Children in the Anthropocene

Rethinking Sustainability and Child Friendliness in Cities

verfasst von: Karen Malone

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Buchreihe : Palgrave Studies on Children and Development

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Einloggen, um Zugang zu erhalten

Über dieses Buch

This book elaborates the need, in a rapidly urbanizing world, for recognition of the ecological communities we inhabit in cities and for the development of an ethics for all entities (human and non-human) in this context. Children and their entangled relations with the human and more-than-human world are located centrally to the research on cities in Bolivia and Kazakhstan, which investigates the future challenges of the Anthropocene. The author explores these relations by employing techniques of intra-action, diffraction and onto-ethnography in order to reveal the complexities of children’s lives. These tools are supported by a theoretical framing that draws on posthumanist and new materialist literature. Through rich and complex stories of space-time-mattering in cities, this work connects children’s voices with a host of others to address the question of what it means to be a child in the Anthropocene.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Chapter 1. Children and the Anthropocene, a Re-turning

Abstract

City children are often perceived as the most disadvantaged human group in the Anthropocene. Cities throughout human history have been difficult and risky places for children, with urban childhoods in the twenty-first century continuing to be played out in crowded, polluted environments, with limited opportunities to engage with nature, animals or other non-human elements. This chapter maps my own theoretical ‘turns’ from over 20 years of researching the geographies of children in cities. I identify the focus of the book and unpack key terms such as the Anthropocene, sustainability and the politics of urban childhoods. I outline my personal re-turning to a posthumanist and vital materialist perspective, including the ethical choices I am making moving from a rights paradigm to an onto-epistemological perspective and how that positions me politically. In this way I explore a move ontologically from identifying bodies (human and non-human) as separate entities with distinct borders, to thinking of the world as made up of all things, an assemblage. Through this I identify the possibility of an embodied engagement with the materiality of my research: a becoming with the data as researcher.

Karen Malone

Chapter 2. Stories That Matter

Abstract

This chapter explores the theoretical framing of the book, my understandings of the role of children as co-researchers and the means through which diverse research approaches have contributed to the research designs where the retrospective data used in this book were obtained. I outline how throughout the book I am reworking and reconsidering intra-species, intra-nature relations and questions of the ‘human-centric’, ‘Western-centric’ and ‘class-centric’ universalisms of dominant voices in the current discourses of children in cities research that has focused on high-income nations. It identifies how I am working the theory, enacting posthumanist and new relational materialist readings retrospectively, to shift away from the child as the central object of my gaze. I explore the ways I am being attentive to and noticing the non-human entities through which children’s worlds are being encountered in their everyday life. The chapter frames my rethinking of agency as central to a relational ontology, by possessing possibilities for not localizing agency in the human subject, not being possessed by humans or non-humans but distributed across an assemblage of humans and non-humans.

Karen Malone

Chapter 3. Cities of Children

Abstract

As the world continues to urbanize and the impact of the Anthropocene is still being heralded as central to our shared scholarly concern, the challenges of sustainability and the battles of the resilience of humans and non-humans will be increasingly concentrated in cities, particularly in the lower-middle-income countries where the pace of urbanization is fastest. This chapter provides a cartography of research on children in cities and the sustainability of cities in regard to children’s experiences while also introducing the reader to the two key research sites explored in this book. It exposes the limitations of theories and practices of sustainability, with one purpose of the book being to rethink or even consider rejecting the idea of sustainability altogether as useful in children’s lives.

Karen Malone

Chapter 4. Ecologies: Entangled Natures

Abstract

Cities are central sites for reconfiguring human–nature encounters in the Anthropocene. The city constitutes a powerful imaginary of the human–nature disconnect and therefore brings credence and attention to our seemingly de-natured lives. Cities represent the effects of the human dominance over ‘nature’: humans in control, taming and managing the wildness of the natural world, keeping nature out. This chapter supports new imaginings for the mattering of natural relations through the ploy of intra-action. It is about opening up possibilities to consider how to engage with the complexity of the child–nature encounters in cities. Put simply, posthumanist and new materialist readings of child–nature encounters, like those presented in this chapter, invite researchers and educators to look at data differently in order to support a shared imagining for a ‘collective ecology’ of human and non-human, child–nature–city collectives in the Anthropocene.

