transcends traditional human familial structures. These hybrids, each embodying traits of different animals, support and protect one another in a world that views them with fear and hostility. Their connection is not based on biological ties but rather on shared experiences, mutual empathy, and the necessity of survival in a post-apocalyptic environment. Through their interactions, Sweet Tooth emphasizes themes of inclusivity and the beauty of finding caregiving relations in unexpected places, ultimately portraying the hybrids as a hopeful symbol of a more interconnected future. Besides their glorious visuality—there is a child-hybrid pig, elephant, fox, turtle, fox, skunk, monkey, rabbit, mockingbird, and raccoon. The child-hybrids celebrate and lean into each other’s differences: who better than a groundhog to dig out of their prison cell, who better than a monkey to climb high and sneak undetected into places humans cannot? Some hybrids are anatomically incapable of speech, other choose not to speak, and a few are fluent in English. Instead of exclusion or hierarchy (of logocentric humanness), the child-hybrids use sign language so everyone can communicate. The hybrids care for each other, share food, and offer emotional support and comfort. Executive producer, Susan Downey, suggests that season two “really taps into family and understanding what that actually means. It doesn’t have to be a blood relative. You can create your own family. People can look different, they can be different and you can still find that common bond” (Romero, 2023: para. 10). Where I push is that in this speculative world, child-hybrids make close kin relations within and across species: the “people” are not only human and perhaps their relational ethics deserve a name other than family.

Key allies that extend care from humans to hybrids are the Animal Army. In Netflix’s Sweet Tooth, the Animal Army is reimagined from the vicious cultists of the comic series into a group of children and teenagers who vow to protect the hybrids against human enemies. The kinship that the Animal Army embodies is based on a redefined sense of belonging and community that is not genetically determined but founded on mutual support for collective aims. Their homebase, an abandoned amusement park, is where they live together in a unique blend of tech refurbishment, graffiti hall, and junk food commune (what food will survive the apocalypse?). Led by their young leader, Bear, they vow to “defend hybrids against all harm” (S1E4). Though imperfect, they are willing to sacrifice for what they perceive to be the greater good of hybrid survival and multispecies alliance. Bear becomes a crucial caretaker for Gus, joining him after realizing that anger and revenge are “not the animal way” (S1E4) and temporarily leaving the Animal Army. Fortunately, the strong kinship bonds Bear has established ensure that her separation is short-lived. The Animal Army ultimately prove to be the heroes of season two, but this comes at a massive cost.

The Animal Army’s commitment to protecting hybrids and their willingness to form non-familial bonds imparts a broader commentary on the need for experimentation arrangements of mutual care. The Animal Army rejects human exceptionalism and violence against animals. Their reimagined family structure highlights the importance of multispecies alliances in a post-pandemic world. Their ethos reflects a belief that the future depends on cooperation and understanding across species lines, a stark contrast to the divisive and destructive actions of the series antagonists, the Last Men. The tragic end of the Animal Army in season two, where they perish battling the Last Men to ensure the hybrids escape, underscores the high stakes of their mission. This aspect of Sweet Tooth further serves as a powerful allegory for the conflict between youth climate activists and the adults they hold accountable for the climate crises. The series creators have expressed as much, looking to “the generation of young climate activists who seem so clear on what we have to fight for as inspiration for the army’s take-no-shit attitude” (Funes, 2021: para. 8). The youth of Sweet Tooth recognize that hope lies in rising above fear and embracing new forms of kinship beyond the traditional family. As the series narrator implores, “If we can see past the fear, we find out what really matters. And we learn that sometimes, the things that set us apart can also bring us together. Because family is what we make it. Each one of us. Together” (S1E8).

