PANEL 12: Indigenous childhoods and environmental transformations

PANEL 12: Indigenous childhoods and environmental transformations

SALSA XII Sesquiannual Conference – Vienna, 2019

Organizers:
Jan David Hauck, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Giovanna Bacchiddu, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

Chair: Giovanna Bacchiddu
Discussant: Antonella Tassinari, CFH/UFSC, Brazil

This panel discusses indigenous children’s understandings of and engagement with the environment in which they grow up and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. The relationships of indigenous peoples to the environments they inhabit have become an increasingly visible area of study, owing to an interest in human–nonhuman entanglements and indigenous ways of knowing on the one hand, and to major transformations that indigenous communities are undergoing on the other – both of which are related to the global ecological crisis. Yet how do children come to know and navigate their communities, gardens, rivers, fields, or forests? During childhood, we are socialized not only into becoming culturally competent members of our communities, but also into navigating the physical environment that provides the context for our upbringing. What are children’s trajectories through different spaces, and how do they learn how to navigate them? How do they relate to human and nonhuman others that they encounter on their paths? And how do they respond to transformations of these spaces in the face of developmental projects, expansion of roads into remote territories, urbanization, loss of habitat to deforestation, or forced migration due to violence or environmental degradation? Different and rapidly changing contexts often demand or presuppose alternative and possibly competing sets of knowledge and skills. How do children acquire these and put them to use? How might different and changing environments afford different patterns of interaction among children and with caregivers? And what are the meanings that particular places and locations have or acquire for children? We seek contributions that address these and related questions.

Panel Schedule