ABSTRACT This article investigates how a specific form of interaction—dialogic facilitation—can enhance children's active participation in meaning negotiation and in co‐constructing both gender stereotypes and counter narratives. Based on a theoretical background comprising dialogue, facilitation, narratives and gender, and a systemic and constructivist approach to society and communication, we analyse interactions collected in a primary school through video‐recording. The data are part of a national research project on children's agency, where a workshop on gender differences and equal relationships was coordinated by a facilitator of a local feminist association in a city of Northern Italy. Despite the limitations of this study, the findings indicate that facilitation, the main form of communication implemented during the workshop, relied on a variety of dialogic actions that display active listening and support, in particular repetitions, minimal feedback and different kinds of gist formulations. In the workshop, facilitation elicited a plurality of intertwined children's stories, some with stereotypes, about gender differences. Particularly recurrent and significant were personal narratives based on lived experiences that deconstruct public and stereotypical narratives. The findings also deepen the understanding of master narratives and counter narrative interlacement dynamics.
We situate this article from/with/in the Necrocene, a geological period marked by the systematic production of human and more-than-human death to an extent that ecological destruction, extinction, loss and harm have become a structural feature of modern life. To respond to this anthropocentric predicament, we draw on Haraway's notion of multispecies worlding to re-imagine death beyond the adult-human frame within educational spaces. Working with relational philosophies including posthumanist and indigenous scholarship, we conceptualise multispecies-life-and-death as a dynamic assemblage of multispecies relationality rather than death as an event interpreted solely through adult-human meaning-making. Life and death are understood not as oppositional states but as intra-active processes continually co-constituting one another; animals, plants, fungi and microbes are always living-and-dying in relation. We ask: which forms of death are rendered invisible or insignificant, and how; whose deaths become grievable, and why; and what might attending to multispecies-life-and-death do from/with/in educational spaces? As educator-researchers, we draw on our doctoral projects: one examining childhoodnature play in an urban forest school in London, and the other exploring animal-child relations in an international school in Bali. Across these encounters, death emerges unexpectedly yet inevitably, shaping our collaborations with child and multispecies co-researchers. In this paper, we share co-created multispecies-life-and-death stories that illuminate these entanglements. Rather than disrupting traditional conceptualisations of childhood's innocence, our engagements with death alongside children affirm multispecies relationality and challenge developmental and anthropocentric norms in education. We conclude by proposing multispecies-life-and-death pedagogies grounded in arts-and-play practices that cultivate becoming-grief-able as a pathway towards more caring, capacious, and liveable post-Necrocene futures.
This paper explores how children and young people relate to death through affective atmospheres and embodied, imaginative encounters with taxidermy and stuffed toy animals. Using arts-based research (ABR), we explore how death, affective atmospheres, empathy and materiality entangle during multispecies relations. Conducted in Finland, the studies took place in two settings: a community art class for young people (9-11 years) and a workshop with upper-secondary students (16-18 years). Engaging in Aesthetic Development Interviews (ADIs) and creating pretend taxidermy artworks, students approach taxidermized animals as sensorial and ethically challenging co-productive research practice. Thinking with Derrida's hauntology, concepts of traces, (em)boding and contamination are used in practices of theorizing how the affective atmospheres of taxidermy evoke empathy and ethical contemplation during the encounters. We elucidate how, as material-discursive entanglements, taxidermy animals can inform post-anthropocentric pedagogies that exercise more-than-human empathy and multispecies relations. By attending to what 'haunts', we begin to notice how children and youth come to sense life and death as materially entangled, recognized through the ghostly presence of more-than-human agents in deathly encounters.
Two days before her mother dies of cancer, 8-year-old Susanne starts writing and drawing her thoughts and feelings in a notebook. She calls it Tenkeboka-det bl & aring; hjertet (The thinking book-the blue heart). Over the next year, Susanne uses the notebook as a private space to write and draw her memories and feelings of sadness, anger, love and hope. The book was only meant for Susanne and no adults were involved in its making, but it was later published-true to its format, as a notebook-to help other children in similar situations. Taking departure in Susanne's thinking book, this article aims to think alongside Susanne, exploring what death and bereavement might look like from one child's perspective in Norway, through her words and drawings. Inspired by theoretical and methodological approaches from childhood studies, death studies and anthropology, I explore entanglements of childhood, culture, relationality and multiple ontology in an analysis aiming to cultivate epistemic pluralism and an ethics of unknowing when exploring death and bereavement from a child's perspective.
ABSTRACT This article examines the conditions under which children's written productions are collected, mediated, and archived through a case study of letters addressed to Santa Claus in Switzerland. Since 1950, the Swiss Post has responded annually to thousands of letters sent by children; a selection of these letters has also been preserved in a museum as part of an institutional heritage collection. The article interrogates the legal, ethical, and epistemic frameworks that govern this particular archival program. Drawing on institutional archives, internal reports, and media representations, this paper analyses how children's letters are progressively transformed from intimate correspondence into institutionalised knowledge about childhood. Attention is paid to a set of interconnected archival ‘nodes’—legal, patrimonial, curatorial, and epistemic—through which children's writings are reclassified, recontextualised, and made publicly legible. The analysis emphasises how the cultural enchantment surrounding Christmas operates as a powerful legitimising narrative, rendering socially acceptable practices that would otherwise raise concerns about the secrecy of correspondence, data protection, consent, and stewardship. While children's voices are highly visible within this archive, they remain largely absent from the processes that shape the collection, interpretation, and circulation of their letters. This asymmetry highlights how institutional practices can simultaneously valorise children's expressions while constraining their agency. By situating this case within debates in childhood studies and in critical archival studies, the article contributes to discussions on children's presence in the archives by shifting the focus from the mere presence of children's voices to the conditions under which these voices are archived, curated, and remembered. It argues that the Santa Claus letters constitute not so much an archive created by children as an archive of an enchanted childhood, shaped by adult imaginaries, affective regimes, and institutional logics.
