CODA: Seismic knots of (un)knowing “toddler”(s)

Abstract

Coming into this themed edition, many of us, perhaps most of us, were (and still are) enraged. Our hackles were raised. From the Latin cauda “tail of an animal,” we speak. Our, *kaud-a“part; tail,” is cleaved, separate, from the work of the collection, flicking here. We were enraged by the ugly parts of the world that had proliferated, effects of late capitalism, even within the certainty of our own settled, privileged, and mostly secure academic lives. We were unsettled by Capitalocene’s effects, which surface everywhere including in the forces of our work, productivity, efficiency, and consumerism. Knitting together, putting on our pussy hats, thinking otherwise about our shared futures with children, we formed our own pack (pact). Teachers can be witches and ballerinas, bitches of sorts, doing their best work in muddy gardens, and small backrooms, in cluttered classrooms, and noisy playgrounds. We worked from what is in the bag, our pitchforks, turning the soil, airing out our whimsical thinking caps, adding bit of yarn, an irony, or some grammarly glue, because when such tools are used together, all sorts of fundicity and “mischief of one kind or another” can ensue (Sendak, 1963). Glaring to many of us at the turn of 2019 were such things as, frequent reports of human tragedies, military occupations or the threat of them, increasing severity and frequency of climate related disasters (earthquakes, floods, fires) followed by reports of long months when many regions of the world were without power, water, food, or hope. Many of us raged, as our powerful governments and world leaders were slow to or not willing to act, and instead played golf, ate Big Macs, spent our money, raised our taxes, and talked about birthday cake. We were unhinged further by images that can’t be unremembered, by media reports of mass movement of human bodies across national and international lines, often accompanied by portrayals of children in foil blankets behind fences; images of toddlers floating alongside wailing and grieving fathers; reports of suckling