Karen Malone

Chapter 5. Movement: Materiality of Mobilities

Abstract

In this chapter, I have sought to compress time and space through the study of movement patterns connected to children stories and images over time. Walking, and moving through the city with children, I have come to know the complicated negotiation children perform in these spaces. I have, through children’s child–city–movement maps, stories and photographs, acknowledged human entanglement in the actions of the materials and matters of our non-human world. By applying Karen Barad’s tools of intra-action, I trace the flow of materials through landscapes, as means for recording the ongoing fluidity and dynamics of objects, theorizing notions of enmeshment and creative entanglement and the materiality of mobilities. I contrast this deeply complex work by tracing to begin with the very linear traditional research on children’s independent mobility in cities that has been most common in the field of child’s geographies.

Karen Malone

Chapter 6. Animals: Multi-species Companions

Abstract

Child–animal relations co-shape shared worlds. Children and animals ‘being together’ as multi-species companions within city spaces is the focus of this chapter. In particular, the chapter explores how children and dogs become deeply entangled in a place like La Paz. How they co-inhabit a shared relational world. In the process of reading the ‘intra-actions between child–animals in La Paz’ pouring over the photographs and drawings, the stories by the children and the walks in the streets and forests, I have sought to be mindful to the way humans and non-humans can slip out of the grasp of classic hierarchical structures. This re-reading of animal relations through the children’s encounters ‘enables’ the child–animal relationships to reveal a new plane of intra-subjectivity. Rather than thinking through the child’s relation to animals (nature) by elevating animals to the status of the children, or de-elevating the child to the status of an ‘animal’, in this posthumanist reading of child–dog in La Paz, I have sought to unpack political, ethical and ontological questions without enforcing a traditional human–animal distinction.

Karen Malone

Chapter 7. Pollution: Porosity of Bodies

Abstract

Porous bodies are not limited to human bodies; it is the porous bodies of water, soil, air and animals, organic and inorganic that make up our cities. This chapter presents a posthumanist narrative of nuclear radiation (as monstrous porous bodies) to explore the concept of the porosity and the entangled matter of bodies at risk on the planet. By exploring the materiality of radiation through techniques of diffraction, I consider bodies and the planet as an assemblage of non-human matter, an ecological community—invisible monstrous bodies of matter entangled in human and non-humans at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test site—and then explore the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in 2011 as an ‘un-world’. I seek through this research to expose the fragility and porosity of all matter and objects that are in relation to each other in this place. I conclude that the genealogy of our bodies is composed of our amorphous engagement with the ecosystem that makes up our planet.

Karen Malone

Chapter 8. Climate Change: Monstrosities of Disasters

Abstract

This chapter on children and the monstrosities of the Anthropocene imagines a speculative materialist view of climate change. Binding together a set of ecological posthumanist assemblages, it seeks to attribute agency to the ‘matters’ of climate change (greenhouse gases, melting glaciers, floods, raising oceans, warming weather and human technologies). Questions of the assemblages of entangled matters co-existing in Fukushima and La Paz are explored through case studies on children with a host of others experiencing major disasters in their everyday lives, mostly as the consequences of historical and present ecological disasters. The stories provide a window into the future and the ongoing consequences of widespread climate change and the threat it will present to children’s lives.

Karen Malone

Chapter 9. Reconfiguring the Child in the Anthropocene

Abstract

The final chapter brings together the key themes of the book and concludes with an analysis of the impacts of the naming of the Anthropocene and its unsettling in my own research and the research of others around children and their relations with many others in cities. I address many of the challenges (and limitations) of ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ (and its linked projects like UNICEF’s child-friendly cities), as a means for addressing the impending monstrous crisis. Simple (or even complex) sustainability models fall short in explaining the complexities of messy entangled worlds of the least privileged, child-bodies-objects in cities.

Karen Malone

Backmatter

Titel: Children in the Anthropocene
verfasst von: Karen Malone
Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Electronic ISBN: 978-1-137-43091-5
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-43090-8
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43091-5