CitizenKin
Children caring for kin and designing a multispecies liveable future
CitizenKin combines citizen science and education in a project about children, animals and sustainability. Due to the immediacy of climate change and its effects on all species, exploring human and non-human adaptation through nature-based solutions and education is now viewed as critical. Responding to species loss in climate change demands an understanding of human-animal relations as interdependent and non-hierarchical, yet education has mostly been slow to adopt non-anthropocentric thinking. CitizenKin engages children’s care and attentiveness towards animals by studying citizen science projects in classrooms and extending a sustainable future imaginary of multispecies co-living through non-anthropocentric education in urban spaces.
The main research questions explored collaboratively by the young people, the researchers, and the experts:
RQ1. How can citizen science projects support children to understand urban communities as multispecies and all kin are citizens?
RQ2. How can multispecies ethnographies extend ways for children to live, care and learn together in urban environments with animal as citizen kin?
RQ3. How can non-anthropocentric education engage children in co-designing liveable futures through creative digital mapping and storytelling?
Citizenkin research design comprises three progressive research stages. First, students and natural scientists explore animals in urban communities as part of a citizen science project; second, students and researchers explore and map humans and non-humans ethnographically as part of multispecies communities; and third, students and researchers produce speculative imaginaries and stories for sustainable co-living in multispecies communities with the help of an expert. This three-tier design combines methods from natural sciences, human sciences, and the arts to form a collaborative process of cultivating the ‘arts of attentiveness’. It produces new knowledge about how children come to learn about and pay attention to sustainable co-living with kin. This design will also contribute to the knowledge base on which practices and pedagogies of non-anthropocentric education can be designed.
Project Members
Professor Karen Malone
Dr Tracy Young
A/Professor Linda Knight
A/Professor Pauliina Rautio
Supporting Organisations
Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland
Environmental Sustainability in the Anthropocene 