This presentation is based on the research project "Negotiating NatureChildhoods. An Ethnography of Relations with Nature in Kindergartens of the Anthropocene". We investigate how children build and entertain relations with their surroundings in the local common worlds of their kindergartens, how relational agency is established in interaction with the material, human and non-human world. In the traditional dichotomic western worldview, often-discussed as the nature-culture-gap (Latour 1993; Haraway 2008), younger children tend to be positioned on the side of "nature", whereby in their educational process and based on intensive contact with nature they are ultimately supposed to develop a "culture" of human responsibility towards the natural environment. Following recent developments in childhood theory with the posthumanist / neo-materialist common worlds concept (Taylor 2013, Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw 2019) though, relations of children with and within their environments are understood as profoundly shaped by materialities and "more-than-human"-connections. Accordingly, with the use of the common worlding concept, our research interest is directed more strongly towards the in-between of separations, towards the power of materiality and all connections of humans and more-than-humans which repeatedly transgress these dichotomic orders. Our talk revolves firstly around the question of how these "entanglements" (Haraway 2008) of people/children, objects, plants, animals, meanings and spaces in the process of becoming (composed) together (Latour 2011) can be captured, and how the relationship between childhood and nature can be discussed from this perspective. Secondly, following the idea of the symposium to shed light on the enactment of relationships in the field, we want to take a close look on the relationships between field participants and researchers through the lens of the common worlds concept. This means that we see these relations evolving out of a process of relationing in which, according to Marilyn Strathern (2020, 3), relations are ‘held in place by relations’. We specifically look at how materialities and people, but also ideas and non-human beings come into play when we as researchers try to form and manage our relationships with the researched. We see our task in tracing these relations, or rather webs of relations. Methodologically, we are guided by the approach as described by George Marcus (1995) in his classic text: “Follow the people / thing / metaphor / story …”, by quite literally following connections and putative relationships (Marcus 1995, 97), also within one local field, and not (as was Marcus’ concern in the 1990ies) in a multi-sited setting.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2008. When Species Meet. Posthumanities 3. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Übersetzt von Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2011. «Il n’y a pas de monde commun. Il faut le composer». Multitudes 45 (2): 38–41. Marcus, George E. 1995. «Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography». Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117. Strathern, Marilyn. 2020. Relations: an anthropological account. Durham: Duke University Press. Taylor, Affrica. 2013. Reconfiguring the Natures of Childhood. Routledge. Taylor, Affrica, und Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw. 2019. The Common Worlds of Children and Animals. Relational Ethics for Entangled Lives. London, New York: Routledge.