These are our stories: Children’s more-than-human encounters with migration in Global South and North contexts

Abstract

This paper explores children’s encounters with migration in global contexts through storytelling. Children from two primary schools in Manchester, UK and Cape Town, South Africa, developed stories of self through object elicitation, poetry and self-made artefacts. The children had either directly or indirectly experienced migration across borders. We combined objects that were brought from home, drawings and annotations in exploring the significance of children’s ordinary everyday encounters. While the children’s story work captures their individual perceptions of self, the collections of objects, drawings and artefacts reflect ideas about what it means to be a child in a world of mobility where human and more-than-human are entangled together. We explore children’s stories in relation to mobility, belonging and more-than-human connections. However, we acknowledge that the interpretation of the ‘final’ stories is incomplete as they continue to change in a process of becoming.