Mushrooms, Clay, and Crone: Refiguring Childhood in the Anthropocene

This session explores the entanglements of childhood, geontopower, and the Anthropocene through three figures of early childhood: Mushrooms, Clay, and the Mother-Maiden-Crone. Thinking with Elizabeth Povinelli’s geontologies (2016) and Katherine Yusoff’s anthropogenesis (2018), we examine how these figures disrupt binary distinctions between life/nonlife, human/more-than-human, and education/world. The destabilization of these boundaries invites a rethinking of childhood as inherently responsive to planetary shifts.

Povinelli’s (2016) geontopower breaks with a biopolitical assumption that power works via tactics of making live and letting die and is instead concerned with maintaining the division of life from nonlife. Her figures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus illustrate attempts to stabilize or traverse this boundary. These figures, however, are not escapes from power or answers to the Anthropocene but symptoms of late liberal governance in times of climate crisis.

Yusoff’s (2016) anthropogenesis reframes human existence as intertwined with geological forces, highlighting endings as much as beginnings. “Definitions of being,” Yusoff insists (2016), “must now acknowledge an eternal but shifting mineralogical root” (p. 9). In the shift, the figure of “humanity-as-strata” emerges as intimately linked with geological forces and processes of decay, renewal, and endurance.

We propose three figures that encourage a reimagining of childhood in the Anthropocene: Mushrooms represent the intricate, underground mycelial networks of relationality and interdependence, emphasizing children’s entanglements with nonhuman life; Clay as the fusion of human and mineral, highlighting children’s material embodiment within strata and their role in sustaining ecological cycles; the Mother-Maiden-Crone invokes processes of care, birth, and pagan wisdom, foregrounding practices of intergenerational care and kinship that extend beyond human boundaries. Engaging with these figures encourages co-speculation about the 'more than social' dimensions of planetary justice, which are highly relevant to eco-attuned scholarship within the sociology of childhood (Kraftl, Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2020).