Making “Cuts” with a Holstein Cow in Early Childhood Education and Care: The Joys of Representation

Abstract

This article explores children’s play with representations of animals, specifically the Holstein cow, as noninnocent care practices in the context of early childhood education and care environments. We use Barad’s relational ontology and Chaudhuri’s concept of zooësis to activate a temporal diffractive analysis of memory stories about children’s play with cows in ECEC read through facts from past, present, and future livestock-rearing practices. We connect the joy of playing with representations of nonhuman animals to the responsibility associated with multispecies lives, and to care as the production of flourishing.