ABSTRACT
This chapter joins the work of feminist environmental scholars and artists to think and experiment with creative strategies to learn to live with plastic toxicities without necessarily celebrating them. It embraces the mixed affects that plastics afford (their sensorial pleasures and possibilities as well as the guilt embedded in their toxicity); it plays with the provocative idea that we can no longer separate our fleshy human bodies from synthetic polymer bodies; and it treats plastic as queer matter. By staying with the trouble these risky attachments bring, conditions for futures other than those already determined by synthetic, toxic petrocapitalist modernity and coloniality might emerge in early childhood education. Working with Donna Haraway’s concept of recuperation, we narrate how plastic lives/moves in a classroom—what might happen when we invite children to live in a plastic world that keeps plastic “in sight and in mind” rather than trying to manage and hide it.
