Ruler-skirts, Rights-kites and Rainbow Ribbons: making gender equality matter with pre-teens in arts-activist research

• In Event: Queer and Trans International and Global Perspectives in Education: Oral Histories and Policy Analysis

Abstract

This paper explores a government-funded arts-activist research project with 70 children (ages 9–11) across rural, urban, and suburban Wales (UK). Using participatory, multi-sensory arts methods, it maps how children experience and express how gender in/equality matters through multi-modal creative outputs that journey beyond a research project. Informed by feminist posthuman and queer post-qualitative frameworks, the study’s ‘findings’ are shared through narrative, visual, and poetic vignettes and film, showing how art operates as a passageway to attune, animate and amplify the complexities of youth voice. In alignment with AERA 2026’s theme, the project foregrounds the political and historical urgency of imagining gender-just educational futures through situated, intergenerational, and speculative creative praxis.

Author

• EJ Renold, Cardiff University