Unruly Raccoons and Troubled Educators: Nature/Culture Divides in a Childcare Centre

Abstract

AbstractCurrent times of anthropogenically damaged landscapes call us to re-think human and nonhuman relations and consider multiple possibilities for alternative and more sustainable futures. As many environmental and Indigenous humanities scholars have noted, central to this re-thinking is unsettling the colonial nature/culture divide in Western epistemology. In this article, through a series of situated, small, everyday stories from childcare centres, we relate raccoon-child-educator encounters in order to consider how raccoons' repeated boundary-crossing and their apprehension as unruly subjects might reveal the impossibility of the nature/culture divide. We tell these stories, not to offer a final fixed solution to the asymmetrical, awkward and frictional entanglements of humans' and raccoons' lives, but as a responsive telling that may bring forth new possibilities for responsible, affective and ethical co-habitations.