Lively Emu dialogues: activating feminist common worlding pedagogies

This paper draws from a series of Place-thought walks that the authors took at an open-range zoo. It practices a feminist common worlds multispecies ethics to challenge the systems that maintain nature-culture divisions in early childhood education. Postdevelopmental perspectives (i.e., feminist environmental humanities, multispecies studies, Indigenous studies) are brought into conversation with early childhood education to consider how zoo-logics maintain binaries and hierarchical thinking. Zoo-logics are related to developmental, colonial, and Western ways of reasoning and being in the world. Two feminist approaches to ethics, (re)situating and dialoguing, are discussed and show how they are necessary for undermining binaries and hierarchies that enable human exceptionalism, white privilege, and phallogocentrism. (Re)situating practices are presented through a lively dialogue based on Emu-human encounters at an open-range zoo. This paper argues that (re)situating and dialoguing pedagogies activate feminist common worldings. Worlding well requires a collective and relational multispecies ethics which are needed in these troubling times.