Walking-with Children on Blasted Landscapes

Abstract

Walking-with children on blasted landscapes opens up possibilities of an entangled set of uneasy encounters, revealing and provoking an alternative geo-storying, a de-colonialising pursuit conjured up from an awakened ethical sensibility. I am walking-with those who have been deemed unworthy of recognition and are invisible in the obscene manifestations of capitalism, the arms race, and the cold war: these companions walk with us as past ghosts as we share the horrors of a dystopian future. Walking-with children on this landscape is to bear witness to the atrocities of the Anthropocene: to bring attention to the invisible, the monsters, the unsightly possibilities, and stories of fear and fascination, doom and dread. In this paper I walk and write with the past, present, and future to highlight the complexity of what Karen Barad calls spacetimemattering.