Nicole Land thinking with Maria Wysocki, Selena Ha, Andrea Thomas, and Alicja Frankowski

We’ve been thinking about rats and understanding the yard as a complex, lively, more-than-human world since yesterday – and this question of responding well, or moving well with, the common worlds of the playground; living with rats and bugs and the yard vs inheritances that tell us we need to control or manage the yard. There are, in this urban place, rats, chipmunks, racoons, bugs, and slugs. I’ve been thinking about this alongside our intentions to want to unsettle practices of ownership or commodification (and concurrent relations of comparison, status, competition). Why, and how, do we invent relations with the yard with children beyond ownership and property? What happens when we refuse to see the yard and its inhabitants, including critters and materials, as things we can control and own and occupy? How do we notice and respond with the yard without centering our inherited ideas of human exceptionalism and mastery and control?