Children's radical kincrafting—Riverways through care, healing, and transformation

Abstract

This piece explores radical kinship through patchwork ethnography across multiple intimate and educational spaces. The style is multivocal as the work honors creative, nonlinear, and embodied ways of knowing and crafting kin relationships. I learn intergenerationally from youth, educators, and my daughter, as we build kin to care for one another and heal from harm. Through my art, I share aspects of my inner child's relationship to kinship. This piece theorizes three key takeaways: (1) Radical kinship moves us toward liberatory lifeways and builds the kind of reverent intergenerational processes that dignify childlike vulnerabilities, asymmetries of care, and playful tendencies. (2) Patchwork and creative ethnography provide a caring methodological framework for respecting different embodied and relational ways of co-creating knowledge and (3) This nonlinear multivocal and visual account models a sense of radical kinship between author and reader.