Listening ‘with’ children ‘to’ the more-than-human world: A diffractive analysis of the child and the challenge of sustainability

Objective: Listening to children has been frequently adopted by researchers working within a child’s rights paradigm, as an uncontested method that veritably represents children’s ‘voices’. Whether children can be understood to participate, and their voices represented veritably, when their lives are culturally situated and co-constructed with significant adults is debatable. The data this paper engages with were created by adopting Barad’s posthumanist methodology of diffraction to listen with children to the more-than-human world. Design/Method: Diffraction was deployed as both a creative knowledge-making practice and an analytical framework that sought insight into the ways in which children are affected by, and affect, ideologies of sustainability. Art-making was adopted as a method to enable children a medium for communication and expression. As children make sense of their social and material worlds through play, I considered it to be a form of performance art during the research. The art-making took place within a ‘wild’ park space in the UK with children age 18 months to 9 years old. Results: This paper engages with a sense-making story created during the research analysis to highlight one way in which children’s possibilities to know become foreclosed when they are filtered through societal constructions of the child as ‘vulnerable’ and how ideas of food production become framed as ‘taboo’ when talking to children. Conclusion: Children’s possibilities to contribute to discussion on issues that create sustainability dissonance seem to become limited. The agency attributed to children tasked with bringing about sustainability change seems questionable and implications for their health and well-being need to be considered.