Under heaps of bubble-wrap a lone hand emerges to wave hello.
Today bodies and bubble-wrap bump up against mandatory safety checks.
Inspection begins
POP!POP!POPPING! Jumping, diving, falling, tripping
Hazardous AND Complex #encounterswithmaterials
POP!POP!POPPING! Twirling, binding, snarling, obstructing
Hazardous AND Inviting #livingwithplastics
POP!POP!POPPING! (Un)comfortable entanglements of bodies and plastic
Hazardous AND Intimate #commonworlds
Close encounters with mounds of bubble-wrap create caring relations that transform the classroom into complex sites of response(ability) (Gabrys, Hawkins & Michael, 2013; Haraway, 2016). The intermingling of bodies and bubble-wrap in motion push educators to think beyond governing binaries: safe/unsafe and care/careless.
As educators and researchers continue to take the safety of children seriously, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) reminds them that, “care can be done within and for worlds that we might find objectionable” (p. 6). Providing safe and care(full) living is never a neutral act but rather a non-innocent ethical-political process of living “as well as possible” (p. 16) in relations with more-than-human others.
References
Gabrys, J., Hawkins, G., and Michael, M. (2013). Introduction: From materiality to plasticity. In J. Gabrys, G. Hawkins & M. Michael (Eds.). Accumulation; The material polictics of plastic. New York, NY: Routledge.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble; Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care; speculative ethics in more than human worlds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.