Vulnerability, Resistance, and Reciprocity: Recasting Responsibilities of Care in Schooling Through Troubling Animal-Child-Adult Encounters Within a School for Marginalized Children

Abstract

This paper troubles enactments of care in schooling and open possibilities of caring otherwise through engaging with a more-than-humanist relational lens of animalchild- adult relationships within a school for marginalized children. I explore two encounters with an animal, child, and myself that challenge my self-perceptions as a caring educational researcher and educator and, within that, what counts as care. By attending to my affective responses within these encounters, I explore how thinking with the concepts of resistance, vulnerability, and intra-action can offer generative possibilities of care in schooling. Through this, possibilities of care grounded in ontological reciprocity and openness emerge to enable a reimagining of how we might care differently with children and animals.