Play and Imagination  

In the first week of October the ECHOing research group took part in the inspiring conference of (Un)Common Worlds III – Navigating and Inhabiting Biodiverse Anthropocenes where we had the wonderful opportunity to share our current research work focusing on “Lingering with multispecies kin: Re-turning to affective encounters of children, amphibians and invertebrates”. Drawing on empirical examples from a one-year ethnographic study in a Finnish primary school, we explore affective child-animal encounters as both a pedagogical approach to multispecies education and a methodological mode of analysis. Our study applies a relational ontology of “attuning-with” (Riley & White, 2019) and approaches affective encounters as embodied and embedded mutual becomings. In our study children (age 9-10 years), together with teachers and researchers investigated how insects and other small non-human creatures sense environments. These inquiries took place in the children’s local surroundings, classrooms and school visits to a Zoo. Our results answer the call of multispecies scholarship to attune to affects, spaces in between, and confront uncertainties (Riley & White, 2019). Attuning with clay and multimodal storying within unfamiliar worlds and temporalities of insects and caecilians performed messy middles of knowing and not-knowing in child-animal encounters resulting in affective responses to non-human species. In these affective encounters, we could sense rich and productive rhythms of silences, and movements that provoked re-turning and lingering with the strangeness, awkwardness and grievance of encountering multispecies kin. Re-turning with child-animal encounters raises awareness of how affect does not emerge through linear temporalities but rather through shifting embodied events and lingering in multispecies education for encountering the strange anew. References Riley, K., & White, P. (2019). ‘Attuning-with’, affect, and assemblages of relations in a transdisciplinary environmental education. Australian Journal of Environmental Education, 35(3), 262–272. https://doi.org/10.1017/aee.2019.30

In a column published in “Puunvuoro” the ECHOing research group reflect (in finnish) on how unruly and embodied storying in local forest can support children’s ecological imagination. Puunvuoro-lehden julkaistussa kolumnissa ECHOing tutkimusryhmä pohtii kuinka kuriton ja kehollinen tarinointi lähimetsässä elävöittää lasten ekologista mielikuvittelua. Link: https://puunvuoro.fi/puheenvuoro/kuriton-ja-kehollinen-tarinointi-elavoittaa-lasten-ekologista-mielikuvittelua/