A New Materialist and Post-qualitative Approach to Poetry Written by Children Children’s literature written by child authors, or another children’s literature, is attracting a growing scholarly interest as a form of young people’s participation in culture and as an expression of their perspectives on their own childhoods and general social and political phenomena in which they participate. Drawing on new materialist, relational and post-qualitative approaches, including the concept of anarchive and walking methods, Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak discusses a discursive-material approach to children’s texts that she is currently developing in her research on the corpus of ecopoetry created by pupils from John Clare Primary School in Helpston. She argues that individual and collective intergenerational encounters with the children’s poems may generate moments, affects and events that result in new entanglements of matter and meaning. Moreover, as Justyna’s project is of participatory nature and involves children as co-creators of the research process, it promotes diversity of knowledge production that may substantially contribute to developing a shared sense of belonging to and responsibility for our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak is Associate Professor of Literature and Director of the Center for Young People’s Literature and Culture at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wroclaw, Poland. She is the author of Yes to Solidarity, No to Oppression: Radical Fantasy Fiction and Its Young Readers (2016). She is a Kosciuszko, Fulbright and Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow. Since 2017 she has served as a member of the executive board of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. She is now a visiting researcher at Anglia Ruskin University, working on Ecopoetic Entanglements: Children’s Poetry Mobilizing John Clare’s Artistic Legacy, a project funded by the Bekker Programme of the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA).
Centre for Education Research and Scholarship
