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A Breathing and Exercising Archive without Chronicity
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This is an archive of Responding to Ecological Challenges with/in Contemporary Childhoods: An Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Climate Pedagogies that took place on the lands of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenausaune, Lenaapeewak, and Attawandaron peoples in February 2020. I, Nicole Land, begin writing this recollection of the three-day gathering, by first Googling what an archive of an event should contain: Conference proceedings, itineraries of participants, actionable outcomes... The archive familiar to academic conferences is one of topology, reiteration, and productivity. Accuracy, I learn, is the heartbeat of these archives, creating catalogues that pivot upon precision. These accounts are concerned too with curating and declaring what the event has resulted in, drowning memories of a gathering in the cementing logics of instrumentation and yield. I hear confidence, certainty, and assertiveness in the sources’ tone. However, this archive will be different. I participated in the group that imagined and organized the Colloquium, and I was present throughout the event. But I remember absolutely nothing about the activities and happenings of the Colloquium. How can I do archiving without the recognizable guidance of (my human) memory? I visit with the intentions and scope that we - and I use “we” to enliven the collective work that an ever-growing group of people poured into the event - hoped would be a skeleton that could give the Colloquium form. Thinking with our colleagues Haro Woods et al. (2018), Nxumalo (2019; with Cedillo, 2017), and Taylor (2017, 2019; with Pacini-Ketchabaw 2015, 2019), our Call for Papers proposed that “we anchor this colloquium in a commitment to unsettle taken-for-granted Euro-Western ways of navigating ecological relations with children”. A core intention of the Colloquium was to disrupt relations that are taken-for-granted amid the neoliberal, settler colonial, universalizing conditions of the Anthropocene. Agitating the archival expectations of the academy and economy might then, I suggest, mark a proposition that my work toward this digital archive can answer to. My concern with “how” to sufficiently archive shapeshifts into “why” crafting a space where an event can linger matters: What does the work of recollecting do in the Anthropocene? Why might an archive set something into motion or nourish a more liveable future? Why does ‘correct’ memory need to be predictable in its temporality, always shouting stories that endure, when these are the storied conventions we pedagogically refuse?
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Thus, this is an archive without chronicity, an archive interested in what others might do in conversation with its limbs and tissues, and an archive hungry for connection and complexity. It will be a careful story fed by provocations and uncertainty. It will be intentionally imperfect, doused in specificity and situatedness. Perhaps this is an invitation to attend together (a together that differently implicates all who engage with this digital archive) to: the uneasy work of recollecting when the “re” is detached from “collecting” by a void filled with both forgetting and possibility; the absences and presences of my memory as a catalyst for attuning to the absences and presences we perpetuate in our work with children; and archiving as a practice of becoming accountable with/in the tangles we hold and those we drop when we gather together to think about responding to our common worlds.
My memories of the Colloquium are missing thanks to a combination of major depression and brain stimulation treatment. Not even ghost-like traces of the event run through my brain; I have nothing in my memory to hold on to as I reach into the days of the Colloquium. In the name of what then, how might I participate in crafting this digital archive? Sara Ahmed (2019) writes that “to create an archive is to make a body, each part being of use to that body, although how a part is to be of use remains to be known” (p. 20). When I hear Ahmed offering that archiving is to participate in building muscles and organs without knowing the complete performative possibilities of that body, I think of archiving as the work of contributing to a project or a question or a commitment; where contributing is a question of ethics and politics and presence, not conclusion. I think too of Donna Haraway’s (2016) words: “each time a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or introduces me to new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some aerobic exercise” (p. 29). Bodies need muscles and muscles need exercise; archives need work and work needs oxygen. I want to think of archiving as caring for how what the Colloquium sets in motion exercises and breathes, rather than recollection as a historical process.  
On Narrative, Reckoning and the Calculus of Living and Dying by Dionne Brand
<< Map
Life Overlooked: Citizen Humanists
Sustaining >>
Enduring archiving: We have learned that there is a temporal quality to working to enliven the Colloquium as a space for speculating together. There are our intentions as organizers, the stories and propositions those who presented work bring, and the shared and divergent histories, citational allies, and material response-abilities (as Haraway offers) that ground a gathering. To nourish the Colloquium as a speculative space we ask “what might happen if…” over and over, intentionally tangling this question with all the time-ly circumstances that make this question powerfully and riskily speculative in this digital space and time. As we participate in the ongoing speculating that lacks simple brackets to denote a beginning and end, how might this archiving put in motion our next speculative move? Put differently, how might we respond speculatively, together, to what emerges in our speculating archive? How do we keep our collective speculating processes in motion as an ethical and political project?
speculating
Fatal Naming Rituals by Billy-Ray Belcourt
Twelve Thousand Moons Image by Angela Sterritt Words by Erica Violet Lee
With dubious ideas, we came together in 2019 to plan an event that would allow us to think otherwise about the future of early childhood education at a time of climate crisis - not to conquer it, not to propose a spectacular outcome. Our intention was to speculate with ‘what might happen if…?’. At the beginning of 2020, during the Colloquium, we speculatively embraced the idea of worlding early childhood education for/in uncertain futures without any guarantees. We opened spaces for social interventions, experimentation, and design that might be considered useless, wacky, or even ridiculous because they did not follow nor served neoliberal logics. Rather, the pedagogical spaces we opened emerged as conditions for possible (more-livable for all) futures that are not yet thought.
