Introduction: Childhood in metacrisis
Climate change is recognised as a leading cause of disruptive environmental disasters, including bushfires, heatwaves and floods that positions children and young people’s “futures at risk” (Gibbs et al., Reference Gibbs, Molyneaux, Harms, Gallagher, Block, Richardson, Brandenburg, O’Donnell, Kellett, Quinn, Kosta, Brady, Ireton, MacDougall and Bryant2021; IPCC, Reference Lee and Romero2023; UNICEF, 2025, p. 1). In 2022, UNICEF reported that more than 27 million children globally had been exposed to flooding impacts alone. In the same year, Australia experienced one of its most devastating climate-induced crises – a series of major flooding events across its eastern states that affected an estimated 14 million people, with the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, especially impacted (UNICEF & Royal Far West, Reference West2022). As our previously published critical review found, the perceptions and recovery needs of children and young people in such climate disasters are not well understood (Verlie et al., Reference Verlie, Rousell, de Kleyn, Hartup, Rickards, St Clair, Bayes, Widdop Quinton, Blom, Hotko, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, de Rivera, Lasczik and Ofosu-Asare2025).
It is also increasingly acknowledged that climate crises do not occur independently of other economic, political, health, social, resource and security crises around the world (World Economic Forum, 2023; Pollock & Bell, Reference Pollock and Bell2025). Lawrence et al. (Reference Lawrence, Homer-Dixon, Janzwood, Rockstöm, Renn and Donges2024) describe how crises form a “causal entanglement…in multiple global systems in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects” (p. 4) where triggers, stressors and domino effects intra-act to produce a “polycrisis.” This, in turn, weakens the resilience of the planet and society to withstand or recover from “emergent harms that are different from, and usually greater than, the sum of the harms they would produce separately” (Lawrence et al., Reference Lawrence, Homer-Dixon, Janzwood, Rockstöm, Renn and Donges2024, p. 4). In this paper, we focus on the 2022 Northern Rivers floods which occurred as the community was emerging from the restrictions of the 2020–2022 COVID pandemic, which in turn emerged on the tail of the 2019/2020 “Black Summer” bushfires (Verlie & Blom, Reference Verlie and Blom2022). Campbell et al. (Reference Campbell, Edwards and Gray2025) found that disaster stressors can compound for young people when crises occur simultaneously or overlap.
Pollock and Bell (Reference Pollock and Bell2025) argue that polycrisis conditions are merely symptomatic of the systematic failures by society. They argue that society has failed to address human worldview causative conditions which have produced polycrisis as the material consequences of these conditions (Pollock & Bell, Reference Pollock and Bell2025). This failure of thought and action on the part of society – the illness, to extend the metaphor – is the “metacrisis”; an onto-epistemological crisis in which human thought, feeling and imagination have been captured by the colonial-capitalist regime that dominates the current planetary epoch (Pollock & Bell, Reference Pollock and Bell2025). At its root, the metacrisis is deeply ideological and grounded in reductionist, materialist, individualist and anthropocentric ideologies. Further, the metacrisis highlights the potential for “human tendencies such as greed, fear and control [to be] amplified by systemic factors” (Pollock & Bell, Reference Pollock and Bell2025, pp. 13–14). Stein (Reference Stein2022) and Wheatley (Reference Wheatley2025) also recognise society’s inability to manage polycrisis as symptomatic of capitalism’s short-term individualistic responses. These individualistic responses are separate movements which compound the impacts of humanity’s failure to adopt a posthuman, entangled response to polycrisis; that is, one that goes beyond human exceptionalism to an ethical, relational and more-than-human enactment (Barad, Reference Barad2007). Moreover, humanity’s separate and individualistic movements signal a meta-systematic dysfunctionality – in our capacity for collective action and sense-making (Pollock & Bell, Reference Pollock and Bell2025; World Economic Forum, 2023).
