A posthuman perspective on ethical responsibility: Using “live export” as a provocation for early years teachers

This paper presents and problematizes a ‘live export’ discourse that complicates and prevents the actualization of children’s participation rights in Australia. ‘Live export’, as a practice of packaging, removing, and suffering illuminates how the child, prisoner, animal, and teacher are entangled in a wide web of relationships. A posthuman logic is used to show how blurring the boundaries between adult/child, human/non-human, nature/culture, might be done. This paper argues that it is the field’s ethical responsibility to work with these ‘entanglements’ and ‘sticky knot’s and to take part in intentional ‘boundary blurring’, so that new ways of thinking and relating to childhood becomes possible