Obscure Taxidermy by Julia Deville
@cynthialopval: “Thinking on digital participation as a ‘collective effort’ of ‘searching for the source’ and ‘caring for the Country’ @AffricaTaylor
"Zoological effigies"
"...build the human dimensions of ecology back into the 'portfolio' of what we know about individual species"
"And one last thing, before I forget, remember: our memories contain every future, every sunrise, you will ever need"
@cynthialopez: “thinking on digital participation as a ‘collective effort’ or ‘searching for the source’ and ‘caring for the Country’ @AffricaTaylor"
"I’ve developed an aversion to that word normal...The repetition of “when things return to normal” as if that normal, was not in contention"
"All of my writing is against the poverty of simplicity. All of my writing is against the trauma of description"
Keynote Presentations
Begin Again
Dis/orientating the early childhood sensorium: Micro-interruptions for alternative climate futures
As a breathing and exercising archive, this archive not only lacks chronicity but also exceeds the borders of this digital space, threading through relations and practices that participants embody in their own places and spaces. Two Colloquium events have detailed biographies: Dis/orientating the early childhood sensorium: Micro-stutters for alternative climate futures and Colloquium Food Pedagogies. Together with Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Meagan Montpetit, Lisa-Marie Gagliardi, Cristina Delgado Vinitimilla, Alex Berry, and Angela Molloy-Murphy, we re-organized this archive using three concepts: speculating, sustaining, and co-labouring. Running alongside each concept is a careful maze made of connections to some of those we think alongside: poets, artists, writers, scholars, colleagues. A series of questions punctuates each collision of concepts and connections. We propose these questions as a tentative practice for thinking archiving in a future tense. Conceptualizing these questions as “enduring archiving”, we want to experiment with questioning as the work of doing archiving as instigating. These questions lean back into the events of the Colloquium to grip their situatedness while simultaneously conferring with each connection the archive makes, and work to invent a question that doubles back to keep the archive in motion.
Co-labouring
Speculating
Citations + Contributors
Colloquium Food Pedagogies
Introduction
Sustaining
As a breathing and exercising archive, this archive not only lacks chronicity but also exceeds the borders of this digital space, threading through relations and practices that participants embody in their own places and spaces. Two Colloquium events have detailed biographies: Dis/orientating the early childhood sensorium: Micro-interruptions for alternative climate futures and Colloquium Food Pedagogies. Together with Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, Meagan Montpetit, Lisa-Marie Gagliardi, Cristina Delgado Vinitimilla, Alex Berry, and Angela Molloy-Murphy, we re-organized this archive using three concepts: speculating, sustaining, and co-labouring. Running alongside each concept is a careful maze made of connections to some of those we think alongside: poets, artists, writers, scholars, colleagues. A series of questions punctuates each collision of concepts and connections. We propose these questions as a tentative practice for thinking archiving in a future tense. Conceptualizing these questions as “enduring archiving”, we want to experiment with questioning as the work of doing archiving as instigating. These questions lean back into the events of the Colloquium to grip their situatedness while simultaneously conferring with each connection the archive makes, and work to invent a question that doubles back to keep the archive in motion.
