Storying Multispecies‐Life‐and‐Death: Becoming‐Grief‐Able in Educational Spaces for Post‐Necrocene Futures

ABSTRACT

We situate this article from/with/in the Necrocene, a geological period marked by the systematic production of human and more‐than‐human death to an extent that ecological destruction, extinction, loss and harm have become a structural feature of modern life. To respond to this anthropocentric predicament, we draw on Haraway's notion of multispecies worlding to re‐imagine death beyond the adult‐human frame within educational spaces. Working with relational philosophies including posthumanist and indigenous scholarship, we conceptualise multispecies‐life‐and‐death as a dynamic assemblage of multispecies relationality rather than death as an event interpreted solely through adult‐human meaning‐making. Life and death are understood not as oppositional states but as intra‐active processes continually co‐constituting one another; animals, plants, fungi and microbes are always living‐and‐dying in relation. We ask: which forms of death are rendered invisible or insignificant, and how; whose deaths become grievable, and why; and what might attending to multispecies‐life‐and‐death do from/with/in educational spaces? As educator‐researchers, we draw on our doctoral projects: one examining childhoodnature play in an urban forest school in London, and the other exploring animal–child relations in an international school in Bali. Across these encounters, death emerges unexpectedly yet inevitably, shaping our collaborations with child and multispecies co‐researchers. In this paper, we share co‐created multispecies‐life‐and‐death stories that illuminate these entanglements. Rather than disrupting traditional conceptualisations of childhood's innocence, our engagements with death alongside children affirm multispecies relationality and challenge developmental and anthropocentric norms in education. We conclude by proposing multispecies‐life‐and‐death pedagogies grounded in arts‐and‐play practices that cultivate becoming‐grief‐able as a pathway towards more caring, capacious, and liveable post‐Necrocene futures.