OUTLINE

The aim of this inquiry is to investigate intergenerational, place based and arts-led co-publishing with children as a radical aesthetic-spatial-political praxis. I have drawn on arts-led methods within in a multi-disciplinary project to contribute to children’s geographies through explorations of the spatial position of literatures by children as determinants of agency and worlding-in-place. 

Through arts-informed multi-method approaches, autoethnographic and artefactual data are presented through affective narratives (Leavy, 2015). These narratives alongside insights from research participants with experience of children as authors, generated through an e-survey, interviews, and arts-led focus groups frame the role of the child as an author of meaning, place, and self.

I have adopted Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s (1983) “assemblages of minor literatures” as an enveloping conceptual framework surrounding empirical chapters or plateaus. These plateaus diffract thematic deployments of minor literature as an assemblage of ideas. Extending this line of thought, five signature Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts—becoming, the nomad, the fold, smooth/striated space, and lines of flight—act as interpretive analytic tools to explore the co-constitutive dynamics of co-publishing, place, and subjectivity. 

The overarching research question is:

1. How and why is publishing books by children transformational? What purposes are served and who benefits? 

ABSTRACT

I reflect on a relational journey of publishing books by children as authors, as intergenerational, place based and arts-led practice that I term co-publishing praxis.  

Co-publishing praxis has been developed largely through the two arts-education organisations I founded: Kids’ Own Publishing Partnership in Ireland and Kids’ Own Publishing (Australia). Co-publishing positions children (up to age 15) as artists, writers, storytellers as published authors of their own books. I explored this practice first as an early childhood teacher in London, then through an arts-education practice in Ireland (Dublin/Sligo), and subsequently as community arts and cultural development (CACD) work in Australia (Melbourne/Tasmania). Place-based books are made, co-created, and published in intergenerational settings, through arts-led approaches towards socially just outcomes (Haynes & Murris, 2017).

The geographical framing of this interdisciplinary inquiry at the intersection of geohumanities, arts and education draws key literature from community engaged arts practice, childhood studies, critical education, public pedagogies as well as literary and colonial geographies. (Bennett, 2010; Biesta, 2019; Kraftl, 2013; Lippard, 1984; Skelton, 2009; Somerville, 2020; Tally, 2020; Thurgill, 2021). My thesis maps a nomadic journey through time and place, moving from London to Ireland, on to Melbourne then Tasmania. This journey reveals insights into ways that children’s own publishing can disrupt dominant narratives in transformative ways contributing to more socially just engagements with literatures and literacies in place (Pahl & Rowsell, 2020; Snaza, 2019).