The 2022 Northern Rivers floods demonstrate the experience of living amidst the metacrisis complexity, where rolling climate and health crises are entangled with broader ontological, social, economic, resource and security ones. The impacts were large scale and ricocheted around the globe through the media. Homes, communities and schools across the region were significantly damaged. Of the 21,170 properties impacted, 4,055 were assessed as uninhabitable (Psychogios & Rumbens, Reference Psychogios and Rumbens2025). In Lismore, the regional Northern NSW Australian town at the flood’s epicentre, 1,500 homes suffered “moderate to severe damages or destruction” (Psychogios & Rumbens, Reference Psychogios and Rumbens2025, p. 68). Schooling was significantly disrupted, as were social connections when communications infrastructure was damaged by flood waters Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al. (Reference Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Lasczik, St. Clair, Pascue de Rivera and Blom2025). Economic impacts followed as businesses remained closed, and employment for many was disrupted or lost. Economic loss across the Northern Rivers from the 2022 floods was estimated to be ＄3.7 billion (Psychogios & Rumbens, Reference Psychogios and Rumbens2025, p. iii).
Metacrisis complexities have become part of the fabric of the lives of today’s children and young people and are highlighted in the disconnections and tensions that circulate in the aftermath of a disaster. Rescue and recovery teams often work according to established protocols, which are based on the needs of an imagined class of “average citizens” due to a sense of urgency and expediency during the immediate aftermath and a lack of resources (Select Committee, 2022). This may result in the specific needs of children and youth being overlooked. In addition, in most disaster situations, children’s needs are not understood or prioritised (Verlie et al., Reference Verlie, Rousell, de Kleyn, Hartup, Rickards, St Clair, Bayes, Widdop Quinton, Blom, Hotko, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, de Rivera, Lasczik and Ofosu-Asare2025) and are frequently unattended, leaving them feeling unheard, vulnerable and disempowered (Luk & Longman, Reference Luk and Longman2024), signalling the need for greater understanding about children and young people’s disaster experiences and impacts. Childhood is not a monolithic experience; it is inherently shaped by a great many factors, including geography, nationality, religious beliefs, culture and lived experiences. Invariably, an Australian child living in the NSW town of Lismore experiences the impacts of rolling polycrises and the planetary metacrisis differently from a Somali child living in Jubaland. In Lismore, children and young people have access to key services, institutional support and to varying degrees of privilege. Although, in the unprecedented 2022 floods, official rescue services were overwhelmed by the catastrophic impacts of the inundation, leaving civilian rescuers to fill the gap in highly precarious conditions, while immediate recovery support was under-resourced (Select Committee, 2022). In Jubaland, children and young people experience systemic long-term instability, war, lack of or no access to essential services and extreme poverty (see e.g. the Children’s Climate Risk Index (CCRI), UNICEF, 2021). This disparity exemplifies how the positioning of children within the metacrisis discourse is profoundly influenced by geographical, political and economic contexts. As such, the concept of childhood necessitates a nuanced understanding as a multifaceted construct that reflects the diverse realities faced by children and young people. This framing aligns with Lee’s (Reference Lee2013) call to attend to how children are positioned in the metacrisis in relation to the “multiplicities of childhood” (p. 54) and through a posthuman lens, how childhood or the child is conceptualised as an entanglement (Murris, Reference Murris2016). Murris (Reference Murris2016) resists defining a ”posthuman child” but describes the concept as “constituted by concepts and material forces, where the social, the political, the biological, and its observing, measuring and controlling machines are interwoven and entwined – all elements intra-act and in the process “lose” their clear boundaries” (p. 91). Both the metacrisis and posthuman positions highlight the contexts that frame childhood and children’s lives and are fittingly entangled to underpin and inform the research in this study.
