5,077 research outputs found
Childhoodnature and the Anthropocene: an epoch of cenes
No full textSection Four troubles childhoodnature and the Anthropocene, a scientific and popular term used to described the present human-nature conditions on planet Earth. This section does this through eight contributions which broadly speak to four “cenes,” namely: children in the Anthropocene – child-cene; woman in the Anthropocene – gyno-cene; cities as sites of the Anthropocene, city-cene; and relations with the more than human – kin-cene. The lines though between/within/through these identified cenes are porous and enmeshed as the nonliving, the human, and nonhuman transition between two epochs – the Anthropocene and the Postanthropocene
The mesh of playing, theorising and researching in the reality of climate change: creating the co-research playspace.
No full textThis chapter develops the concept of the ‘co-research playspace’ as a methodological figure for working with children as co-researchers and co-artists. This concept emerged through our collaborative research and artistic co-production with 135 children who participated in the Climate Change and Me project (2014-2016) in Northern NSW, Australia. Drawing on Winnicott’s concepts of ‘transitional space’ and ‘transitional objects’ in relation to children’s art and environmental play, we locate the co-research playspace within the mesh of children’s playing, theorising and researching in the reality of climate change. In developing the concept of the co-research playspace, we specifically focus on that ways that iPads functioned as transitional objects within the Climate Change and Me project. This leads us to further analyse the ways that children used digital video as a ‘transitional medium’ that allowed them to experiment with new forms of co-production and creative resistance. Through our analysis of films produced by children in the project, we outline a series of three political-aesthetic modes of response to climate change that break with the predominant moralistic discourse surrounding the issue: I. critical interventions in public space; II. wild, absurd, and improvisational disruptions; and III. the creation of thought experiments and alternative worlds. The chapter concludes with the consideration of ‘children as para-academic researchers’, a concept that emphasises children’s abilities to invent their own modes of co-creation and critical inquiry that disrupt normative research protocols and associated adult expectations
Uncommon worlds: toward an ecological aesthetics of childhood in the Anthropocene
No full textIn addressing the need for a more robust engagement with aesthetics in posthumanist studies of childhood and nature, this chapter makes some tentative steps towards an ecological aesthetics of childhood that is responsive to Whitehead’s speculative philosophy. In doing so, the chapter takes an alternative theoretical approach from much of the ‘common worlds’ scholarship that has emerged in recent years, while making the case for a new aesthetics of childhood that is responsive to the accelerating social, technological, and environmental changes of the Anthropocene epoch. Our approach foregrounds the singularity of children’s aesthetic experiences as relational-qualitative ‘intensities’ that alter the fabric of nature as an extensive continuum held in common. We therefore argue that every moment in the life of a child is an uncommon and unrepeatable occasion through which the common world of nature is felt, perceived, and experienced differently. This eco-aesthetic approach is developed further through the analysis of photographs taken by children as part of the Climate Change and Me project, which has mapped children and young people’s affective responses to climate change over a period of three years in New South Wales, Australia. Rather than working with images as representations or analogic signifiers for children’s experience, we analyse how each photograph co-implicates children’s bodies and environments through affective vectors of feeling, or ‘prehensions’. This leads us to reframe aesthetic notions of image, sensibility, perception, and causality in relational terms, while also acknowledging the individuation of childhood experiences as ‘creaturely becomings’ that produce new potentials for environmental thought and behaviour
Returning to frugality
No full textExhibition held at the Monash University Museum of Art, 17 Sept.-22 Nov. 2008. Essays by Geraldine Barlow, Kyla McFarlane, Dr Paul Sunnucks, Dr Janet Stanley, Dr Patrick Moriarty, Wayne Gumley, Giselle Perdomo, Dr Shaun Cunningham, Shane Murray, Assc. Prof. Geoff Rose, Prof. David Griggs, Mark Boulet, Assc. Prof. Kate Rigby, Dr Tim Cavagnaro, Dr Amy Cutter-Mackenzie, Prof. Ralph MacNally, Doug Holmes. Artists exhibited: Laurence Abehart, Lauren Berkowitz, Chris Bond, Angela Brennan, Paul Buwang Buwang, Janet Burtchill and Jennifer MacCamley, Joyce Campbell, Mikala Dwyer, Michael Corridore, Peter Dombrovskis, Anna Ephraim, Gali Yalkarriwuy Gurruwwi, Andrew Hazewinkel, Susan Jacobs, Ash Keating, Nick Managan, Dhuwarrwarr Marika, Mandy Martin, Vera Möller, James Morrison, Anne Noble, Henry Nupurra, Raquel Ormella, Fiona Pardington, Luke Pither, Adam Pyett, Stuart Ringholt, Ewen Ross, Sandra Selig, Andrew Sinclair, Eilen Yaritja Stevens, Lisa Stewart, Ricky Swallow, Christian Thompson, Michelle Ussher, Rohan Wealleans, Roy Wiggan and John Wolseley
Early Childhood Australia\u27s best of sustainability: research, practice and theory
No full textECA Best of Sustainability: Research, theory and practice by Elliott, Edwards, Davis and Cutter-MacKenzie collates a range of key articles focussing on sustainability from past editions of the Australasian Journal of Early Childhood and Every Child. Sustainable service operation and promoting children’s responsibility and care for the environment are now part of the National Quality Standards and more importantly, all early childhood services must engage with sustainability in this time of increasing global environmental concerns.
