Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw

The University of Western Ontario | UWO · Faculty of Education

The earth is drowning in plastic waste. Yet, as the plastic waste crisis grows exponentially, responses to excess waste remain stuck around containment and management processes. These approaches fail to notice that plastics know no boundaries. We now encounter plastic rocks, plastic water, plastic bodies, plastic worlds spilling into oceans and riv...

Despite the burgeoning literature that describes the most effective ways of engaging early childhood educators in professional learning, very little empirical work in North America has examined the processes, dialogs, and engagements in which educators participate to address quality as a social construct. This article (1) describes a model of profe...

This paper sketches aspects of common worlding waste pedagogies through Donna Haraway’s figure of the Chthulucene. More specifically, it narrates the making and happenings of what we call a queer synthetic curriculum in an early childhood centre. Drawing attention to plastic in order to reframe children’s relationship to it, the article engages wit...

This paper is a response to multiculturalism’s reductionist and othering constructions of Black presence in Canadian early childhood research and practice. We engage in possibilities for creating movement away from multiculturalism as the primary way of responding to anti-Blackness in Canadian early childhood education. We put forward orientations...

Who is a child and what is childhood? These are not easy questions to address, yet they are questions that every adult could potentially answer. Every adult was once a child and we all have some form of understanding and conceptualization of childhood; albeit these may be rooted in different ontologies and draw on diverse epistemes. As such, these...

In this paper we present a working manifesto that emerged from our projects with pedagogists – a new professional figure in the Canadian early childhood education context. Drawing on feminist scholars’ work, we offer this manifesto as a feminist call to actively think against the anti-intellectualism sustained by existing structures in early childh...

Thinking with feminist scholarship on ethicality, this article draws from two ethnographies with animal and young children to outline new questions for doing research in children’s geographies. Specifically, the article discusses how feminist ethicality within multispecies research challenges the masculinist idea that ethical research should focus...

This article considers the intersection of multiple and, at times, seemingly conflicting temporalities in Andean childhoods. We draw on Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s scholarship on Andean sociology and our ethnographic research with Cañari families to argue that Cañari families’ and children’s relations with cows and milk production are fueled by both...

In an inquiry with young children at a small river beside a school in Cuenca, Ecuador, romanticizations of harmonious childhoods and pristine, even magical, river natures are in abundance. Using common worlds framings, this article interrupts purity in child-nature pedagogies. We argue that encountering the river as a site of contradiction, and as...

Arising from the question ‘How might we think of pedagogy in early childhood education?’, this article traces pedagogy’s histories, conceptual difficulties, inherent foreclosures, and contextual particularities. It argues that within the context of early education, pedagogy has become an obscure, sophisticated supplement of some sort rather than an...

In the face of the multiple existential threats we have brought upon ourselves, this background paper calls for education to be reimagined and reconfigured around the future survival of the planet. To this end, we offer seven visionary declarations of what education could look like in 2050 and beyond. These declarations proceed from three premises....

Classroom pet programs have become extremely popular in urban North American early childhood classrooms. This article challenges anthropocentric child-pet pedagogies by proposing common world pedagogies of ‘staying with the trouble.’ Drawing from a common world multispecies ethnography in one early childhood centre, the authors engage with the spec...

Childhood studies scholars have increasingly sought to examine the complex entanglements of children's lives with nonhuman materials, animals, plants and earthly processes. Doing so has enabled new insights into children's relationships with global challenges such as climate change. Now, researchers from many disciplines are reflecting critically u...

This interview was conducted in the collaborative spirit in which Mindy Blaise and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw work. At the time, Veronica was in Australia with Mindy, doing what they call “Bush Salons” in Wee Jasper, Australia—a project that has become an integral component of the Common Worlds Research Collective. We were inspired by this conversat...

In this chapter, we propose to articulate Guattari’s concept of transversality as applied to education as neoliberal pedagogy under twenty-first-century capitalism. To do so, we will delineate an “adversarial relation” between definitions of transversality in the work of Guattari and the appropriation of Guattari’s concept by neoliberal pedagogical...