Floods and children in the literature
As has been established in the introduction to this paper, global water disasters are worsening (Van Dijk et al., Reference Van Dijk, Beck, Boergens, de Jeu, Dorigo, Edirisinghe, Forootan, Guo, Güntner, Hou, Mehrnegar, Mo, Preimesberger, Rahman and Rozas Larraondo2025). Flooding, including the immediate impacts, and the often extended and overlapping response, restoration, rebuilding and recovery phases, can significantly disrupt the learning and developmental stages of young people’s lives (Verlie et al., Reference Verlie, Rousell, de Kleyn, Hartup, Rickards, St Clair, Bayes, Widdop Quinton, Blom, Hotko, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, de Rivera, Lasczik and Ofosu-Asare2025). Flood impacts cause acute and immediate trauma through death, injury and illness (including impacts on relations and friends, family pets and animals); damage and or loss of home and possessions; disruption to access to school and social connection to community; and longer-term loss and displacement, all contributing to distress and anxiety effects (Carroll et al., Reference Carroll, Morbey, Balogh and Araoz2009; Mort et al., Reference Mort, Walker, Williams and Bingley2018). Such disaster and recovery conditions become the “backdrop of children’s daily lives” with long-lasting consequences, including mental health and academic performance impacts (Gibbs et al., Reference Gibbs, Molyneaux, Harms, Gallagher, Block, Richardson, Brandenburg, O’Donnell, Kellett, Quinn, Kosta, Brady, Ireton, MacDougall and Bryant2021, p. 16). However, a gap exists in understandings of disaster experiences and needs from the perspectives of children and young people (Amri et al., Reference Amri, Haynes, Bird and Ronan2018; UNICEF & Royal Far West, Reference West2020), with their voices rarely included in conversations about flood impacts including impact on schooling and education (Verlie et al., Reference Verlie, Rousell, de Kleyn, Hartup, Rickards, St Clair, Bayes, Widdop Quinton, Blom, Hotko, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, de Rivera, Lasczik and Ofosu-Asare2025). As the Advocate for Children and Young People submitted to the NSW Independent Flood Inquiry in 2022, young people feel “invisible, forgotten, helpless and unable to influence the world around them in disaster” (Advocate for Children and Young People, 2022, p. 15).
Flood research derives from a range of disciplines including emergency management, psychology, public health, education and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR). Much research focuses on risk, and when taking a top-down, managerial approach, often positions children and young people as vulnerable and needing protection, and therefore requiring an adult or managerial focus to direct flood-prone communities’ preparation, crisis responses and recovery efforts (Amri et al., Reference Amri, Haynes, Bird and Ronan2018; Verlie et al., Reference Verlie, Rousell, de Kleyn, Hartup, Rickards, St Clair, Bayes, Widdop Quinton, Blom, Hotko, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, de Rivera, Lasczik and Ofosu-Asare2025). This victim-positioning undermines the capacity and capability of children and young people, and that they are capable agents within their own lives and contribute to their communities. Exclusion of child and youth knowledge from preparedness and recovery efforts is an injustice of recognition and misses an opportunity to learn from children and young people’s voices as the “experts on their own lives” (Kellert, Reference Kellett2005, p. 2) and contributors to flood response and recovery.
Children and young people’s relationships with the places in their lives, including bodies of water and associated climate systems, have emerged as a growing research focus within the fields of environmental education and climate change education. This emergence – founded in posthuman and new materialist philosophy and an ethos of inclusive, just, relational and ethical ways of human ecological intraconnectedness (Siegel, Reference Siegel2024) – includes children’s creek encounters (Nxumalo & Villanueva, Reference Nxumalo and Villanueva2019), child muddy water walking (Rooney et al., Reference Rooney, Blaise and Royds2020) and illustrations of children’s regenerative learning with local rivers (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Blaise, Poelina, Guimond and John2025). This body of work, drawing from place-based and Indigenous knowledges, supports children and youth to co-construct understandings of place and allows them to advocate for rethinking relationships, responses and advocacy of land, rivers and seas. For example, the Bawaka Country collective’s community night fishing collaborations and deliberations with Country (Reference Country, Wright, Suchet-Pearson, Lloyd, Burarrwanga, Ganambarr, Ganambarr-Stubbs, Ganambarr and Maymuru2015); families immersing in water on Country (Crinall et al., Reference Crinall, Blom, Williams, Wijeyekoon, Blom, Rowbottom and Rowbottom2026), and Ford and Blenkinsop’s (Reference Ford and Blenkinsop2018) exploration of learning to speak the language of the River Franklin. The criticality dimension that these works bring to explorations of children, young people and examples of “crises of place” (Springgay & Truman, Reference Springgay and Truman2022, p. 171) challenges the more managerial approaches, such as those found in public health and DRR. However, flooding crisis situations are seldom addressed in these and other climate education explorations of child and youth relations with watery bodies (Verlie et al., Reference Verlie, Rousell, de Kleyn, Hartup, Rickards, St Clair, Bayes, Widdop Quinton, Blom, Hotko, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, de Rivera, Lasczik and Ofosu-Asare2025).
