Willing, Lauren

I am currently doing a PhD in the education and social work department, with a focus on environmental education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Specifically, I am researching with possums and children who have become entangled in mortal relations through pest control education programs. My inquiry is concerned with the intersectionality of oppression and marginalisation between groups/categories of humans and with other animals. Developing a consciousness of oppression for all of Earth’s knotty network of beings is at the heart of my conceptual framework. With that consciousness humanist hierarchies can be challenged on who is considered a subject, who matters and who is excluded. My supervisor is Donna Haraway. Thanks to her work on companion species, I can write/think the partial human-possum histories with ecofeminist theories. The next step will be to reconfigure child-possum mortal relations with respect and interspecies justice.