It is not lost on me that the refiguration of the family in Sweet Tooth largely happens once bio-bonds are rendered impossible—once children have been manufactured, hybridized, orphaned, or abandoned. Suffering and loss precede alter-kin-making for Gus and for the Animal Army. Nevertheless, I think there are ecopedagogical teachings about multispecies alliances, redefined kinship, the rejection of human exceptionalism, and the agency of youth in the series. Sweet Tooth illustrates the importance of creating diverse communities based on mutual support and collective aims, rather than traditional, bio-determined family structures. This scales up to notions of environmental reproductive justice described earlier, emphasizing that the future of the planet depends on our ability to hospice what is sick and work together with all forms of life. Sweet Tooth’s portrayal of these alliances encourages an understanding of humans as vulnerable and one part of a larger ecological community where every species plays a vital role. It is common to hear that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism, and, to this I supplement Lewis’s (2022: 119) rift “it is still perhaps easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the family.” Sweet Tooth gestures toward all three.

Ecopedagogical implications

Taylor (2017: 1449) observes that in the field of environmental education, there is often a pattern of mentioning the interdependence of social, political, and environmental systems before returning to “humanist understandings of agency.” Despite the best intentions, these approaches can “reiterate human-exceptionalism through its renewed emphasis upon the transformative powers of collective (and individual) human agency” and ingenuity (Taylor, 2017: 1451).

There is an important distinction between the multispecies “collective ecology” emphasized by Taylor and anthropocentric eco-pedagogies. The latter assumes that humans must unite to take collective action for the sake of the environment. In contrast, the former, is an ongoing ethical practice of human and non-human relational encounters and entanglement. This approach involves “collective action” with non-humans and the environment rather than solely “on behalf” of it (Taylor, 2017: 1451), aligning with the visions of distributive reproductive justice mentioned earlier. Collective ecologies involve grappling with environmental, settler colonial, multispecies, and anti-Black inheritances on a damaged planet (Common Worlds Research Collective, 2020; Malone, 2018; Nxumalo, 2019), which include the family.

In reviewing family abolition texts, I noticed that the humanist stewardship pedagogy challenged by Taylor reflects many premises of the idealized family form. The planetary and the familiar operate “from the premise that humans have exceptional capacities, not only to alter, damage, or destroy, but also to manage, protect, and save” (Taylor, 2017: 1453), whether it be saving the child and/or saving the planet. Instead, the protagonists of Sweet Tooth are child-animal hybrids and their teenage allies who offer ways of living and relating that have substantial import for adults working with children. They interrupt an anthropocentric worldview and demand of us to think the child, family, and future differently. They cultivate a deeper understanding of the interconnectedness between humans and the more-than-human world, while fostering an ethics of response-ability, hospitality, and care for the environment and critters of all kinds.

My intent in bringing Sweet Tooth into the discussion is to evoke the speculative to address the ecopedagogical, but without drawing hard lines between the literal and the imaginative, just as I suggested was possible with Haraway’s Camille Stories and reproductive tokens. We need both: “real stories that are also speculative fabulations and speculative realisms. . .in which multispecies players. . .redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing, still possible recuperation” (Haraway, 2016: 10). We need to “both posit new kinds of communal formations and also reckon with the difficult work of reforming the current structures within which we live” (Hamilton, 2019: 475). Sometimes it may be important to distinguish between the two, like when talking about infrastructures of care for young children or consequences of climate change that disproportionally impact marginalized communities. At other times it seems as though the speculative is dismissed as having no material consequence or that decentring the family is too difficult, which leaves visions of abolition and justice with little place to go. Speculative stories “can spark counter-imaginaries that have the potential to dream bigger and materialize into concrete changes” (Benjamin, 2024: 66). In lifting the importance of collective imagination, Kelley (2002: xii) cautions, “Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down.” Speculative stories, family abolition, making kin, hospicing, a pedagogy of discomfort, and generous suspicion are ecopedagogical building practices.

Footnotes

Funding

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

ORCID iD

Emily Ashton

Notes

Author biography

Emily Ashton (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. Her research in childhood studies focuses on speculative figurations of children, childhoods, and climate futurities.

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