What future relations with more-than-human worlds might be possible?

Shared by MIRIAM POTTS and REBECCA REAM

What future relations with more-than-human worlds might be possible?  Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2019) ask “the onto-epistemological question: Who and what constitutes the common worlds that children and animals co-inherit and co-inhabit?” (p. 1). In response, we wonder what their future worlds might be. In the following Feminist Common Worlding Methods experimental microblog exchange, we fabulate possible common worlds across space-time scales.

As feminist researchers and devoted readers of Haraway (1991; 2003; 2008), we are inspired by her (2016) ‘Camille’ stories, intergenerational examples of the ‘Children of Compost’: These stories present a naturalcultural world that rejects techno-fixes and paradises. In Camille’s worlds we painfully and joyfully learn to ‘stay with this trouble’. Heeding Haraway’s call to mutate such stories, we began our own speculative worldings. Thus, the ensuing post (microblog #1, microblog #2, microblog #3, microblog #4) is an experimental feminist research method, testing emerging ideas in our theses. In doing this we provide an interdisciplinary approach to relations with place and other species that makes ‘research kin’.

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References

Haraway, D. J. (1991). Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books.

Haraway, D. J. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness (Vol. 1). Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Haraway, D. J. (2008). When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.  

Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Taylor, A. & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2019). The Common Worlds of Children and Animals: Relational ethics for entangled lives (ebook edn). London & New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis.