Abstract
By exploring and reconsidering the view of children’s encounters with nature from a posthumanist perspective, this chapter seeks to dismantle rather than support constructions of a nature-culture binary. A posthumanist approach adopts the tools of new materialism by allowing for the rereading of research data by decentering the human and attending to the complexity of child-nature relations. This work is done in order to unpack the means through which romanticized notions of children’s “nature” experiences can be embedded in Western-centric literature in the child-nature movement, a movement that is having significant currency in environmental and sustainability education literature as well. To illustrate the importance of including a diversity of stories of children-nature relations, and to explore the challenges in rereading research through these theoretical lenses, two contrasting cases are explored. One of the cases emerges from research conducted in Semey, a city on the northeast border of Kazakhstan where issues of nuclear radiation are a historical concern and the second draws on children’s encounters of “grubs” and “worms” in an early childhood center in Melbourne, Australia. I have deliberately set out in this chapter to reveal the messiness of documenting and theorizing children’s encounters with the environment in order to open up new imaginings of childhood, nature, and education.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Barad, K. (1997). Meeting the universe halfway: realism and social constructivism without contradiction. In L. H. Nelson & J. Nelson (Eds.), Feminism, science, and the philosophy of science (pp. 161–194). Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer.
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. London: Duke University Press.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Clarke, D., & Mcphie, J. (2014). Becoming animate in education: Immanent materiality and outdoor learning for sustainability. Journal of Adventure Education and Outdoor Learning, 14(3), 198–216. doi:10.1080/14729679.2014.919866.
Crutzen, P. (2002). Geology of mankind. Nature, 415, 23.
Dickinson, E. (2013). The misdiagnosis: Rethinking “nature-deficit disorder”. Environmental Communication, 7(3), 315–414. doi:10.1080/17524032.2013.802704.
Evans, G., Gernot, B., Aliya, H., Rachel, S., Kimberly, W., & Shapiro, E. (2007a). Young children’s environmental attitudes and behavior. Environment and Behavior, 39(5), 635–659.
Evans, G., Juen, B., Corral-Verdugo, V., Corraliza, J. A., & Kaiser, F. G. (2007b). Children’s cross-cultural environmental attitudes and self-reported behaviors. Children, Youth and Environments, 17(4), 128–143.
Fox, N., & Alldred, P. (2014). New materialist social inquiry: Designs, methods and research assemblage. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 18(4), 399–414. doi:10.1080/13645579.2014.921458.
Gill, T. (2007). No Fear: Growing up in a risk averse society. London: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
Haraway, D. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people and significant otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Haraway, D. (2008). When species meet. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.
Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making kin. Environmental Humanities, 6, 159–165. Retrieved from http://environmentalhumanities.org
Harker, C. (2005). Playing and affective time-spaces. Children’s Geographies, 3(1), 47–62.
Kahn, P., & Kellert, S. (Eds.). (2002). Children and nature: Psychological, sociocultural, and evolutionary investigations. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Kraftl, P. (2014). Geographies of alternative education: Diverse learning spaces for children and young people. Bristol: Policy Press.
Lee, N. (2013). Childhood and biopolitics: Climate change, life processes and human futures. London: Palgrave.
Lenz-Taguchi, H. (2011). Investigating learning, participation and becoming in early childhood practices with a relational materialist approach. Global Studies of Childhood, 1(1), 36–50.
Lorimer, J. (2012). Multinatural geographies for the Anthropocene. Progress in Human Geography, 36(5), 593–612.
Louv, R. (2005). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books.
Louv, R. (2011). The nature principle. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books.
Malone, K. (2004). “Holding environments”: Creating spaces to support children’s environmental learning in the 21st century. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 20, 53–66.
Malone, K. (2007). The Bubble-wrap generation: Children growing up in walled gardens. Environmental Education Researcher, 13(4), 513–528.
Malone, K. (2015). Theorizing a child–dog encounter in the slums of La Paz using post-humanistic approaches in order to disrupt universalisms in current ‘child in nature’ debates. Children’s Geographies. doi:10.1080/14733285.2015.1077369.
Morton, T. (2007). Ecology without nature: Rethinking environmental aesthetics. London: Harvard University Press.
Phenice, L. A., & Griffore, R. J. (2003). Young children and the natural environment. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 4(2), 167–171.
Rautio, P. (2013a). Children who carry stones in their pockets: On autotelic material practices in everyday life. Children’s Geographies, 11(4), 394–408.
Rautio, P. (2013b). Mingling and imitating in producing spaces for knowing and being: Insights from a Finnish study of child-matter intra-action. Childhood, 21(4), 461–474. doi:10.1177/0907568213496653.
Rotas, N. (2015). Ecologies of Praxis: Teaching and leaning against the obvious. In N. Snaza & J. Weaver (Eds.), Posthumanism and educational research. London: Routledge.
Shaviro, S. (1995). Two lessons from Burroughs. In J. Halberstam & I. Livingston (Eds.), Posthuman bodies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Smith, M. (2013). Ecological community, the sense of the world, and senseless extinction. Environmental Humanities, 2, 21–41.
Sobel, D. (1996). Beyond ecophobia: Reclaiming the heart in nature education. Great Barrington: The Orion Society.
Taylor, A. (2011). Reconceptualising the nature of childhood. Childhood, 18(4), 420–433.
Taylor, A. (2013). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. Oxon/London: Routledge.
Taylor, C. A., & Ivinson, G. (2013). Material feminisms: New directions for education. Gender and Education, 25, 665–670.
Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2015). Learning with children, ants, and worms in the Anthropocene: Towards a common world pedagogy of multispecies vulnerability. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 23(4), 507–529. doi:10.1080/14681366.2015.1039050.
Taylor, A., Blaise, M., & Guigni, M. (2013). Haraway’s ‘bag lady story-telling’: Relocating childhood and learning within a ‘post-human landscape’. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(1), 48–62.
Tipper, B. (2011). ‘A dog who I know quite well’ everyday relationships between children and animals. Children’s Geographies, 9(2), 145–165.
Wals, A. (1994a). Pollution stinks. De Lier: Academic Book Centre.
Wals, A. (1994b). Nobody planted it, it just grew! young adolescents’ perceptions and the experience of nature in the context of urban environmental education. Children’s Environments, 11(3), 1–27.
Wilson, E. (1984). Biophilia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wilson, R. (1994). Preschool children’s perspectives on the environment. Paper presented at the North American Association for Environmental Education, Cancun.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Australia, as represented by University of Western Sydney
About this entry
Cite this entry
Malone, K. (2016). Posthumanist Approaches to Theorizing Children’s Human-Nature Relations. In: Nairn, K., Kraftl, P. (eds) Space, Place, and Environment. Geographies of Children and Young People, vol 3. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-044-5_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-044-5_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-287-043-8
Online ISBN: 978-981-287-044-5
eBook Packages: Social SciencesReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences