Queer worlding childhood

This paper sets out to queer education's normative human-centric assumptions and to de-centre the straight and narrow vision of the child as only ever becoming an autonomous individual learner. It re-focuses upon the more-than-human learning that takes place when we pay attention to queerer aspects of children's, as well as our own, entangled becomings in the common worlds in which we live. In this case, the entangled becomings are those of children and dogs. Drawing upon Donna Haraway's notion of ‘queer worlding’ and Karen Barad's assertion of ‘nature's queer performativity’, the authors explore how we might go about ‘queer worlding’ childhood. Using deconstructive and diffractive methods, they trace a selection of entangled child–dog events across three sites: the streets of Hong Kong; an Australian early childhood education bush setting; and an exhibition in a Swedish art museum. Through narrating some of the more disconcerting aspects of these events, the authors reveal how we might tap into the ‘queer worlding’ ways in which the world is acting on us, even as we are acting on it