Responding to the ‘small’: thinking-with Karen Barad and Emmanuel Levinas about death and dying in times of ecological crises

How can education make room for children’s enquiries about the meaning of existence in a fragile world? Responding to this question, the paper thinks-with Emmanuel Levinas and Karen Barad and reimagines ‘responsibility’ and ‘response-ability’ in times of ecological crisis. Re-turning data from Small Matters, a research project on young children’s philosophical enquiries into multispecies death and dying, we illustrate through a vignette of how the Community of Philosophical Enquiry (CoPE) pedagogy enables ‘thinking-with-hands’ that troubles human exceptionalism and adult-centrism. Levinas’s ethics of alterity and Barad’s agential realism inspire a posthumanist reading of Aatu’s existential play with a LEGO miniature skeleton. We argue that cultivating response-ability requires slowing down, attuning to the small (child, iPhone, paper, white tack, pencil …), troubling anthropocentric temporalities, and tracing phenomena ad infinitum. We conclude that re-turning to the data excavates a multiplicity of layers of reality – a worlding process critical for justice-to-come.