Chapter 10

Down the back of a chair

In this chapter, the authors work with Ursula Le Guin’s (1986) Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction to offer a reconfiguration of “the book” in childhood contexts. Attending to the relational agencies generated from messy entanglements of (hence hyphenated) reader-book-child-chair-cat-lice-mites, they feel their way around to arrive at other ideas about what books are, what books do, and what else they might potentiate in contemporary imaginations of “the child”. Le Guin retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural “carrier bag” rather than a weapon of domination. The authors offer a scrabbling methodology of “research-creation”: a method of scrabbling “down the back of the chair” (both literally and metaphorically). This feminist methodology attunes to assemblages of odds and ends, hair and dust mites, children’s literature and child readers and facilitates an exploration of the intersectional, relational meanings that might tell us something else about childhood in the Anthropocene.