Red Circles, Embodied Literacies, and Neoliberalism: the Art of Noticing an Unruly Placemaking Event

This article presents a data story that illustrates unruly placemaking from an event that unfolded during a six-year research enquiry exploring the out-of-school literacies of young people in an informal neighbourhood making space. Specifically, I analyse the happenings between a four-year-old boy and a red marker through theories of critical posthumanism and companion species to illustrate how the white space of paper and the marks made on that space are acts of placemaking, and thus political in nature, and I suggest that noticing the unruliness of such bodily acts can help us disrupt the embodied literacies of hyper-capitalist structures underpinning traditional understandings of everyday childhood practices.