This paper introduces common worlding approaches in early childhood education as possibilities for situating educational practices within current times of environmental precarity. Particularly, it offers new questions to early childhood nature education practices that reinscribe settler colonial and Euro-Western binary logics.

Classroom pet programs have become extremely popular in urban North American early childhood classrooms. This article challenges anthropocentric child-pet pedagogies by proposing common world pedagogies of ‘staying with the trouble.’ Drawing from a common world multispecies ethnography in one early childhood centre, the authors engage with the spec...

In this article, the authors bring the new temporal theorizations of the Anthropocene into the pedagogical realm by grappling with the shifting time relationships the Anthropocene makes one aware of within the context of children’s common worlds. Using an actively inclusive more-than-human common worlds framework that reassembles worlds by counteri...

Within the Western cultural imaginary, child–animal relations are characteristically invoked with fond nostalgia and sentimentality. They are often represented as natural and innocent relations, thick with infantilizing and anthropomorphizing ‘cute’ emotions. Our multispecies ethnographic research – which is conducted in the everyday, lived common...

Much has been written about the need to bridge the theory/practice divide by bringing them together in the 'praxis' of teaching. For researchers inspired by posthumanist theorizations, the task of bridging the theory/practice divide is particularly challenging because it is accompanied by the additional need to resist the nature/culture divide that...

Materials, objects, places, and environments are inextricably bound to experimentation. In this regard, Gilles Deleuze helps us see encounters of materials, objects, places, and humans as part of the flow of experience. In his view, we are never separate from the world; we are made up of relations; thought creates itself through encounters. For Del...

Much has been written about the need to bridge the theory/practice divide by bringing them together in the ‘praxis’ of teaching. For researchers inspired by posthumanist theorizations, the task of bridging the theory/practice divide is particularly challenging because it is accompanied by the additional need to resist the nature/culture divide that...

Current times of anthropogenically damaged landscapes call us to rethink human and nonhuman relations and consider multiple possibilities for alternative and more sustainable futures. As many environmental and Indigenous humanities scholars have noted, central to this rethinking is unsettling the colonial nature/culture divide in Western epistemolo...

This paper identifies innovative work on curriculum undertaken in New Zealand in the 1990s as inspirational for recently developed frameworks in Australia and parts of Canada. The paper argues that the form this incorporation has taken in Canada and Australia is, almost literally, an opening of ‘some space’ — as the more established modernist and t...

Current times of anthropogenically damaged landscapes call us to rethink human and nonhuman relations and consider multiple possibilities for alternative and more sustainable futures. As many environmental and Indigenous humanities scholars have noted, central to this rethinking is unsettling the colonial nature/culture divide in Western epistemolo...

http://www.cayc.ca/content/canadian-children-vol-40-no-2

This article takes the naming of the Anthropocene as a moment of pedagogical opportunity in which we might decentre the human as the sole learning subject and explore the possibilities of interspecies learning. Picking up on current Anthropocene debates within the feminist environmental humanities, it considers how educators might pedagogically eng...

Unsettling the Colonial Places and Spaces of Early Childhood Education uncovers and interrogates some of the inherent colonialist tensions that are rarely acknowledged and often unwittingly rehearsed within contemporary early childhood education. Through building upon the prior postcolonial interventions of prominent early childhood scholars, Unset...

The 21st century is marked with a variety of unique and intersecting issues, opportunities, and political realities. Child and Youth Care (CYC) theory and practice continues to take place within and in response to a range of relationships, discourses, and institutions. Our relationship with the physical world is now understood with a sense of urgen...

The article examines the entangled constitution of the child-bear figure through the analytics of late liberal colonial investments. It maps three frictional child-bear encounters, both imaginary and real, in the context of early childhood classrooms: bears as unwelcome and (yet) original inhabitants that pose a threat to human safety, bears as end...

