Telling story: the carrier bag theory of fiction as a means of researching-with children

This chapter will explore the (idealistic but not utopian) idea of reciprocal arts education practice as a means of ‘researching-with’ children. From the etymology of reciprocus (based on re- ‘back’ + pro- ‘forward’), it will move backward and forward in time as a reciprocal method arguing for postdevelopmental, agential observations in practice research, looking closely and critically at the author’s experiences of working collaboratively with children, proposing creative method and artwork as ‘ontological relationality’ (Braidotti, 2013) and research outcome.

This chapter owes a debt to the encouragement and support of colleague Jayne Osgood, who, with Red Ruby Scarlet and Miriam Giugni (2015) argued the case for posthumanist research to be seen as ‘theory and method and art’. Reflecting on experimental, arts-based inquiry, concerned with how ‘the vitality of matter, affect, discourse, bodies (human and non-human) and place “intra-act” in assemblages … for what might be questioned, shared, politicized and transformed’, they seek not to pose solutions or conclusions but ‘rather to create a space to encourage halting conversations about gender that transmute and reconstitute irreducible details along lines of continuation, interruption and reformulation’ (Osgood et al., 2015, p. 357). I will argue that forms of this Baradian ‘response-ability’ can be enacted by storying through socially engaged arts practices of dialogue, photography and education resource-making....