47: Removing Prediction: Narratology as Research Schema for a Child’s Thirdspace

This study investigated how Soja’s (1998) discussion of thirdspace and narrative analysis, has the potential to reopen us to the otherness of children—to their specialness, their fragility, their dependence, and their symbolic status as beginning. Rather than removing the concept of otherness, I suggest that we use narrative data to create multiple categories of us and other, and otherness, or the individuated accent of each life act as a symbol of complexity, surprise, and potentiality. It is often through developing a narrative that has personal meaning that children, adolescents, and adults begin to shape and problematize what is happening to them and what their understandings are. This particular investigation follows 10 children from three projects, or housing estates, in Northern Ireland, about an hour from Belfast.