A Creative Conversation for Re-imagining Creative Visual Methods with Children and Young People in Pandemic Times and Beyond

Abstract

In this project we forward insights about the importance of being in ‘the room where it happens’ – creating tactility and togetherness in the research encounter – for research with children and young people in times of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Created in response to the intense uptake of digital methods catalysed by COVID-19, in this project we productively re-imagine moments from our creative visual research with children and young people from before the COVID-19 pandemic. This re-imagining began early in 2020 and has continued to evolve, incorporating our shifting perspectives and ‘thinking with’ the scholarship of leading creative methodologists. The creative output is in the form of a ‘Prezine’ which is our concept and is a portmanteau bringing together ‘Prezi’ a presentation tool, and ‘zine’. The Prezine charts our creative conversation, moving between four connected rhizomes of thinking about creative research with children and young people: ‘the room where it happens’, being in the encounter, spaces for the unexpected, and what we are calling ‘methodological alchemy’. The Prezine documents our experiment in thinking about research futures where we openly and creatively explore the process of making this reflective resource about research ‘becomings’.