Multispecies collaboratories: reconfiguring children’s more-than-human entanglement with colonization, urban development and climate change

Abstract

This paper shows how multispecies collaboratories work to complexify understandings of shared space with more-than-human others through collective inquiry and experimentation. Recognizing tensions produced through engaging childhood geographies research on stolen land, it proposes multispecies collaboratories as inextricably situated within the uneven flows of colonization, urban sprawl, and climate change. The authors present six collaboratory sticking points – the politics of green, confronted by the unexpected, bearing witness, boundary bursting, root problems, and troubling entanglement – to highlight possibilities and incommensurabilities inherent within. Sharing moments on Anishnaabe, Attawandaron, Lūnaapéewak, and Haudenosaunee territories in London, Ontario, and lək̓ʷəŋən and WSÁNEĆ territories in Victoria, British Columbia, they take a common worlding approach to reconsidering young children’s multispecies relations as always and already political, multifarious world-making forces. They argue for multispecies collaboratories as small but significant sites for unhinging children’s geographies from neoliberal, colonial logics, asking: What kinds of experimentation make it possible to activate a collective sense of relationality and reciprocity with the myriad of creatures with whom children share space? What is required of us to do so without retooling the colonial logics that contribute to the erasure of Indigenous peoples, more-than-human kinships, and connections to place?