Journeying in the Aftermath: Surfacing Children’s Place-Making in Manchester and Cape Town

Practices of migration, movement and mobility have become increasingly prevalent in contemporary societies, often accompanied by a rise in narrowly politicised narratives of who belongs and who does not. Most studies of migration focus on the experiences of adults as they negotiate movement and its aftermaths. Less is known about how children experience and narrate their experiences of migration, mobility, and place-making, whether through their own direct movement, or as the children of migrants who have now settled in the places where children grow and live their lives. This poses the question how, as researchers, can we work alongside children in developing narratives that allow us to recognise the afterlives of movement and mobility as experienced by children themselves, in a world in which significant life-choices are determined by adults? In this paper, we explore children’s place-making through arts-based storytelling in the Global South and Global North. The research took place in two primary schools in Manchester, England and Cape Town, South Africa in areas marked by socio-economic, linguistic and ethnic diversity. The paper explores the ways in which children’s use of objects, drawings and artworks construct and reconstruct their social worlds, offering narratives around place-making. We argue that uncovering and examining such narratives gives us a better sense of the temporal patterns of place-making in childhood, where memories of their own and familial experiences co-exist and mix alongside a grounding in the here-and-now of the school and home.