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An interview with the editors of Children's Literatures, Cultures, and Pedagogies in the Anthropocene

Our member, Dr. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak (University of Wrocław, Poland), and her co-editors, Prof. Terri Doughty (Vancouver Island University, Canada) and Dr. Janet Grafton (Vancouver Island University, Canada), talk about their edited collection, Children's Literatures, Cultures, and Pedagogies in the Anthropocene: Multidisciplinary Entanglements (Bloomsbury, 2025).

Published:

Q: What is this edited collection about?

We have brought together work from children’s literature and culture scholars, ecopedagogical theorists and practitioners, early childhood educators, anthropologists, and arts educators to present a multidisciplinary conversation on the practices and functions of children’s literatures, cultures and pedagogies, including successes and challenges, as means of negotiating our rapidly transforming world and our human relationship with it at a time of climate and biodiversity crisis.

The book has five sections: Fictions of Consumption; Multispecies and Intergenerational Kinships; Response-ability on Indigenous Land; Eco-Literacies, Ecopedagogies, and More-than-human Teachers; and Intergenerational Hope in the Anthropocene. This does not represent a progressive arc toward an uncomplicated message of hope. Instead, the last section invites readers to ask thorny questions about hope: What does it look like? How does hope for some depend on loss for others? What is required to transform hope from desire to meaningful action? What kind of planetary futures are we creating? Above all, the collection works to resist intergenerational climate injustice.

Q: What made you initiate this volume?

Terri works with illustrated texts and critical plant studies; Justyna works with new materialism, posthumanism and participatory research with young people; and Janet works with environmental studies and food studies. Our individual work intersects at the pressure point of the climate crisis and its impacts on children’s lives, expressed in their literature, culture, and classrooms.

Inspired by an interdisciplinary conference we hosted at Vancouver Island University in June 2022, Assembling Common Worlds, we began this book project with our subtitle, “Multidisciplinary Entanglements,” wanting to create a space where work from different disciplines, by scholars and/or practitioners who often think interdisciplinarily, can be found side-by-side, rather than in disciplinary-specific publications.

By talking about multidisciplinary scholarship that is entangled, we wanted to move beyond the idea of disciplines that simply encounter or borrow from one another to focus on the ways in which work in children’s cultures and pedagogies, especially engaging with environmental issues, occurs in fields that find themselves simultaneously distinct from and enmeshed with the production of knowledge in other fields. 

 We were also mindful that young people are often positioned as eco-heroes and bearers of humanity's futures, so we selected the contributions to our volume to problematize these ideas by foregrounding readings and practices that focus on children's lived experiences of multispecies relationalities here and now. Finally, we wanted to challenge age hierarchies and promote intergenerational cooperation.

An excerpt from the introductory chapter:

Many discussions about youth culture and crises related to climate change and biodiversity loss point to young people as a source of hope. Leaving aside the intergenerational injustice implicit in the belief that youth will transform the ecocidal cultures inherited from previous generations, we need to acknowledge that young people are struggling with the scope and speed of change on our damaged planet. Climate anxiety, solastalgia, eco-anger, and ecogrief globally affect young people (Hickman et al. 2021). What, then, can scholars and educators who work with children and their cultures offer that is not simply, in the words of Greta Thunberg, more “blah, blah, blah” (Carrington 2021)? 

Most productively, we can listen to young people and engage with their concerns. We can also work with them to dispense with the divisive and unproductive binaries that separate young people from adults and humans from nature. Affrica Taylor (2013) effectively deconstructs the Romantic concept of the child of/as Nature; young people have no magical affinity with the natural world, and we should not burden them with our expectations that they will save our planet. This is not to say that they do not have experiences and ideas worth attention. The notion of child agency continues to be fraught; as Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Zoe Jaques (2021) acknowledge, “age apartheid” is a product of, among other things, adult anxieties about control (xvi). Nonetheless, adultism is challenged by theories such as Marah Gubar’s (2016) proposal of a kinship model for thinking transgenerationally and the work of scholars engaged in participatory research with young people as collaborators (Deszcz-Tryhubczak 2019; Biswas and Mattheis 2022; Bowman and Germaine 2022). Another framework for thinking and working with young people is childhoodnature, which has emerged in the field of environmental education as a locus for theories challenging the human/nature binary and articulating how children and childhood are inextricably entwined with—affecting and being affected by—living on this planet with more-than-human others (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Malone, and Barratt Hacking 2020). Likewise, the Common Worlds Research Collective promotes feminist, decolonizing research and pedagogies that foster intergenerational and interspecies communities and collaborations (Taylor and Giugni 2012; Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2019; Common Worlds Research Collective 2020). The contributors to Children’s Literatures, Cultures and Pedagogies in the Anthropocene are unified by shared interest in how engaging with young people’s cultures and/or experimenting with collaborative pedagogies might help young people constructively process the alarming environmental problems of the Anthropocene and map ways to persevere amidst the ongoing changes affecting our shared planet. . . . 

