Chapter 8. Research with children, weeds, and a book

Abstract

In this chapter, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak looks back at an encounter with weeds, a seemingly unimportant moment in a child-led research project that has nevertheless continued to arrest her attention long after the completion of her collaboration with the children. She uses the concept of after childhood (Kraftl 2020) and the notions of attentiveness and curiosity developed in multispecies studies (van Dooren, 2018; van Dooren et al. 2016; van Dooren & Rose, 2016) to speculate retrospectively about possible movements of the research focus away from the child participants and the book they studied with her towards the plants and their lifeworld. Reflecting on the common world that might have emerged in the project as a result of these shifts, she argues for the thematic, methodological, and ethical importance of human and more-than-human entanglements in children’s literature and culture studies in the Anthropocene.