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In:Children's Cultures after Childhood
Edited by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Macarena García-González
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 16] 2023
► pp. 152–170

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Chapter 10
Down the back of a chair

What does a method of scrabbling with Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” offer conceptualizations of “the child” in the Anthropocene?

 | CERS University of Middlesex
 | CERS University of Middlesex
 | CERS University of Middlesex
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 8 August 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.16.10rij
Abstract
In this chapter, the authors work with Ursula Le Guin’s (1986) Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction to offer a reconfiguration of “the book” in childhood contexts. Attending to the relational agencies generated from messy entanglements of (hence hyphenated) reader-book-child-chair-cat-lice-mites, they feel their way around to arrive at other ideas about what books are, what books do, and what else they might potentiate in contemporary imaginations of “the child”. Le Guin retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural “carrier bag” rather than a weapon of domination. The authors offer a scrabbling methodology of “research-creation”: a method of scrabbling “down the back of the chair” (both literally and metaphorically). This feminist methodology attunes to assemblages of odds and ends, hair and dust mites, children’s literature and child readers and facilitates an exploration of the intersectional, relational meanings that might tell us something else about childhood in the Anthropocene.
Article outline
  • From the margins
  • Critique of “the child” and “childhood”: Towards a posthuman (re-)conceptualization of the child
  • Limitations of contemporary conceptualizations for our doings on/for/with children
  • Challenging contemporary approaches to childhood literacy: What (more) can a book do?
  • Taking up the invitation for child agency
  • Posthumanist approaches to researching with child, book, and more-than-human assemblages
  • Scrabbling inside the book
  • The mattering of books
  • Researching-with nonhuman others; parasitic-others
  • An un-ending-ness to our scrabbling methodology
  • References
References (36)
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