Common Worlding with Children in Brazil: Refusing and Reimagining Pedagogies in the Colonial Anthropocene

Bacelar de Castro, Adrianne

This presentation responds to the colonial Anthropocene by thinking with childhood’s entanglements with place, more-than-human agencies, and histories of coloniality within the context of Olinda Nova do Maranhão, Brazil. Drawing from common worlding pedagogies, Black trans/travesti radical imaginations(Rodrigues Costa da Silva, 2022), and the lived experiences of quilombola communities, I extend the conversation beyond dominant Euro-Western discourses of the Anthropocene. I consider how childhood emerges within and through the complex forces of colonial geographies, and how educators, children, and the land itself resist and reconfigure the structures of racial capitalism, human exceptionalism, that continue to define our present.

Grounded in everyday pedagogical encounters, this work moves with refusal, confluence(Bispo dos Santos, 2023), and radical imagination—unsetling the sedimented layers of colonial histories. These refusals are understood as not only responses to the Anthropocene but also as radical reconfigurations of the relationships between life, nonlife, and land. In line with Yusoff’s (2018) critique of the white Anthropocene, which overlooks the colonial geographies and extractive economies that materially delivered humanism and its racialized structures of thought, I discuss how childhood in Olinda Nova is shaped by and yet refuses the colonial logics embedded in these histories.

This presentation situates itself within ongoing efforts to rethink childhood studies within the problematics of the colonial Anthropocene. It offers pathways to engage more deeply with the enduring impacts of colonialism while centering the vibrancy and resilience of Black life and traditional knowledges in Brazil.

Bispo dos Santos, A. (2023). a terra dá, a terra quer [Kindle]. Ubu.

Rodrigues Costa da Silva, V. (2022). Nas encruzilhadas da imaginação radical preta e travesti. Aguarrás, 9(39). http://aguarras.com.br/encruzilhadas-preta-travesti

Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black Anthropocenes or none. University of Minnesota Press.