Abstract
What access do children have to public spaces and spaces to children? What are the relationships of mutual care and custodianship that flow in between and among the more-than-human intra-actions made possible by ‘commoning’? Trivial events and things, quiet whispered stories that may be overlooked in the purposeful business of everyday city living and dismissive notions of child, perform energetically in relation and as part of our intra-connected and changing worlds. They become more-than-visibly present in their tangible and somatic connection with an alert and haptically aware community of children and a camera-wielding maker/researcher.
Living in a time of planetary catastrophe thus begins with a practice at once humble and difficult: noticing the worlds around us.
Tsing et al. (2017, p. M7).
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Notes
- 1.
The British took control of the Cape from the Dutch East India Company in 1795. It was later to become the Cape Province, part of the ‘Union of South Africa’ formed in 1910 after the South African War. The Union brought together imperial and settler colonial interests, effectively excluding all local African leadership. In 1948, the National Party won the election and formally and legally entrenched racial segregation through the adoption of their policy of ‘Apartheid’.
- 2.
Rhodes’s 1894 speech in parliament www.sahistory.org.za/people/cecil-john-rhodes.
- 3.
In their book, Free, fair and alive, Bollier and Helfrich challenge the objectivised concept of ‘The Commons’ proposing instead a relational and performative verb: commoning. Importantly, the notion refers to systems and relationships rather than resources or commodities (Bollier and Helfrich 2019).
- 4.
- 5.
Johannesburg succumbs to sci-fi sinkholes. Mining News, 28 September, 2014.
- 6.
‘Muti’ is a widely used Southern African term for herbal medicine. A muti garden is one planted with medicinal herbs for use by a traditional healer.
- 7.
The whole poem can be accessed at https://www.cdd.unm.edu/ecln/PSN/common/pdfs/the%20child%20is%20made%20of%20100.pdf.
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Giorza, T.M. (2021). The Art of Learning with Trees. In: Learning with Damaged Colonial Places. Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1421-7_8
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