Making everything work or building a den

 Liz de Freitas asked me yesterday what I did as PI on this project and I wrote this: 

It was interesting to be asked what I will do as a PI – I guess the answer is both everything and nothing. Part of the job of a PI, in my view, is to be a holding space for all the thinking and doing in the project. This means reading, thinking and listening.

Then there is the co-production element, which is about planning and not planning at the same time.

It is a kind of dance between failure and success, and it is a complex experience.

Anyway, here it is.

At the moment I am trying to make everything work. It is a bit like den-building. When I was a child my holidays were spent on the farm in Dorset. The moment we arrived I would disappear into the trees with my friend Anna and we would make dens for two weeks in the woods. 

Trying to bring together such a range of twigs into one place that holds everyone together is, I think the work of building a den.  Here are some twigs: 

I promote and attempt to exemplify forms of humble, creative, speculative, generous but nonetheless robust collaboration in which the ‘conventional’ social-scientific and phenomenological commitments of childhood studies still have an important part to play. 

The collaboratories all took different forms, but the key driver was an elision of collaboration with experimentation (the ‘laboratory’ element of the neologism ‘collaboratory’). (Peter Kraftl 2020).