This paper draws upon a Welsh Government–funded arts-activist engagement and research project with 70 children aged 9–11 across rural, urban, and suburban Wales (UK). Using participatory, multi-sensory arts methods, the study maps how children experience, negotiate, and express how gender in/equality matters in their everyday lives. Informed by feminist posthuman and queer post-qualitative frameworks (Deleuze & Guattari 1987; Barad 2015; Manning 2020; Bey 2021; Preciado 2025), the project conceptualises gender as an assemblage: a dynamic, relational, and more-than-human process through which bodies, affects, materials, discourses, and spaces intra-act. While research has richly documented the non-linear and intersectional ways children are entangled in gender and sexuality norms, there remains limited work on how children’s own insights can meaningfully shape gender-equitable educational futures. The study thus responds to a persistent gap between critical research on childhood, gender, and sexuality particularly scholarship challenging developmental discourses of innocence and age-appropriateness, and education policy and practice (Payne & Smith 2025; Gannon et al. 2024). The project unfolded in two phases. First, creative friendship-group encounters used drawing, mapping, image-elicitation and speculative prompts to explore everyday gender norms and pressures. Second, whole-class arts-activist workshops invited children to collectively activate what mattered to them through the making of “dartaphacts” (arts-activist objects), designed to communicate their messages safely to wider publics. Childhood researchers have long recognised the potential power of arts-based methodologies to research some of the most sensitive folds of experience (Lupton and Leahy 2021; Hickey-Moody et al. 2022). Accordingly, children’s multi-modal creative outputs (drawings, objects, movement, slogans, and film) are treated not as data to be extracted, but as practices that travel beyond the research encounter. Rather than presenting linear “findings,” the paper shares narrative, visual, poetic, and filmic vignettes that show how art operates as a passageway (Manning 2020) for attuning to, animating, and amplifying the complexities of children’s gendered lives. In alignment with ECER 2026’s theme, “Knowing and Acting” the paper foregrounds the political and historical urgency of imagining gender-just educational futures through situated, intergenerational, and speculative creative praxis. In a context of intensifying gender-phobia and regulation of childhood gender expression (Butler 2024; Stockton 2021), the paper argues that arts-based, posthuman approaches have the potential for crafting ethical, response-able (Barad 2007) spaces where children’s gendered experiences can matter within and beyond educational research, policy, and practice.

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