'making Kin' - from the Perspective of Children in a Forest Kindergarten

To delimit the concept of the Anthropocene, which was established by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000), Donna Haraway offers the term 'Chthulucene' (2018, p. 139) and thus establishes a term that is intended to focus on a variety of sources and stories - and above all on the earth-related (chthonic) component. The prefix ‘anthropo-‘, Anna Tsing writes, prevents us from paying attention to the patchwork landscapes, multiple temporalities and changing alliances of humans and non-humans (2018, p. 201). Thus, it is Haraway's notion of kin-making (2018, p. 142) - the active process of seeking and forging relationships - that will be considered in more detail in this paper. Based on observations that children do not find it strange to endow animals and plants with personality and (human) abilities, this contribution will explore the question of “what entities do children relate to?”. It is therefore important to examine children's relevance settings with regard to relatedness and to reconstruct the development of their ways of dealing with things from a longitudinal perspective. The data collected in the setting of a forest kindergarten in Switzerland in ethnographic and participatory research in the author's dissertation project serve as a basis for this. The analyses are based on conversations that took place with the 18 children in the forest kindergarten during ‘free play’. The reconstructed results from the interpretation of the children's narratives are referenced on the one hand to studies from well-being research on the importance of natural spaces for children (Galli et al. 2016) and on the other hand, the results are discussed in the light of the theories of new materialism (Hoppe & Lemke 2021) and on the basis of posthumanist and ethical responsibility perspectives (Barad 2007; Haraway 2018).