Abstract

In this article, we explore ways in which arts-based approaches may be deployed to educate ways of knowing/becoming/doing difference differently, particularly when issues of racism and xenophobia come to the front. We present a school research intervention with students and in-service teachers in Santiago, Chile. In this study, we use The Island, a picturebook that produces a narrative of exclusion and fear, instead of promoting tolerance and conviviality. From a new materialist approach, we show engagements or makings of children and adults, sketching out how they defy simplistic ways of thinking and feeling about normative difference. We frame this study as a diffractive research-intervention in which the intertwined and productive relation ‘books and readers’ allow us to problematize rather than simplify what knowing/becoming/doing with arts may do to the production of difference within school contexts.