Colloquium Organizers Nicole Land Meagan Montpetit Lisa-Marie Gagliardi Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw Randa Khattar Archive Curators Nicole Land Meagan Montpetit Lisa-Marie Gagliardi Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw Cristina Delgado Vintimilla Alex Berry Angela Molloy-Murphy Exhibit Curator Alex Berry Pamba Mesa Experience Ideation: Cristina Delgado Vintimilla Chef: David Gunawan Farm: Chris Devries (Common Ground Farms) Adrianne Bacelar de Castro Cody Ethier Dana Lee Elaine Dasilva Kathleen Kummen Kelly-Ann MacAlpine Lisa-Marie Gagliardi Malvika Agarwal Mariam El Naggar Maureen Cullen Randa Khattar Rocio Raeesi-Gujani Rob Ketchabaw Sarah Hennessy Tatiana Zakharova Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
Keynote Speakers Alexis Shotwell Erica Violet Lee Affrica Taylor Elder Liz Akiwenze Research Assistants Adrianne Bacelar de Castro Alex Berry Amara Digout Ashley Do Nascimento Carla Ruthes Coelho Cory Jobb Jasmine Singh John Drew Kelly-Ann MacAlpine Malvika Agarwal Maureen Cullen Sarah Hennessy Sarah Kathleen Black Rocio Raeesi-Gujani Tatiana Zakharova Photography and Videography Amara Digout Adrianne Bacelar de Castro Tatiana Zakharova Paper Presentations Angela Molloy-Murphy Annie Montague Bridget Stirling Emily Ashton Hanah McFarlane Heather Fraser Janna Goebel Jenny Ritchie Leah Shoemaker Louise Phillips Mel McRee Nancy Van Groll Nikki Rotas Virginia Caputo Will Parnell
Archive References Ahmed, S. (2019). What’s the use? On the uses of use. Durham: Duke University Press.   Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Haro Woods, Nelson, N., Yazbeck, S., Danis, I., Elliott, D., Wilson, J., Payjack, J., Pickup, A. (2018). With(in) the forest: (Re)conceptualizing pedagogies of care. Journal of Childhood Studies, 43(1), 44-59. doi:10.18357/jcs.v43i1.18264  Nxumalo, F. (2019). Decolonizing place in early childhood education. In E. Tuck & K. W. Yang (Eds), Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education Book Series. New York: Routledge Education. Nxumalo, F., & Cedillo, S. (2017). Decolonizing place in early childhood studies: Thinking with Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies. Global Studies of Childhood, 7(2), 99–112. doi: 10.1177/2043610617703831 Taylor, A. (2019). Countering the conceits of the Anthropos: Scaling down and researching with minor players. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2019.1583822 Taylor, A. (2017). Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1448–1461. doi: 10.1080/13504622.2017.1325452 Taylor, A. & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2019). The common worlds of children and animals: Relational ethics for entangled lives. London, UK: Routledge. Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2015). Learning with children, ants, and worms in the Anthropocene: Towards a common world pedagogy of multispecies vulnerability. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 23(4), 507-529. doi:10.1080/14681366.2015.1039050
If you would like to get in touch with us, please email nland@ryerson.ca 
Presentation Chairs Adrianne Bacelar de Castro Ashley Do Nascimento Cory Jobb Cristina Delgado Vintimilla Fikile Nxumalo Kelly-Ann MacAlpine Leah Shoemaker Mindy Blaise Peter Kraftl Sarah Hennessy Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw Funding for the Colloquium Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Ryerson University Western University London Children’s Museum London Bridge Child Care Service
Alas de Invierno by Juana Córdova
sustaining
Fermentaton by Kaitlyn Boulding
Co-Labouring >>
We considered the risks of thinking our process of archiving with the concept of sustaining, because early childhood education has already embraced sustainable development through dangerous neoliberal initiatives. Yet, we could not deny that our work prior to, during and following the colloquium was deeply embedded in multiple minor acts of sustenance: caring for our proposals and propositions to participants; feeding - literally and metaphorically - our colleagues by re-imagining community around food; preserving spaces for slowing down and grieving the climate crisis around us; conserving moments for creation and ideation; keeping each other alive; maintaining the imperfections of our practices; attending to the work required for sustentation; and upkeeping the land that we gathered on while acknowledging that we were/are uninvited guests.
Archive of Hope and Cautionary Tales: Environmental Sustainability and Social Justice by North American Observatory
Enduring archiving: As we craft this archive, we can feel that there is an unusual energetic demand to thinking about sustaining. Sustaining, as a verb, requires we face questions that understand our presence as already deeply entangled with the traces we leave. We have to ask both, what might this Colloquium sustain and what might sustain this Colloquium? While the first part of the question asks what we produce, the latter wonders what holds us together. As the Colloquium continues to unfold beyond the gathering into this archive, we see the urgency in getting to know this as one question: what is the work of sustaining? What if to do sustaining we must put each of the words that phrase “created at the event” at risk as they meet the temporal, complex, exhausting work of sustaining? What do we keep in motion and what motions do we keep as we do sustaining?
Colloquium Food Pedagogies
Quarantine Quatrains Menu Generator by Gastropoetics
Repair by Alexandra Crosby and Jesse Adams Stein
"If you want to turn the closeness spoons find in drawers into a tangier form of tender, you need to hold the silence enyzmes love"
"...consider how best to respond and act in the face of their own daunting environmental and climatological challenges"
"What shall we care for, why, and how?"
