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Part of
Children's Cultures after Childhood
Edited by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Macarena García-González
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 16] 2023
► pp. 122–136

Chapter 8
Research with children, weeds, and a book

An after-childhood perspective

| Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław

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.

Keywords: weeds, more-than-human world, attentiveness, curiosity, after childhood
Article outline
  • The encounter with the weeds
  • The art of attentiveness
  • In the shadow of the child
  • Zooming in on the weeds
  • Children-weeds-book entanglements
  • Stories we tell through research matter
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.16.08des
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