The ‘Voices of the Future’ project was jointly funded across environmental science, arts and humanities and social science (NERC NE/V021370/1]. It aimed to explore children’s relation to treescapes with a focus on belonging and hope. It brought together a number of disciplines including the science of tree-measuring, childhood studies and human geography. There was a particular focus on belonging and hope for treescapes in the project, and it is this focus that we will address in this presentation.

The future of treescapes belongs to children and young people (CYP). Despite increasing child and youth led environmental activism, CYP voices are still rarely heard in policy and practice. In our project, we worked with school children in a number of schools across the North-West of England, with both primary and secondary age children. Employing an innovative co-production approach, we draw together arts, humanities, social and scientific methods, and knowledge to imagine future treescapes that meet the interdependent needs of humans and the environment.  

In the contexts where we worked, we were working with a mix of children and young people who had migrated from a number of different countries, including India, China and Pakistan, over a number of years, also, more recently, Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia. Our team were diverse, and we focused very much on multilingual children and families. The experience of working in schools was a multilingual one, with many languages represented, particularly in central Manchester in the North-West of England. Many of the children were third, fourth or even fifth generation of migrant families who had moved to the North West of England to work in the many factories there in the 1950’s and 1960’s (Werbner 1990). They settled in small-scale terraced housing, often from the Victorian era in the UK, and their community life was close knit and involved many languages, including Urdu, Punjabi, Mandarin and Arabic. 

Our focus in the presentation will be how trees afford opportunities to migrant children to engage dialogues to negotiate their national identities referencing their biographical and migrating histories  (Savage et al 2010). We include stories from “being with trees in the school forest” opening dialogues about trees and children’s relations with the place in a transnational context. Here, we see stories which do not just represent but also make worlds.  We see children’s stories as a messy mix of temporalities whereby story layers pile up and create the possibility of turn and return (Hohti and Tammi 2023, p 10). We also discussed the value of creating relational and democratic conditions for children to enable them to engage open dialogues about their belonging (ness) (Nunn 2022) as part of learning about their environments. We see these research encounters as potential space developing an emergent sense of belonging (Nunn 2022) among children. Children in these encounters are enabled to see themselves as co-researchers to document/record encounters of about trees and their environments.

The talk will cover our work in one semi-rural school, which was located adjacent to a town in the North West of England. Here, we developed, with the children, a project called “Trees n’Us” which was concerned with trees and their role in mitigating climate change. In partnership with Manchester City of Trees, a tree-planting charity and with the support of the year 3 and 4 teachers in the school (children aged 7-8) we worked intensively in the school to support a tree-planting and tree-exploring project. Alongside tree planting, we worked with a trained Forest School teacher, who encouraged the children to encounter trees through free play in a series of Forest school sessions within the school day as part of environmental/outdoor education. We documented these sessions and from these, developed an understanding of a relational sense of belonging which was both multilingual and sensory, experienced through action and experience. This sense of belonging was actively constructed through the interaction with the woodlands. Our team included tree scientists, who were interested in measuring trees, ethnographers and childhood studies academics, as well as tree planting practitioners and a philosopher and an artist. This multi-disciplinary team spent several days in the school, recording and documenting tree planting, tree measuring and the forest school activities. Ipads were given to children to record the activities, and we collected over 300 photographs and films by the children. We also worked with a film-maker, Steve Pool, to develop our thinking with film. We interviewed the forest school practitioner and spent time listening to the stories that the children told us about their experience of the forest school. In this presentation, we focus particularly on two multilingual children’s experience of the forest school. The dialogues between the children started about a tree, its thorny branches, rope with knots and reading places under trees. During these conversations, children talked about their personal relationships with the country of their and their parents’ origin (India). The conversations then led us to trace the complexity and multiplicity in children’s dialogues about their national belonging and (non) belonging (Nunn 2017). In doing so, we also look at the children and their relational agency to negotiate their possible national identities dialogically based on their experiences of living and moving into multiple transnational contexts.

Our understandings of the concept of belonging and space are shaped by our encounters with the young people, who inhabited a fluid and complex world of language-ing (Badwan 2020). In this work, we theorise belonging as a fluid and complex space of practice, drawing on Nunn (2022). Seeing belonging as negotiated across nation states and spheres of influence, and dynamically constructed within families as well as across communities enables a more open and porous concept of belonging as both place-based and affectively attuned. We explore tree-planting, and tree-relating as offering possibilities for belonging within spaces that themselves can be co-constructed and developed by children and young people. Treescapes, as complex, living, adaptive landscapes, shedding leaves and branches and offering opportunities for climbing, living within and experiencing, offer complex spaces of belonging for migrant children as co-existing within and amongst them.

Badwan, K. (2020). Language in a globalised world: social justice perspectives on mobility and contact. United Kingdom: Springer Palgrave Macmillan. Nunn, C. (2022). The participatory arts-based research project as an exceptional sphere of belonging. Qualitative Research, 22(2), 251 268. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794120980971 Nunn. C. (2017) Negotiating national (non)belongings: Vietnamese Australians in ethno/multicultural Australia, Identities, 24:2, 216-235, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2015.1096273 Hohti, R., & Tammi, T. (2023). Composting Storytelling: An Approach for Critical (Multispecies) Ethnography. Qualitative Inquiry, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004231176759 Savage, M., Chris, A.C., Atkinson, R., Burrows, R. Méndez, M. L., & Watt, P. (2010) The Politics of Elective Belonging. Housing, Theory and Society, 27:2, 115-161, DOI: 10.1080/14036090903434975 Werbner, p. (1990). The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts, and Offerings Among British Pakistanis. New York: Berg Print