Abstract
In light of extinctions and exclusions of uncharismatic beings from ethical regard and conservation efforts, this study contributes to the challenges of (re)situating humans ecologically and nonhumans ethically (Plumwood 2002), to imagine opportunities for future flourishing for a wide variety of beings, including the unloved. This is vital for survival, and for anxieties that our cohabitations can bring (eg. fear and disgust), and so for living well.
The study develops modes of relating and creating visibility for insects, spiders, and their kin, to expand on how humans attribute meaning and value to them. It presents a collective effort in (re)imagining relations with creatures through experimental narrative practices, involving the creation of visual narratives or comics with children, and where I am co-creator. In processes of engaging senses and imaginations in everyday spaces, indoors and outdoors, we participated with small life forms in insect hotels and easily overlooked places, together and separately. I explore processes, creative responses, and possibilities these micro ecologies offer for transforming multispecies (story)worlds.
The creative/field practices led to various tricks and shifts in perspectives and relations, relevant to children’s insect relations and broader human relations with nonhumans. By relying on more than verbal ways of meaning-making, binaries, boundaries, and mechanistic conceptions are unsettled. Different ways of knowing are valued, including embodied and creative. Human and nonhuman divides are unsettled; and the line between the playful and the serious, as (interplays of) play, humour, and humility enabled forms of nonanthropocentric thought and practice. Children emerged as funny philosophers and co-artists: they played and tricked perceptions, often in moments of friction. Beyond friendship, they alerted and unsettled unknowns, separations, destructions, interceptions, and disgust, and probed possibilities for relating, often humourously. In a creative and critical feedback loop, I investigated and experimented with playful thinking in my own creative practice, and with cultivating humour in moments of incongruity or friction in my encounters, affected by children, creatures, and other narratives and knowledges.
The study suggests the multiple values of play, humour, and humility in multispecies cohabitations with the unloved: they allow to take part in and capture something about ambivalences, incongruencies, and uncontrollabilities, with ethical and ecological relevance. They engaged an openness, created movement, flexible thinking, and unsettled values and perspectives (of one’s own and/or others). They engaged with a variety of uneasy and hard to resolve frictions with creatures, and offered ways to circumvent moralisations without being unethical. They offered momentary relief, potentially helping to cope. The study proposes this holds potential for transforming relations and exercising tolerance: for space-making for not-knowing and for others. Children, creatures, and comics are proposed as ambivalent role models for adaptive potential, where play and humour can emerge as part of an (ecological) continuum of creative tricks and flexible responsiveness, in shared lives with plenty of slippery, paradoxical, comic-al, and unknowable elements.
The study suggests an effective way of engaging children’s insect relations. More generally, it recommends cultivating ecologies of attention by activating and facilitating play and humour, like through multimodal storytelling practices such as comics. These would benefit from integration in teaching efforts, in research, and wider engagements. The small and humble stories may not save us nor guarantee any outcomes, but enable the movement and vitality for response with fellow creatures, and potentially, for learning to share the table.