Insect-Thinking as Resistance to Education’s Human Exceptionalism: Relationality and Cuts in More-Than-Human Childhoods

Abstract

This article discusses the “more-than-human” turn in qualitative inquiry and education, engaging with the critiques presented by philosophers, animal studies scholars, and educational scholars toward the “too easy” adoption of an inclusive relational ontology. Based on Barad’s concept of re-turning, the article develops a methodology of insect-thinking, which folds memories as well as scientific and “low theoretical” sources in and out the analysis to re-narrate child–animal encounters as entangled with place, time, class, poverty, displacement, imagination, and planetary futures. Insect-thinking produces irritations and interruptions to the human exceptionalism that underpins educational research and childhood studies. Based on conflicts, avoidance, and violence in child–insect relations, the authors discuss “cuts in relationality” and propose insect-thinking as means to approach more-than-human worlds as both shared and incommensurable.