Volume 47, numéro 1, mars 2022 Speculative Worldings of Children, Childhoods, and Pedagogies Sous la direction de Emily Ashton

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This article combines collective biography, diffractive analysis, and speculative fabulation to weave together the authors’ childhood memories of “common worlding.” Our collective biography brings into focus how we engaged in common worlding in our childhoods through dreaming, metamorphosis, and play by tactfully moving across different worlds and learning with the human and more-than-human others we encountered. As we foreground childhood memory and its potential to reimagine pasts, presents, and futures, we explore what kind of conditions are necessary to (re)attune ourselves to the multiple worlds around us in order to maintain and nurture children’s—and our own—other-worldly connections.

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A generative reading of four recent children’s books by Mi’kmaw authors through Indigenous and posthumanist lenses, this article suggests that Indigenous children’s literature works at envisioning a “very old” future and highlights the counter-hegemonic potential of that future in the current moment. First, a reading of the Mi’kmaw mythopoetic tradition as speculative fiction is presented. Second, becoming-with Land is discussed as a radical pedagogical future. Third, the tensions between Indigenous and posthumanist theories are discussed, along with the generative potential of those tensions. The article concludes by highlighting the power of the very old futures (re)emergent from very old stories.

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In this paper, I attempt to interrupt conventional analyses of childhood and instead illustrate the importance of diverse stories around child-nature relations. Vital materialist perspectives dismantle and disrupt binaries, so by exploring these perspectives, I am decentering the (adult) human and thinking-with the possibilities for multispecies relations in precarious times. This paper finishes with a speculative story that proposes lively experiments in multispecies and multi-entity possibilities, in a near-future contaminated Toronto. Enabled by microbes that have flourished on a shipwreck of e-waste, children, birds, and a dog codiscover the Symbio.

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Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti unsettles harmful depictions of Black childhood and reconceptualizes the role of young Black females in racialized communities with an acute awareness of the challenges they encounter in the realworld. Using the speculative form of Binti as an allegory for the present, this article turns to the character of Binti to highlight ways to overcome obstacles of exclusion and otherness. Inspiration is found in how Okorafor utilizes Africanfuturism as a framework that artfully integrates and retains African Indigenous cultures in a technologically advanced world. Additionally, childhood studies informs how this article examines the impact of Africanfuturism as a defamiliarizing strategy to address normalized (Western, white) childhood and notions of futurity for Black children and youth.

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This article focuses on droidial bodies in children’s literature to explore how speculative literacies foster necessary spaces for thinking about (non)human and more-than-human connectivity. Specifically, we share what was produced when we applied a framework underpinned by posthumanist concepts to three children’s books centering robots. Using Jackson and Mazzei’s thinking with theory to plug into these books, this article raises (re)new(ed) questions about the intersections of literacy, humanism, and droids. It proposes that pairingposthumanist concepts with droidial texts can be generative in thinking about, critiquing, and predicting changes with the (ever-developing) relationship(s) between humans and machines.

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Tensions can arise when biased thoughts and practices are uncovered through discursive events in early years classrooms. This paper challenges the common practice of disregarding childhood curiosities in an attempt to ease tension and remove the risk of discomfort for some adults in caregiving and educating roles. Through a conceptual shift from a futurity of inclusion to an urgent call to action that problematizes the exclusion of nonhuman subjects within the curriculum, the construction and implementation of anti-bias curriculum is offered as a vehicle to the realization of holistically inclusive early learning spaces.