Eye-to-Eye with Otherness: A Childhoodnature Figuration

Abstract

Taking a narrative approach that follows Haraway’s (Staying with the trouble. Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, Durham/London, 2016) call for making kin with growing awareness of a looming 6th mass extinction of species, the chapter focuses on multispecies encounters to consider what childhoodnature as a concept can do for research. The intention is neither to focus on what can be learned from multispecies child-animal encounters, nor is it an attempt to document such encounters in “real life.” Rather, the chapter experiments with the porosity and liveliness of materialized thought (the text) as it gives form to an event (the multispecies encounter) across time and in place. The intention is to speculatively imagine a childhoodnature figuration of a hen and a child as a lively encounter that ripples through time/place and that generates unexpected lines of inquiry. The chapter experiments with a speculative approach to explore new ways of thinking and doing multispecies relationships as “earthly encounters” that matter to politics and ethics of sharing worlds. This, we argue, is an essential task in the midst of loss of diversity as it opens spaces for new imaginings about sharing worlds through kin-making in childhoodnature research.

The story is a hen and child story. They are the main actors and we thank them for their ability to call us to attention. Chickens and child are members of Gloria’s kin and we hope that we have captured their encounters in ways that agree with them. And Ena, thank you for sharing worlds for a time.