SPRING/PRINTEMPS 2018 1 Vol. 43 No. 1 JOURNAL OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES EDITORIAL We begin this editorial with gratitude for the reviewers who took the time to generously provide critical, insightful, and generative feedback to all of the submissions. We are also immensely grateful to everyone who submitted articles for consideration. We were particularly excited to receive so many contributions from early childhood educators who are grappling with learning how to respond to environmental challenges within their everyday work with young children. We thank all of the authors for their patience through the review process. As Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang (2017) have said, “academic journals and their introductory editorials make for terrible time machines” (p. 1). Finally, this special issue would not have come together without the care and attention of editorial assistant Dr. Nicole Land. We are so appreciative of her invaluable help at every step of the process. This call for papers emerged from our interest in highlighting the ways in which early childhood educators and researchers are drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives to situate education in the current environmentally challenging times. As we write this editorial amid political discourse in North America that seems to be fueling, rather than ameliorating, rampant extractivism, we feel a sense of urgency for education to respond to the ecological inheritances facing 21st-century children. At the same time, in this moment of late capitalism, we wonder how these necessary educational responses might also move away from individualized discourses of stewardship and responsibility. This is particularly relevant to early childhood education, where the figure of the individual developing child as future salvation remains a common trope, one that is rooted in instrumental approaches to teaching and learning (Blaise, 2013; Lenz Taguchi, 2010). Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2013) reminds us of the necessity to shift away from individual responsibility when she states that “the alternative to extractivism is deep reciprocity” (n.p.). In this regard, in composing the theme of this special issue, we have looked toward the potential invigorations of bringing interdisciplinary perspectives into conversation with early childhood environmental education in ways that highlight more-than-human relationality, reciprocity, and plurality (Mitchell, 2017; Nxumalo, 2018; Simpson, 2013; Todd, 2016). We have drawn particular inspiration from recent scholarship in early childhood education that has engaged interdisciplinary perspectives that include intersectional feminist approaches, Indigenous knowledges, and the environmental humanities to engage with why and how the Anthropocene, as an epoch marked by devastating human impacts on the earth, necessitates a turn away from normative romantic conceptions of children and nature (Pacini-Ketchabaw & Taylor, 2015; Ritchie, 2015; Taylor, 2017). This scholarship supports an orientation toward critical and generative pedagogies that are firmly situated within the messy anthropogenic worlds young children co-inhabit, while foregrounding the inseparability of nature and culture. Some of the particular questions that animated our call for papers around the broad theme of interdisciplinary and situated environmentally attuned early childhood education included these: • How might educational responses to the Anthropocene attend to the highly uneven causalities and impacts of environmental precarity on young children along colonial, racialized, gendered, and classed stratifications? How might creative and critical practices foreground Indigenous land and communities in present place and time? (see Haro Woods et al.; Saint-Orens & Nxumalo; and Nelson, Pacini-Ketchabaw, & Nxumalo) • What are some possibilities for troubling the ways in which universalizing Anthropocene discourses materialize in schools and communities? (see Lakind & Adsit-Morris and Nelson, Pacini-Ketchabaw, & Nxumalo) • How might decolonizing movements such as #WaterisLife meet childhood education? (see Saint- Orens & Nxumalo) SPRING/PRINTEMPS 2018 2 Vol. 43 No. 1 JOURNAL OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES EDITORIAL • What emerges from pedagogical efforts to queer childhood-nature relationships? How might perspectives from multispecies studies unsettle anthropocentric early childhood pedagogies? (see Molloy Murphy; Pineda; Schoepe; and Wapenaar & DeSchutter) • What kinds of pedagogical interruptions do posthumanist lenses bring to normative conceptions of childhood education? (see Murris, Reynolds, & Peers) Tuck and Yang’s (2018) words resonate with this collection, which enacts what they refer to as relational, rather than comparative, analysis: Paying attention only to the polarity of theories of change, the exterior contours of their shape and definition, can be misleading in terms of thinking about how theories of change can be in relation to each other. Instead, we might consider the inner angles created in mapping these poles, the sharp corners, the wide wedges which meet on the inside. If we consider those inner angles for their feature of the way that an angle does not have a length, then we can be concerned not with the distance between ideas, but the small shifts that can cross them… New vantage points, new movements, new somatic possibilities are made through that small shift. (pp. 2–3) Following Eve and Wayne, we invite you to craft your own theories of change and provocations for environmentally responsive early childhood pedagogies as you read these articles on their own, as well as in the inner angles you find in their generative resonances and tensions with each other. SPRING/PRINTEMPS 2018 3 Vol. 43 No. 1 JOURNAL OF CHILDHOOD STUDIES EDITORIAL References Blaise, M. (2013). Activating micropolitical practices in the early years: (Re)assembling bodies and participant observations. In R. Coleman & J. Ringrose (Eds.), Deleuze and research methodologies (pp. 184–200). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. New York, NY: Routledge. Mitchell, A. (2017). A politics of worlds. Planet Politics forum. Retrieved from https://worldlyir.wordpress.com/2017/05/15/a-politics- of-worlds-planet-politics-forum/ Nxumalo, F. (2018). Situating Indigenous and Black childhoods in the Anthropocene. In A. Cutter-Mackenzie, K. Malone, & E. Barratt Hacking (Eds.), International research handbook on childhoodnature: Assemblages of childhood and nature. New York, NY: Springer. Pacini-Ketchabaw, V., & Taylor, A. (Eds.). (2015). Unsettling the colonialist places and spaces of early childhood education. New York, NY: Routledge. Ritchie, J. (2015). Social, cultural, and ecological justice in the age the Anthropocene: A New Zealand early childhood care and education perspective. Journal of Pedagogy, 6(2), 41–56. doi: 10. 1515/jped-2015-0012 Simpson, L. B. (2013). Dancing the world into being: A conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson (by Naomi Klein). Yes Magazine, March 5, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/dancing-the-world-into-being-a- conversation-with-idle-no-more-leanne-simpson Taylor, A. (2017). Beyond stewardship: Common world pedagogies for the Anthropocene. Environmental Education Research, 23(10), 1448–1461. doi: 10.1080/13504622.2017.1325452 Todd, Z. (2016). Relationships. Cultural Anthropology website January 21, 2016. Retrieved from: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/799- relationships Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2017). Journals make terrible time machines. Critical Ethnic Studies, 3(2), 1–11. doi: 10.5749/ jcritethnstud.3.2.0001 Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2018). Introduction: Born under the rising sign of social justice. In E. Tuck & K. W. Yang (Eds.), Toward what justice: Describing diverse dreams of justice in education (pp. 1–17). New York, NY: Routledge.