Verlie et al. (Reference Verlie, Rousell, de Kleyn, Hartup, Rickards, St Clair, Bayes, Widdop Quinton, Blom, Hotko, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, de Rivera, Lasczik and Ofosu-Asare2025) note how the literature differentially positions children and young people across the Global South and North as predominantly vulnerable/deficit or agentic and how the political ecology of these framings shifts in relation to support for resilience-building. For example, within vulnerability-based or deficit approaches, possibilities for children and young people’s agency in individual and community resilience-building may be recognised, although these approaches are primarily focused on instrumental education for managing flood events to maximise outcomes that suit human (adult) society (Verlie et al., Reference Verlie, Rousell, de Kleyn, Hartup, Rickards, St Clair, Bayes, Widdop Quinton, Blom, Hotko, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, de Rivera, Lasczik and Ofosu-Asare2025). But within agentic approaches, and particularly those found in some climate change education studies that explore human relationships with watery places, Verlie et al. (Reference Verlie, Rousell, de Kleyn, Hartup, Rickards, St Clair, Bayes, Widdop Quinton, Blom, Hotko, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, de Rivera, Lasczik and Ofosu-Asare2025) find positionings that are inherently grounded in resilience-building through explorations of human–water relations to enable imaginings of everyday living with climate changes (Neimanis & Walker, Reference Neimanis and Walker2014) for regenerative sustainable futures (Wooltorton et al., Reference Wooltorton, Blaise, Poelina, Guimond and John2025) beyond metacrisis worldviews. Both dimensions of resilience-building are valuable as responses to the complex multiplicity of converging crises of floods and other “climate shocks” disrupting children’s lives (UNICEF, 2025, p. 2). In acknowledgement of this complexity, leading child-focused organisations have recommended that research and planning should prioritise children and young people’s perspectives and needs (Advocate for Children and Young People, 2022; UNICEF, 2025; UNICEF, & Royal Far West, Reference West2020).
Floods + me overview
In response to such calls, the authors of this paper initiated the Floods + Me project in the Northern Rivers region of NSW Australia and engaged children and youth as researchers. Adopting a posthuman viewpoint that challenges the boundaries of adult and child, and as such, as a collective of adult, child and youth researchers, they explored the experiences of the 2022 flood events to understand and map the flood experiences of children and youth. Together, they engaged in arts-based methods, co-created a community exhibition and co-developed an educational framework to inform future climate disaster responses (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., Reference Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Lasczik, Rickards, de Rivera, Rousell, Blom, Bayes, Hotko, Ofasu-Asare, Widdop Quinton, St Clair, de Kleyn and Verlie2025). The insights and recommendations from the Floods + Me project offer regenerative strategies for these troubling times of the metacrisis; strategies that speak directly to the future of the planet, from the viewpoints of those who will inherit it. This paper, which explores the concept of the metacrisis through the Northern Rivers flooding events, has a focus on “Children and Young People.” As such, the purpose of this paper is to centre and privilege children and young people’s voices through their research into the impacts of the 2022 flooding events, and climate disasters more broadly, and on schooling and education. We explore the phenomenon that children and young people are not simply affected by climate disaster; they are interpreters, researchers, relational actors and knowledge producers where multispecies kin are considered equally in their posthuman worlds. In the following section, we outline our “child-framed research methodology” that privileges the voices of children and young people and where children and young people are the researchers (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Reference Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2022, p. 52).
