Making with the Trouble: Un/Enfolding Posthuman Participants with Young People in Creative Post‐Qualitative Research

Abstract This paper explores how ‘what matters’ can surface in multisensory arts‐informed projects as ways for young people to survive and stay with gender and sexuality troubles that are always more than theirs. Situated in an ex‐mining post‐industrial locale, we make an agential cut in a longitudinal research and engagement project called Unboxing Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) to open up a rare case study of entangled ‘creative coproduction’ (Renold and Ivinson forthcoming). Supported by an artist‐in‐residence teacher assistant, composer and filmmaker, we explore the making and mattering of a clay sculpture, the Bruised HeART, created by Alys (pseudonym, age 13) which we theorise as a ‘dartaphact’ (a concept combining ‘data’, ‘art’ and ‘act/ivism’ to register the posthuman participation of arts‐based data). We follow how the heART continues to matter through film and a second dartaphact made from barbed wire and skewered fragments of Alys' instapoetry. Drawing upon the concept of The Fold we compose three figurative folds (crushing matters; crystalising matters; carrying matters) to draw connections between Alys' activist mining ancestors, the silencing of queer violence, and her collection of locally sourced crystals – situated practices generating resourceful posthuman companions to manage multiple troubles. Each fold is composed for its passageway potential to glimpse at our ethical‐political praxis of attuning to and making‐with troubles already in motion and how dartaphacts might propel new ways of understanding and doing relationships and sexuality education Otherwise.