This paper emerges from a three-year project, funded by the AHRC entitled: ‘Odd: Feeling Different in the World of Education. Although the research had a number of strands of enquiry, we were brought together in a common aim to think through the lived experience of ‘feeling odd’ In school from the perspective of staff and pupils. The research drew together artists, researchers and school staff to consider what it felt like to not fit in and how schools could work to accommodate difference in the world of education. As an artist and ethnographer, we worked with groups of children over a two-year period to make films together, analyse the films and collectively consider what they meant. Rather than see children’s work as something to be discussed or extracted from, if it is seen as ‘the work’ it is differently situated. We thought through our work as a form of collective "research-creation' (Cambre et al 2020). Research-creation presented us with an emerging theoretical framework that is significant when doing research with young people that concerns their lives and experiences. This meant that our work focussed on the idea of what emerges within the act rather than driving research aims and objectives through predefined questions, aims and objectives (Manning and Massumi 2014). The results of the art-making activities included a series of short films made by children on their experience of feeling odd in school. Within these films, ideas surfaced such as the idea of the uncanny (Loveless 2019). The term ‘uncanny’ emerged within our shared stories and emerged collectively sometimes from a feeling of uncertainty or the sense things were different-to-normal. Research with young people is an entangled assemblage of rhythms and flows and movements that can come to light in the making of something new together. This can connect with the charged immediacy of everyday life suggesting further questions and further movement, being part of the ongoing research.

Cambre, C., Chapman, O., Couillard, P., Cowan, T.L., Cussans, J., Cutler, R.L., Hroch, P., Knowles, R.V., Lowry, G., Manning, E. and Mookerjea, S., (2020). Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-creation. University of Alberta. Loveless, N. (2019) How to Make Art at the End of the World. Duke University Press. Manning, E. and Massumi, B. (2014) Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. University of Minesota press.