ABSTRACT
The common worlds of child-animal relations are the subject of this chapter. Far from rehearsing the perfect coupling of children and animals as one of nature, purity and innocence (as the Romantics would have us believe), I set out to rearticulate child-animal relations as queerly situated naturecultures (Instone, 2004). Both the children and the animals in my enactments are co-shaped by their entangled relations with each other, but also by the very specific geo-historical common worlds in which they are enmeshed and embedded. Drawing from feminist, ecological and post-human philosophies, hybrid geographies and non-western world-views, my common world childanimal rearticulation or enactments interrupt taken-for-granted humanist and developmentalist understandings about the ‘nature’ of the individual child, the ‘nature’ of animals in children’s lives, the ‘nature’ of human nature and the ‘nature’ of kinship. Reconfigured within the common worlds of naturecultures, child-animal relations become completely mixed up affairs.
