Making with the Trouble: Un/Enfolding Posthuman Participants with Young People in Creative Post-Qualitative Research.

This paper explores how 'what matters' can surface in multisensory arts-informed projects as ways for young people to survive and stay with gender and sexuality troubles that are always more than theirs. Situated in an ex-mining post-industrial locale, we make an agential cut in a longitudinal research and engagement project called Unboxing Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) to open up a rare case study of entangled 'creative coproduction' (Renold and Ivinson forthcoming). Supported by an artist-in-residence teacher assistant, composer and filmmaker, we explore the making and mattering of a clay sculpture, the Bruised HeART, created by Alys (pseudonym, age 13) which we theorise as a 'dartaphact' (a concept combining 'data', 'art' and 'act/ivism' to register the posthuman participation of arts-based data). We follow how the heART continues to matter through film and a second dartaphact made from barbed wire and skewered fragments of Alys' instapoetry. Drawing upon the concept of The Fold we compose three figurative folds (crushing matters; crystalising matters; carrying matters) to draw connections between Alys' activist mining ancestors, the silencing of queer violence, and her collection of locally sourced crystals - situated practices generating resourceful posthuman companions to manage multiple troubles. Each fold is composed for its passageway potential to glimpse at our ethical-political praxis of attuning to and making-with troubles already in motion and how dartaphacts might propel new ways of understanding and doing relationships and sexuality education Otherwise.