Methodology
The Floods + Me project entangles the positioning of child and youth as researchers, agents and knowledge producers in the Northern Rivers flood recovery process. It is child-framed, engages with posthuman thinking, arts-based methods (Lasczik et al., Reference Lasczik, Rousell, Ofosu-Asare, Foley, Hotko, Khatun and Paquette2020) and a diffractive mapping methodology (Blom et al., Reference Blom, Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2025). A resounding tenet of child-framed research methodologies (Barratt-Hacking et al., Reference Barratt-Hacking, Cutter-Mackenzie, Barratt, Robert, Brody, Dillon and Wals2013) is the conceptualisation of child as an agentic subject, over a passive object of research and, more broadly, passive participant in their educational journey (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles & Rousell, Reference Cutter-Mackenzie and Rousell2019). Our child-framed approach seeks to authentically include children and young people in disaster situation research, positioning participant children and youth as genuine co-researchers alongside the university researchers in this study (henceforth termed young researchers and adult researchers). Through this approach, this study created a platform for children and young people to express their thoughts and feelings about schooling during the floods and early recovery phases.
The Floods + Me research followed a phased design (see Figure 1), building through a series of collaborative and individual activities to both support children and young people in developing research skills using arts-based research methods (Blom et al., Reference Blom, Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2025; Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., Reference Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Lasczik, Siegel, Young, Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2022) and to enrich data generation. The initial research exercise involved all researchers (child, youth, adult) in a critical review and consensus evaluation of an overarching research aim. The final iteration – to understand and map the flood experiences of children, youth and multi-species families in the Northern Rivers – included a posthuman perspective of family, understood as human and more-than-human (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Reference Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2022).
Floods + me research phases flowchart.
This paper focuses on the qualitative arts-based data generated in Phases 2 and 3 of the research.Footnote 1 The data is mapped and presented as a diffractive entanglement of the young researcher data with collaborative diffractive mappings (Barad, Reference Barad2014) co-constructed by children, youth and adults as co-researchers. Diffraction can be described as attending to the patterns of interference and difference when “reading important insights and approaches through one another” (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p. 30; Blom et al., Reference Blom, Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2025). This design is inherently intraconnected and non-linear, intraweaving data generation and analysis, where diffractive responses to previous data generated new data and understandings through “diffractive data entanglements” (Blom et al., Reference Blom, Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2025, p. 2751). Thinking with posthuman theory (Barad, Reference Barad2007; Blom et al., Reference Blom, Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2025) in light of the metacrisis (Stein, Reference Stein2022; Wheatley, Reference Wheatley2025), the data are presented as co-constructed diffractive mappings that challenge adults’ assumptions and interrupt the “business-as-usual” responses that often follow in the wake of an immediate crisis (Verlie et al., Reference Verlie, Rousell, de Kleyn, Hartup, Rickards, St Clair, Bayes, Widdop Quinton, Blom, Hotko, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, de Rivera, Lasczik and Ofosu-Asare2025). Responses that in that in turn reinforce and contribute to the metacrisis (Huckle & Wals, Reference Huckle and Wals2015). These diffractive mappings involve complex considerations, including the ecological, social, political and physiological dimensions that compound in flood events and other climate crises. This research was approved under Southern Cross University HREC (Southern Cross University HREC approval 2023/138).
Phase 1: Participants and recruitment
Thirty young people joined the Floods + Me research project which included fifteen child (5–10-year-old) researchers and fifteen youth (11–17-year-old) researchers. The young researcher participants elected to join the project after invitations were distributed to local schools, the Wade School and the Spinks School (pseudonyms), and an open call via social media to Northern Rivers child and youth communities (including schooling and home-schooling networks, and other school types).