The publication documents the best of research, theory and practice to date and questions where has early childhood education for sustainability come from and more importantly, where is it going? There are multiple possibilities for educators, researchers, policy makers and managers to take action in early childhood settings for an environmentally sustainable future
Agency, Power and Resistance from the Perspectives of All Beings
No full textThis response is a creative and representation of socioecological learning through a posthuman framing. In order to facilitate environmental, ethical social and political change in a rapidly changing world we look beyond humans as being exceptional and ‘saviours of the world’, and encourage an awareness of the remarkable capabilities of other inhabitants of the Earth and the Earth itself. Agency, together with discourse, power and resistance are reimagined from the perspective of all beings. While immersed in the environmental crises that surround the Anthropocene Era, this response attempts to rethink the very concepts of ‘nature’ and the boundaries of ‘human beings’. Rather than privileging ourselves as humans at the expense of all others we embrace the tangle of relationships in which we are enmeshed. We acknowledge and explore the power imbalance between humans, and between humans and all other inhabitants. This visual ethnographic interpretation is mapped out with concrete poetry, three-dimensional object photography, and narratives. This interpretation of the intricate loops and threads of its corresponding chapter endeavours to provoke thought and inspire agency and action with a diverse perspective
Walking the Mandala - A Big-Little Way of Being and Knowing in Disrupted Worlds
No full textGlobal disruptions can inspire new ways of teaching and thinking through the big questions of little things. Recognising our disrupted times, we explore the mandala as an integrative symbol – a visuo-spatial abstraction of a worldview – that invites and represents responses to big questions in ontology, cosmology, epistemology, axiology and eschatology. We re-imagine the mandala as an expansion and a contraction of intersecting ‘opposites’ (e.g. sacred-profane, mythos-logos, order-chaos) that can push-and-pull thinking through the wicked problems of disrupted times.
We embrace Walking the Mandala as a mytho-poetical and logico-mathematical act for learning and unlearning. It is at once an embodied and affective act of creative turns and qualitative diffractions, and a cognitive act of critical and analytical cartography that orientates and measures. It is a circumambulation – a circling of possibilities that connects oneself to others.
Finally, we introduce a novel three-dimensional mandala – the Zygo – as a material artefact and architecture for critical, creative and consilient thinking through disruptions in big-little worlds
Playing With Environmental Education
No full textThis article represents the early collaboration of Cutter-Mackenzie and Edwards in early childhood environmental education. The article grappled with the notion of knowledge and its role in the teaching and learning of early childhood education. At that time, ‘knowledge’ was viewed as difficult to integrate with play-based approaches to learning in early childhood education due to reliance in the field of traditional theories of play as a basis for early childhood pedagogy. This meant that open-ended or free play dominated practice, where the role of the teacher was invariably to be seen but not heard.</jats:p
Childhoodnature Pedagogies and Place: An Overview and Analysis
No full textNature-based experiences have gained increasing attention for their capacity to foster children’s connectedness with nature, referred to here as childhoodnature. This chapter explores childhoodnature from a pedagogical perspective of place, beginning with an overview of the conceptual foundations of and distinctions between place-based education and place-responsive and place-conscious pedagogy. We then examine recently emergent post-human and new materialist ontologies and pedagogies for their contributions to new understandings of and approaches to childhoodnature connections. Besides providing a map of the childhoodnature pedagogies and place section of this handbook, we assess the extent to which the theoretical and empirical contributions of the section chapters lay the groundwork for developing the pedagogies of place literature. Despite marked differences in cultural contexts, a number of common themes emerged across the chapters, particularly in relation to the intent and focus of the pedagogies of place. All chapters expand and/or challenge current understandings and/or preconceptions of place, nature, childhoodnature relationships, and pedagogy. A number of chapters highlight the role of agency, embodied learning, and place relations in enabling children to build connectedness with nature. Finally, in considering the chapters as a whole, some implications are offered for future research
Retirement party for Mrs Amy Cutter
No full textRetirement party for Mrs Amy Cutter in the Vernier Radcliffe Memorial Library, March 26, 1961. Across from Circulation Desk of Vernier Radcliffe Memorial Library, left to right: Godfrey T. Anderson, PhD, (President of CME), Thomas Jefferson Cates, Mary Lou (clerk typist in the Catalog Department), Earlene E. Garland (secretary to Otto), Dr. and Mrs. Paul J. McMillan and son, Leroy W. Otto (chief librarian), Margaret Rossiter White (Historical Records Librarian), William R. Berdan, Oran I. Amy Cutler (reference librarian-guest of honor), Mrs. Samuel A (Hulda H.) Crooks, Dr and Mrs. Thomas F. Judefind, Irene Schmidt (serials librarian), Elleanor Mary Summerton (catalog librarian). Retirement party for Mrs Amy Cutter, March 26, 196120.5 x 25 c
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