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Adopting creative research approaches to explore climate-induced crises: stories and learnings with children and young people from the Floods + Me project
Conference presentation

Adopting creative research approaches to explore climate-induced crises: stories and learnings with children and young people from the Floods + Me project

Simone M Blom, Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles Professor, Alexandra Lasczik, Liberty de Rivera, Lauren Rickards Prof., David Smith Rousell, Katie Hotko, Chantelle Bayes, Yaw Ofosu-Asare, Helen Widdop Quinton, …
2026 ATEA Conference (Gold Coast, Queensland, 01/07/2026–03/07/2026)
02/07/2026

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Abstract

In this paper, we share our research story from the Floods + Me project which investigated one of Australia’s most devastating climateinduced crises: the unprecedented Northern Rivers floods of 2022 through children and young people’s perspectives. The flood events had many destructive impacts including structural, functional and operational impacts to schools layered with the physical, social and emotional dimensions to the community. One facet of the community that remained under-represented in flood research, and one that this project sought to explore, was the flood experiences of children and young people from their perspective. To improve understanding of these impacts and climatedisaster impacts more broadly, the Floods + Me research project - an inter-university and transdisciplinary collaboration of child youth and adult researchers - mapped child and youth experiences of post-floods life. The research adopted arts-based methods and a child-framed methodology placing children and youth as co-researchers and equal knowledge producers. This creative, innovative and collective approach to undertaking research aimed to disrupt existing research methodologies and practices to drive ecological and social transformations in the way climate-induced disasters are understood and responded to. Through a posthuman, diffractive theoretical lens that focused on the concept of children and childhood, we explored the data that spoke to children and young people’s experiences of schooling and education in their post-flood life. In this paper, we present the seven diffractive mappings that emerged from the data and explore the insights they provide into how children and young people experienced the floods The mappings represent conceptual ideas that were generated from the data through the process of diffractive analysis. The findings provide a vision for how we can collectively work to build sustainable and hopeful futures that effectively respond to climate-induced disasters with and for the generations to come.

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