Situating Indigenous and Black Childhoods in the Anthropocene

Living reference work entry
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Part of the Springer International Handbooks of Education book series (SIHE)

Abstract

This chapter engages with selected Indigenous and Black feminist onto-epistemological concepts in relation to their potential for interrupting the ongoing absenting or essentializing of Indigenous and Black childhoods in dominant North American nature education discourses. In particular, I consider Indigenous feminist practices of presencing and relating alongside Black feminist traditions of testifying-witnessing as ways of knowing and doing that provide openings for inclusive, critical, non-anthropocentric, and speculative child-nature pedagogies, particularly for Black and Indigenous children living and learning in North American contexts. To illustrate their generative and interruptive potentials, I put these concepts into dialogue with ethnographic fragments of young children’s everyday multispecies encounters, children’s literature, Black speculative fiction, as well as situated Black and Indigenous place stories. I discuss how early childhood educators in the context of settler colonial North America might engage these ideas in their everyday practices with young children, including the ethical potentials of doing so within the ongoing and interconnected conditions of anthropogenic environmental change, settler colonialism, and anti-blackness.

Keywords

Settler colonialism Anthropocene Nature education Black feminisms Indigenous feminisms Black childhoods Indigenous childhoods 
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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing AG 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Curriculum & Instruction, College of EducationUniversity of Texas at AustinAustinUSA

Section editors and affiliations

  • Amy Cutter-Mackenzie
    • 1
  • Karen Malone
    • 2
  • Marianne Krasny
    • 3
  • Hilary Whitehouse
    • 4
  1. 1.School of Education, Gold Coast CampusSouthern Cross UniversityGold CoastAustralia
  2. 2.Centre for Educational ResearchWestern Sydney UniversitySydneyAustralia
  3. 3.Cornell UniversityIthacaUSA
  4. 4.James Cook UniversityTownsvilleAustralia

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