Phases 2 and 3: Qualitative data creation methods
The young researchers participated in five researcher workshops hosted by the adult researchers, where they explored the potential for the young researchers to use a range of arts-based methods, including audio and video interviewing, visual and spatial mapping, painting, sculpture, drawing, collage, storying and poetry. Central to the Floods + Me research, these artmaking research practices (Lasczik et al., Reference Lasczik, Rousell, Ofosu-Asare, Foley, Hotko, Khatun and Paquette2020) served not only as data creation tools but as embodied, visceral opportunities for children and young people to process the flooding events, offering some a space for healing (Gentle, Reference Gentle2024). Between workshops, the young researchers chose their preferred techniques, creating data at home including via reflective visual diaries. At a final collaborative “think-tank” workshop, the research team examined all visual and text data generated and produced mapping, text and video responses to those data explorations. The adult researchers then engaged with all the co-research data and diffractive analyses (Barad, Reference Barad2014), responding through arts-based approaches as a further diffractive mapping (Blom et al., Reference Blom, Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2025; Lasczik et al., Reference Lasczik, Rousell, Ofosu-Asare, Foley, Hotko, Khatun and Paquette2020).
Diffractive data methods
As part of Phase 3 activities, data was generated by both young and adult researchers through the use of arts-based methods and the concept of diffraction (Barad, Reference Barad2007); where, within and beyond the research activities, data creation and analysis become entangled (Blom et al., Reference Blom, Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2025). The diffractive method generates conceptual maps (Deleuze & Guattari, Reference Deleuze and Guattari1994) and invites the researchers to open the data by thinking with concepts rather than reducing and confining the data to static categories, codes or hierarchies of meaning (Mazzei, Reference Mazzei2014). The mappings suggest where the effects of difference appear and allow the adult researchers to study how differences are produced, how they matter and the entangled effects these differences make (Blom et al., Reference Blom, Lasczik and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles2025). Thinking with posthuman concepts, specifically human bodies as nature and the metacrisis, we plugged “data into theory into data resulting in multiplicity, ambiguity, and incoherent subjectivity” (Mazzei, Reference Mazzei2014, p. 743; italics in original). This practice brought focus to unique insights from the visual, textual and experiential data generated through the research process.
Data presentation and discussion: Seven diffractive mappings
Seven diffractive mappings emerged from the adult researchers’ final engagement with the Foods + Me data, thinking through the concepts of Children and Young People in the broader framing of posthumanism and the metacrisis. We recognise that these diffractive concept mappings, which document the final stage of the research process in preparation for publication, leaned into our collective university expertise in the field of environmental and climate change education to inform this phase of the research. As adult researchers, we were troubled by the tension of undertaking this final diffractive analysis without the direct input of the young researchers. However, our intent was always to honour and elevate the voices of children and youth findings. In doing so, their research is inextricably entangled throughout this section of the paper, including through the visual data inclusions (Figures 2–17) that form part of the diffractive mapping presented below.
Two adult researchers’ arts-based diffractive mappings of the young researchers’ interviews transcript data illuminating their loss and isolation.
The apocalypse: the floods and beyond in young people’s lives produced by an adult researcher using a collage, visual journal approach to presenting extracts from the young researchers’ interview data.
Blurry photographs, blurry bodies, blurry worlds: a young researcher’s blurry photographs have been diffractively mapped and presented by an adult researcher to illustrate the way the flood waters created a lack of clarity in young people’s school learning and lives.
“Black out” text diffractive mapping by an adult researcher using the concept of “normal” and highlighting the youth researchers’ focus on “normal” in their interview data.
As part of the diffractive mapping, one of the youth researcher’s conceptualisations of home as detailed in from their interview data is portrayed visually by an adult researcher in their visual diary.
One adult researcher mapped the topography of the floods using young researchers’ interview data written throughout this artwork, which demonstrates the entanglements of place post-flood.
An adult researcher diffracts the concept of lismore place discussed in the young researchers” interview data alongside a drawing representing lismore’s iconic sculpture, the heart.
A multispecies relationships collage by an adult researcher using interview and photographic and drawing data generated by the young researchers.
Happiness, hope and pashion [sic]: this image shows a young researcher engaging in an arts-based diffractive response (painting) to extracts of youth researcher interview data and think-tank workshop post-it responses prompted through a shared visual diffractive mapping.
An adult researcher diffractive mapping of the words that glowed (Maclure, Reference MacLure2013) from the young researchers’ peer-interview data.
