Objects of Affection: Deathly Encounters With Taxidermy, Stuffed Toys and Atmospheres

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how children and young people relate to death through affective atmospheres and embodied, imaginative encounters with taxidermy and stuffed toy animals. Using arts‐based research (ABR), we explore how death, affective atmospheres, empathy and materiality entangle during multispecies relations. Conducted in Finland, the studies took place in two settings: a community art class for young people (9–11 years) and a workshop with upper‐secondary students (16–18 years). Engaging in Aesthetic Development Interviews (ADIs) and creating pretend taxidermy artworks, students approach taxidermized animals as sensorial and ethically challenging co‐productive research practice. Thinking with Derrida's hauntology, concepts of traces, (em)boding and contamination are used in practices of theorizing how the affective atmospheres of taxidermy evoke empathy and ethical contemplation during the encounters. We elucidate how, as material‐discursive entanglements, taxidermy animals can inform post‐anthropocentric pedagogies that exercise more‐than‐human empathy and multispecies relations. By attending to what ‘haunts’, we begin to notice how children and youth come to sense life and death as materially entangled, recognized through the ghostly presence of more‐than‐human agents in deathly encounters.