Shared by Affrica Taylor
What would happen in home corner if it transformed into a refuge for queer kin? Years ago, I co-authored an article that featured the queer home corner antics of a boy who became princesses and a girl who became a horse. Recently, Haraway proposed that we need to make non-human kin in order to collectively recuperate damaged worlds. She’s written her own speculative fiction (SF) about ‘the children of compost’ who do this recuperative work with queer-symbio animal kin. Her stories prompt me to re-imagine home corner anew – beyond the standard design and play that reproduce hetero-normative domestic relations. As a provocation to ECE scholars interested in experimenting with feminist common worlding methods and writing their own SF stories, I ask … What would the architectures of home corner look like if designed to accommodate all manner of refugees, dispossessed and displaced beings instead of nuclear families? What kinds of recuperative queer kin rituals, practices and relations would emerge in this purposely-reconfigured collective safe space?
Haraway, D. (2017) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Taylor A. & Richardson, C. (2005) Queering home corner, Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 6 (2): 163-173.
What happens to home corner when a chemical fire makes it uninhabitable?
Mindy Blaise & Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
(Source – Twitter: Richard Willingham)
What happens to the home corner when a chemical fire makes it uninhabitable? As soon as the fire erupted, Footscray, a suburb in Melbourne, Australia was engulfed with a dark dust of chemical concoction unknown to most. The home corner became uninhabitable and humans could no longer be in charge. Survival depended on making kin with more-than-human. Hope for removing the destructive contamination involved developing symbiotic relations with the only toxic-resistant local Indigenous plant murrnong. The first task was to address the plastic home corner toys (dolls, food, crockery) that became toxic as they interacted with the chemical fire. Should these once cherished home corner items be buried, burnt, thrown away, donated? In collaboration with Wurundjeri-willam people and murnong, a spell was created to detoxify, cleanse, and heal. Since then, home corner has increasingly become a place for ritual queer kin practices of care.
Please see Linda Stupart’s Twitter account .
ABC News (2018, Sept). Massive industrial fire brought under control, but warning remains in place for Melbourne’s west. Available at http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-30/west-footscray-fire-sends-smoke-over-melbourne-suburbs/10181410