Why fences?

Why fences? Fences are part of common worlds. I feel their cuts and divisiveness. They arose as a marker of property ownership: to protect what is claimed as owned—land, water, cat, dog, bird. Fences also protect us from felons and protect children from society. In Aboriginal Australian ontologies, fences divide, cut, and block. They demarcate black/white contact zone, claimed land, and enforced incarceration (Power & Somerville, 2015).

Fences enact a partition of the sensible (Ranciere, 2010): defining who, when and where can partake in society. Child care fences divide children by age, separating and excluding family members and define participation. I question fences, their imposition, and their colonising force. In my encounters with children and fences, they reach beyond the fence (as in image hosing down distant fire), and through, over and under fences. Thinking and being with fences is political like thinking with tape. Cots also fence.

References

Ranciere, J. (2010). Dissensus (S. Corcoran Ed.). London: Continuum.

Power, K., & Somerville, M. (2015). “The fence as technology of (post-) colonial childhood in contemporary Australia.” In Unsettling the colonial places and spaces of early childhood education, edited by V. Pacini-Ketchabaw and A. Taylor, (p. 63-77). New York: Routledge.

Does the public include more-than-human kin and places?

How do we become worldly across the species in a dog park and what do we become?