Research project What if? Symbio-teaching in Early Childhood Education and Care
Environmental humanities and human-animal studies meet preschool children's storytelling practices, for example knowledge in bioethics, biosemiotics and zoopoetics.
Preliminary thesis title:
What if? Symbio-teaching in Early Childhood Education and Care (Monograph in Swedish).
The thesis has been formulated partly against the background that children's stories are rarely taken seriously - despite the fact that it is children who will live with the decisions made today in the future - and partly against the background of feminist philosophers of science who have long argued that all forms of storytelling are both reality-creating and knowledge-creating.
Supervised by Anna Palmer, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi and Christine Eriksson.
Project description
The purpose of this thesis is to, together with preschool children and their preschool teachers, investigate and generate reality- and knowledge-creating storytelling practices about/with other species. This is done with the support of Donna Haraway's symbiographical philosophy and narrative methodology as well as postphenomenology.
The research method involves talking with children based on their first-hand perspective, who in turn talk with other species that they meet and create relationships with in their everyday life at the preschool and its surrounding areas. Attention has been directed in a post-phenomenological analysis to the children's life worlds, where memories, experiences and past experiences appear as important collaborators in their narratives about/with other species.
The study's intervening approach, inspired by what Haraway calls SF (here: Speculative Fabulations, Scientific Facts and String Figurations), has meant that the children's observations and thoughts have been brought together with philosophical reasoning and knowledge from various scientific disciplines and research fields, such as cognitive psychology and natural science.
Project members
Project managers
Maria Hylberg
Doktorand
