Thinking with Deconstruction: Book-Adult-Child Events in Children's Literature Research

Abstract

As Nathalie op de Beeck (2018) has recently pointed out, children's literature scholars need to forge more meaningful connexions between ecoliteracy and environmental action to create possibilities for achieving environmental justice. I propose that we achieve this goal by (auto-)deconstructing our research practices and subjectivities through promoting the participation of children as active contributors to all elements of the research process. Such approaches enable young decision-makers to engage with one another, with books and with the world through ethics of interconnectivity. I see such praxis as exemplifying deconstructive events and discuss their emergence in Shaping a Preferable Future: Children Reading, Thinking and Talking about Alternative Communities and Times (ChildAct), a project I co-conducted with children in Cambridgeshire, UK, in the school year 2017–2018. The project centered on child-adult collaboration towards a better understanding of how utopian literature shapes ideas for preferred futures, how these ideas evolve in readers’ encounters with their localities and how they call readers into action. As I show, ChildAct testifies to the possibility of de-centering children's literature research towards a field promoting a shared sense of belonging to and responsibility for our world.