"...bears witness pedagogical designs and speculations, metaphoric resonances between the kitchen and the table, and tangled food relations"
Enduring archiving: During the Colloquium, we noticed that certain neoliberal and settler colonial habits persevered, stubbornly interjecting in and reifying the unfamiliar, speculative space we hoped to create. For instance, delineating ownership, ‘hearing’ individual voice, and feeling ‘good’ about learning specific practices to take and apply in research or with children. Additionally, neoliberal ‘conferencing' conventions and associated notions of epistemic authority and expertise sipped in and around the Colloquium experience, despite the collective work of undoing this configuration with well articulated intentions and an open discussion of ‘academic extractivism’, a colonial practice that Alexis Shotwell named and disrupted in a keynote presentation at the Colloquium. These conventional practices and subjectivities often interrupted the colabouring of being together. What if we inhabit this problem as a context for digging in, for responding? What does re-asserting an epistemologically dominant (and violent) model/standard/norm do, when held in intimate conversation with an imperfect question that works hard to dismantle this taken-for-grantedness? What, then, is it to live and co-labour in the minor and monstrous ruins of a question of the otherwise?
#INDG3015 Winter Term Public Site by Zoe Todd
co-labouring
Composting #57-#60: Labour (a series) by COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities
Responding to Ecological Challenges with/in Contemporary Childhoods Colloquium was sustained through co-labouring. We (the team) engaged with a desire for a common project, and our collaboration flowed as a movement of collective creation. That is, the Colloquium was shaped in the midst of a collaboration. It was imagined and delivered as we co-laboured. Importantly, we are not referring to the pervasive early childhood notion of collaboration that privileges a politics of niceness. Our co-labouring demanded alternative compositions that were not always comfortable for everyone, brought struggles and difficult questions, and produced frustrations and unachievable promises as we continued speculating and envisioning.
#Collabrary: a Methodological Experiment for Reading with Reciprocity by CLEAR
Colaboring: Within Collaborative Degeneration Processes by Cristina Delgado Vintimilla and Iris Berger
Sweaty Concepts by Sara Ahmed
Speculating >>
"...we came to see collaboration in its laboring, or colaboring: in the struggles with materials, questions, difficulties, frustrations, and promises, as these are ‘mixed, heated, and cooled,’ flowing toward something that might emerge when it is not yet recognizable as such"
"How can we change academic reading relations that tend to be extractive into something more reciprocal, humble, generous, and accountable?"
"We need 'sweaty concepts' because we need more descriptions of the patterns that are obscured when bodies are received by spaces that have assumed their shape. We might have to insist on giving these descriptions"
"Rigorous, inclusive and anti-essentialist feminist thinking about labour, or work, is not a straightforward proposition in a time of climate change, coronavirus and (somehow ongoing) colonial capitalism"
"Interrupting developmental archives of early childhood education’s sensory palette"
Indigenous Ecological Ways of Knowing and the Academy
Common Worlds Research Collective
Please click here to visit with video of Alexis' presentation
Episode 16: Waterways and Ways to the Water by the Henceforward Podcast
What do we keep in motion and what motions do we keep as we do sustaining?
There's no Such Thing as 'We' by Max Libiron (Discard Studies Blog)
Keeping water and keeping fire: Resistance along the kisiskâciwani-sîpiy
Learning to Become with the World: Education for Future Survival by Common Worlds Research Collective
Affrica Taylor @AffricaTaylor
What is it to live and co-labour in the minor and monstrous ruins of a question of the otherwise?
Education without extractivism: Settler practices for respecting Indigenous sovereignties in entangled worlds
Erica Violet Lee @ericavioletlee
Climate Action Childhood Network
How might we respond speculatively, together, to what emerges in our speculating archive?
Please click here to think with video of Affrica's presentation
Alexis Shotwell @alexisshotwell
Erica’s presentation was live tweeted at #climatepedagogies2020. Please click here to trace Erica’s presentation on Twitter
From Woe to Wonder by Aracelis Girmay
Citations >>
Wild fire provocations: Re-igniting conversations about ‘shadow places and the politics of dwelling’* across ravaged settler colonized lands (*Plumwood, 2008)
Please click here to think with video of Affrica's presentation
"Listen. Put your ear to the ground. Hear my heart beat. Feel my tentacles reach out. See me shout. Do you hear me? I speak to you through the visible and invisible. I yearn to connect with you, but you ignore me. You take advantage. You disregard, for if it were not for me, you would have no place to stand. Divide me with your invisible grid"
"...requires a complete paradigm shift, from learning about the world in order to act upon it, to learning to become with the world around us. Our future survival depends on our capacity to make this shift"
"I am trying to learn with and for the sake of my children. To help them move, even in their woe, toward wonder. To resist the seal of a sentence so complete, and to find, in the syntax, openings through—so onto a ground of their own dreamings, again and again, they alight"
Common Worlds Research Collective
"What are the ethical ways collectives come together while maintaining difference, without sorting and ranking?"
"what are the ethical ways collectives come together while maintaining difference, without sorting and ranking?"
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A Breathing and Exercising Archive without Chronicity