Archipelagia: a board game for researching childhood mobilities

This article presents the design, implementation and results of Archipelagia, a board game created to explore the everyday mobility experiences and territorial knowledge of island children in southern Chile. It describes the ethnographic experience developed in three archipelagos (Calbuco, Chauques and Quinchao), where the game was tested and adapted to create the final version. This laid the foundations of Archipelagia as a tool for research and the production of knowledge on mobilities, focusing on childhood and island contexts. The main findings point to five benefits supporting the use of Archipelagia: raising awareness of the particularities of everyday island mobilities, building territorial and ecological knowledge, promoting care and respect for the environment, highlighting community histories and points of encounter, and facilitating the opening of spaces for intergenerational dialogue. Most of the benefits enabled by the game are forms of rootedness that exist with the flows inherent to everyday island mobility, thus contributing to the field of childhood mobility studies in island contexts. In short, this ethnographic experience demonstrates the value of creating research tools focused on the study’s protagonists, which in this case allowed accessing frequently elusive dimensions of island childhood mobility.