Tunnelling through the anthropocene: making oddkin with a children’s picturebook

For Donna Haraway, staying with the trouble requires making oddkin, that is, humans, non-humans and more-than-humans require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations. “We become-with each other or not at all” (Haraway 2015, p.4). Working with this insistence for staying with each other, the trouble and the unexpected, welcoming collaboration and combination, we recount the processes involved in the curation and creation of a picturebook (entitled Making Odd Kin) with over 100 four-year-old children as part of an environmental education project (www.minibeasts.org). As a feminist project, Making Odd Kin is concerned with multispecies justice by finding pathways for resilience and resurgence within a damaged world as a practice of “tunnelling” (Tsing & Haraway, 2014). Through this tunnelling methodology we imagine a children’s literature that might better register the complexities of multispecies flourishing and be respectful of children’s capacities for world-making. Our book project might be taken as an example of the tunnelling proposed by Tsing & Haraway through its insistence that localized actions and collaborations with diverse life forms build resilience and offer ways to live well together on a dying planet. As Haraway, Le Guin and we argue, storytelling and making odd kin with other beings are vital to fostering new ways of understanding and relating to the world.

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