Queer Synthetic Curriculum for the Chthulucene: Common Worlding Waste Pedagogies

This paper sketches aspects of common worlding waste pedagogies through Donna Haraway’s figure of the Chthulucene. More specifically, it narrates the making and happenings of what we call a queer synthetic curriculum in an early childhood centre. Drawing attention to plastic in order to reframe children’s relationship to it, the article engages with three main questions: How might we refashion waste practices from children’s ubiquitous plastic relations? How might we speculate on the kinds of response-able worlds that might be remade through new kinds of interactions between child and plastic bodies? What might the Chthulucene synthetic futures of early education entail? The queer synthetic curriculum also experiments with creative strategies to learn to live with plastic toxicities without necessarily celebrating them; it embraces the mixed affects that plastic affords (its sensorial pleasures and possibilities as well as the guilt embedded in their toxicity); it plays with the provocative idea that we can no longer separate our fleshy human bodies from synthetic polymer bodies; and it treats plastic as chthonic queer matter. We argue that, by staying with the trouble these risky attachments bring, conditions for futures other than those already determined by synthetic, toxic petrocapitalist modernity and coloniality might emerge in early childhood education.