In this paper we think with the specificities of paint to tell stories about entanglements of settler colonialism and paint and painting in early childhood art education. We see to become implicated (Razack, 1998) within settler colonialism in the context we now call Canada. We paint a messy non-linear picture of our work with children through a pr...

The article provides a discussion of “researching” neoliberalisms and neocolonialisms in white settler colonial societies such as Canada. It addresses the research implications after conceptualizing neoliberalisms as assemblages that are always already implicated in colonial histories. Specifically, the article discusses the need to rethink methodo...

The article examines the entangled constitution of the child-bear figure through the analytics of late liberal colonial investments. It maps three frictional child-bear encounters, both imaginary and real, in the context of early childhood classrooms: bears as unwelcome and (yet) original inhabitants that pose a threat to human safety, bears as end...

Working methodologically and theoretically with the hydro-logics of bodies of water, this article addresses the limitations of humanistic perspectives on water play in early childhood classrooms, and proposes pedagogies of watery relations. The article traces the fluid, murky, surging, creative, unpredictable specificities of bodies of water that e...

In this paper we think with the specificities of paint to tell stories about entanglements of settler colonialism and paint and painting in early childhood art education. We see to become implicated (Razack, 1998) within settler colonialism in the context we now call Canada. We paint a messy non-linear picture of our work with children through a pr...

Bringing frictions to children's visits to a forest in British Columbia (BC) as possibilities for ‘common worlds pedagogies’, this article proceeds by troubling forest colonialisms, untangling forest histories and trajectories, attending to more-than-human elements of the forest, and inhabiting the forest with children. The article engages with the...

The idea of transitions in early childhood education practice rests on a conceptualization of time that is characteristic of western thought: time as spatialized by having been divided into discrete units. This article explores the space-time dimension in relation to transitions. Drawing on Deleuzian-inspired writings on duration, time as intensive...

This chapter provides a challenge to positivist notions of partnership in early childhood education, and instead proposes a re-generative posthumanist perspective, based on relationality of partnerships. Specifically, the chapter addresses the troubles and struggles inherited in research partnerships through a non-idealized vision of research partn...

This session opens space to explore the rubric, "intimate economies" for revisioning and reworking strategies to achieve a more just and equitable distribution of economic and social power. Intimate economies are both naturalized (caring work) and stigmatized (erotic labour). This session examines alternative possibilities for reconceptualizing int...

In this article, I use Donna Haraway's philosophy to think about postcolonial encounters between different species. I follow entangled stories of the deer/settler-child figure to trouble colonialisms and untangle the histories and trajectories that we inhabit with other species through colonial histories. I shy away from generalizations and instead...

In this article, the author addresses intra-actions that take place among humans and non-human others — the physical world, the materials — in early childhood education's everyday practices. Her object of study is the clock. Specifically, she provides an example of what it might mean to account for the intra-activity of the material-discursive rela...

In this neoliberal era of productivity agendas and hyper-individualism, we think it timely to be offering a themed issue that spotlights children’s relations to the more-than-human world. Not only are we delighted by the fact that children’s relations with the more-than-human world deliver no measurable economic outcomes, we hold out additional hop...

This is the first special conference issue to be published by the International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies. It brings together keynote talks, a roundtable conversation, peer-reviewed conference papers as well as a book review. Most of the contributions included here were featured at the Child and Youth Care in Action III Conference,...

This paper considers how research practices on racialization in early childhood education might be reconceptualized when racialization is placed within relational intricacies and affects in multiple encounters. By foregrounding race and its emergence in multifarious, unpredictable ways in everyday encounters between human and non-human bodies, spac...

Lunch Time at the Child Care Centre: Neoliberal Assemblages in Early Childhood Education In this article we interrogate neoliberal assemblages within the context of eating and feeding practices in early childhood education. We consider how neoliberal assemblages are enacted and created through multiple linkages between micro and macro regulations a...

This article employs a transnational feminist lens to examine the experiences of racialised immigrant girls who provide care for their younger siblings. The article draws on findings from a participatory action research study in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada to examine the role that immigrant girls’ caregiving practices play in transnational f...