This collection offers no panaceas for young people; however, it does provide multidisciplinary perspectives on and models for encouraging new imaginaries through various forms of learning, thinking, and teaching, applying intergenerational, intercultural, and even interspecies collaborations . . . . As anthropologist Natasha Myers (2021) observes, “the situation we find ourselves in now leaves us at the limits of language, and grasping at the edges of imagination. We need art, experiment and radical disruption to learn other ways to see, feel and know.” Similarly, Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013), writing on the broken relationship between humans and land shaped by settler cultures, cites Gary Nabhan’s point that “we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without re-story-ation” (9). These examples point to the need to (re)think in manifold ways about the world and our place with(in) it: “human beings are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth are the main story” (Haraway 2016, 55). Children’s cultures and pedagogical encounters offer productive avenues to generate new ways of thinking about being/becoming and doing in an entangled world of complex relationships. We agree with Paulsen, jagodzinski, and Hawke (2022) that a collective outlook for an improved future for all life on earth is possible only by opening ourselves to multiple perspectives, visions, and practices (17). Some of the chapters in this collection engage in close literary analysis of children’s texts, some address theoretical and applied pedagogies, and some consider how children’s cultures and experiences offer examples of different ways for humans to live on a damaged planet. …

This collection has a pluralistic understanding of children’s cultures.  We use the terms “child,” “children,” “young people” and “young adult,” in acknowledgement of the inadequacy of a single term to delineate human beings within the various discourses that engage with children’s interactions and experiences in the world. Peter Kraftl (2020) is one of the prominent voices in the development of a post-childhood theory, an interdisciplinary approach that challenges the direct focus on the child to consider instead how the child emerges and functions in an assemblage of relationships with place, other beings (human and more-than-human), and material productions. Similarly, post-age pedagogy rethinks education as not something that adults do to or provide for children, but as processes rooted in shared intergenerational experiences with the capacity to be transformative for all participants (Haynes and Murris 2017; Shi 2022). Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Macarena García-González (2023) remind us of ethnocentric constructions of the child (4–5). Chapters in this volume attest to the ways in which discussions of children need to be multifocal: accounting for the effects of time, place, and various culturally-constructed markers of identity, and for the ways in which children are, like other beings, always-already becoming, including in Haraway’s (2016) sense of “becom[ing]-with” (4), through complex assemblages including other humans, non-humans, and materials. The meaning-makers in this collection include young people of diverse ages, adults, and more-than-human teachers. 

 

Bibliography

  • Biswas, Tanu, and Nikolas Mattheis. 2022. “Strikingly Educational: A Childist Perspective on Children’s Civil Disobedience for Climate Justice.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 54, no. 2: 145-157. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.1880390.
  • Bowman, Benjamin, and Chloé Germaine. 2022. “Sustaining the Old World, or Imagining a New One? The Transformative Literacies of the Climate Strikes.” Australian Journal of Environmental Education 38: 70-84. doi:10.1017/aee.2022.3.
  • Carrington, Damian. 2021. “‘Blah, Blah, Blah’: Greta Thunberg Lambasts Leaders over Climate Crisis.” Guardian, September 28, 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/28/blah-greta-thunberg-leaders-climate-crisis-co2-emissions. 
  • Common Worlds Research Collective. 2020. “Learning to Become with the World: Education for Future Survival.” UNESCO Futures of Education Report. Paris: UNESCO. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000374032.
  • Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Amy, Karen Malone, and Elisabeth Barratt Hacking, eds. 2020. Research Handbook on Childhoodnature: Assemblages of Childhood and Nature Research. Cham: Springer.
  • Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna. 2019. “Thinking with Deconstruction: Book-Adult-Child Events in Children’s Literature Research.” Oxford Literary Review 41, no. 2: 185-201. https://doi.org/10.3366/olr.2019.0278.
  • Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna, and Macarena García-González, eds. 2023. Children’s Cultures after Childhood. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna, and Zoe Jaques, eds. 2021. Intergenerational Solidarity in Children’s Literature and Film. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
  • Gubar, Marah. 2016. “The Hermeneutics of Recuperation: What a Kinship-Model Approach to Children’s Agency Could Do for Children’s Literature and Childhood Studies.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 8, no. 1: 291-310. https://doi.org/10.3138/jeunesse.8.1.291.
  • Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
  • Haynes, Joanna, and Karin Murris. 2017. "Intra-Generational Education: Imagining a Post-Age Pedagogy." Educational Philosophy and Theory 49, no. 10: 971-983. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1255171.
  • Hickman, Caroline, Elizabeth Marks, Panu Pihkala, Susan Clayton, R. Eric Lewandowski, Elouise E. Mayall, Britt Wray, Catriona Mellor, and Lise van Susteren. 2021. "Climate Anxiety in Children and Young People and their Beliefs about Government Responses to Climate Change: A Global Survey." The Lancet. Planetary Health 5, no. 12: e863-e873. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(21)00278-3.
  • Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
  • Kraftl, Peter. 2020. After Childhood: Rethinking Environment, Materiality and Media in Children’s Lives. Oxford: Routledge.
  • Myers, Natasha. 2021. “How to Grow Livable Worlds: Ten Not-So-Easy Steps.”  ABC Religion and Ethics, January 6, 2021. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/natasha-myers-how-to-grow-liveable-worlds:-ten-not-so-easy-step/11906548. 
  • Paulsen, Michael, jan jagodzinski, and Shé M. Hawke, eds. 2022. Pedagogy in the Anthropocene: Rewilding Education for a New Earth. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Shi, Xiaofei. 2022. "Towards a Post-Age Picturebook Pedagogy." Humanities & Social Sciences Communications 9, no. 1: 423-423.  https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01446-4.
  • Taylor, Affrica. 2013. Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. New York: Routledge.
  • Taylor, Affrica, and Miriam Giugni. 2012. “Common Worlds: Reconceptualising Inclusivity in Early Childhood Communities.” Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood 13, no. 2:108-119. https://doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2012.13.2.108.
  • Taylor, Affrica, and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw. 2019. The Common Worlds of Children and Animals: Relational Ethics for Entangled Lives.  New York: Routledge.

 

 

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