Article available online: http://www.earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/AJEC1101.pdf

In this article, we draw on postfoundational frameworks to make visible the subjectification processes by which practitioners simultaneously master and become mastered by developmental theories. We emphasize the implication of the entire minded-body in the processes of the developmental worker formation. We show these processes through empirical in...

In this article, we draw on postfoundational frameworks to make visible the subjectification processes by which practitioners simultaneously master and become mastered by developmental theories. We emphasize the implication of the entire minded-body in the processes of the developmental worker formation. We show these processes through empirical in...

This article reinterprets practising for diversity and difference discursively and contextually using post-colonial, anti-racist feminist, and post-structural lenses. Working with data from a participatory action research project, the article critically reflects on normalized and standardized discourses of difference and diversity by interrogating...

This article describes the contexts within which reconceptualist approaches to research and practice in early childhood education are taking place in British Columbia, Canada. The authors situate their work on a project entitled Investigating 'Quality' in Early Childhood Education within national and international early childhood discourses.

This article explores how child care acts as a zone of governance for immigrant young children, enacted through discourses of multiculturalism implied to be flexible and open. It draws on an analysis of early childhood educators' interpretations and understandings of their own practices when working with racialized young immigrant children and fami...

The series was designed to broaden and deepen understandings of quality care in order for the province of British Columbia to be able to situate its policy, program, and training considerations in some of the most dynamic literatures currently available about the care and development of children.

This paper identifies: (a) discourses that shape immigrant parents' and early childhood educators' views of young children's bilingual development, and (b) ways in which these discourses are manifested in the everyday lives of immigrant parents as well as in the practices of early childhood educators. The findings of a study in a mid-size Canadian...

This article is the second half of “Rethinking The History of Ontario Day Nurseries: Loci for Intervention, Regulation and Administration.” The intent of the two-part article is to emphasize the discursive environment in which day nurseries in Ontario, Canada, developed in the early part of the twentieth century. Part One explores the theoretical l...

A large portion of the early childhood literature in the area of cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity addresses the practices of institutions for young children, immigrant/refugee parents' understandings of their situation, and provides recommendations for more inclusive practices. This body of literature has proved very useful in bringing is...

In response to current discussions about a universal Canadian childcare system (affordable childcare for all families), this article deconstructs the position that childcare occupies in the province of Ontario through the examination, from a historical perspective, of a document that outlines regulations for childcare programs: the Day Nurseries Ac...

Although plurality and diversity are often taken as givens in the ongoing conversation on the role of public schooling, practitioners do not necessarily share the same understandings of these sociological facts. This article explores ways in which teachers who are committed to working within ethnically and linguistically diverse settings make sense...

Latinos in Canada are receiving attention because of frequent poor performance in school. This phenomenon turns out to be connected to a number of basic problems that can only be understood through investigation of institutional processes with routine operations that may disadvantage certain minorities. This paper presents and discusses part of the...

This article describes how a group of Latin American parents became more effective in their dealings with their children's schools, a mainstream Canadian institution. Ethnicity, along with race, gender, and social class, is a critical determinant in of the interactions between schools and any group of newcomers to a society, particularly when those...

This article describes how a group of Latin American parents became more effective in their dealings with their children’s schools, a mainstream Canadian institution. Ethnicity, along with race, gender, and social class, is a critical determinant in of the interactions between schools and any group of newcomers to a society, particularly when those...

This paper argues that current theoretical and popular discussions around child care in Canada are limited as they fail to fully comprehend the range of child care practices in society. The paper examines established approaches and juxtaposes traditional discourses of child care and motherhood with findings from a participatory action research (PAR...

Much has been written to date on the subject of quality child care in Canada, with a history that goes back approximately three decades (for example, Fowler, 1975; Pence & Goelman, 1985; Goelman & Pence, 1987; Doherty, 2005). The starting point for most of this work has been a view of quality child care derived from developmental psychology and res...