“Gaps, holes, spaces”: an adult researcher diffraction from the young researchers’ interview data about the “holes” in their education post-flood.
An adult researcher collaged snippets from the young researchers’ interview data in this diffractive mapping through the concept of healing.
Young researcher’s interview data transcribed into text and diffractively mapped by an adult researcher to highlight the sparse attention to first nations peoples and knowledges in the data.
An adult researcher’s visual diary reflection on the complexities of the metacrisis and the other voices that were marginalised in the young researcher’s data.
Rivers of feelings: an adult researcher maps the multidimensionality of the young researchers’ affective and emotional experiences of the floods by diffractively mapping the young researcher’s data using watercolour.
Figure 16. Long description
The illustration features a map-like design with rivers and streams flowing across the page. Each river is labeled with different emotions and experiences, such as ʼhigh intensity of feeling is immediate aftermath,ʼ ʼsome not returned to same level of feeling,ʼ ʼno one liked the Rugby Club storm school,ʼ ʼnot everyone is as comfortable in the school location,ʼ and ʼendless ticks when not informed ahead.ʼ The rivers are colored with watercolors in shades of blue and green, and the labels are written in various colors and orientations. The title ʼRivers of feelingʼ is written at the top, and there are additional annotations and notes scattered throughout the illustration.
An adult researcher’s diffraction on the ways young researcher’s interview data communicated they were caught in a rolling series of crises, or a polycrisis (Lawrence et al., Reference Lawrence, Homer-Dixon, Janzwood, Rockstöm, Renn and Donges2024).
Diffractive mapping 1: Loss and isolation
A sense of isolation and feeling “lost” emerged as a dominant experience for the young researchers in the 2022 Northern Rivers flood (see Figure 2), aligning with experiences of other flood-affected children (Mort et al., Reference Mort, Walker, Williams and Bingley2018). These experiences are not interpreted as isolated psychological responses but as entangled expressions of the social disruption of multispecies, ecologies and metacrisis-driven acts (Barad, Reference Barad2007; Stein, Reference Stein2022). The flood shattered pre-existing relationality, severing children and young people from their support networks, routines and sense of coherence.
School was identified as a key site of stability, routine and social connection by children and young people. Closures of schools, alongside the loss of internet and phone access for some immediately following the flood, heightened feelings of isolation. Expressions of stress and anxiety increased, and for those whose homes were not flooded, a sense of survivor’s guilt. Young people noted that adults often spoke of material and support received from the broader community, but those whose schooling was disrupted felt their communities were “broken,” particularly in the immediate aftermath when digital telecommunications technology was disrupted. These breaks were not merely logistical but deeply affective, as the young people lost access to peers and the rhythms that anchored their daily life. Young people described finding it harder to build resilience without social support and were frustrated when adults in the educational setting expected them to bounce back and settle back into daily class routines. This educational logic privileged resilience as a form of individual grit, rather than acknowledging the systemic and existential nature of young people’s distress, overshadowing young people’s understanding of community connection and social relation as modes of collectively creating resilience; a decreasing capability in the metacrisis (Stein, Reference Stein2022).
Loss was categorised in multiple registers: material (belongings), interpersonal (friends and family), institutional (schools and routines) and communal (local businesses and services). But there was affective expression over the loss of “everything,” reflecting an experience of overwhelm and a lack of personal control. In a society that dictates that children and youth should routinely relinquish agency to their adult counterparts, the loss of personal control was felt deeply by many young researchers. Posthuman thinking challenges the child–adult divide to propose conceptualising agency as an inherent part of all relations (Barad, Reference Barad2007) and as such, children and youth voices matter akin to adults (Murris, Reference Murris2016). In aligned posthuman thinking, Lasczik et al. (Reference Lasczik, Rousell, Ofosu-Asare, Foley, Hotko, Khatun and Paquette2020) describe the agency of water, where humans are also considered as bodies of water, where water and human body have a collective agency that transcends age and entity definitions and boundaries.
Also lost, over time, was the ability to recollect the flood; young people recognised they lacked clear memories of what had happened, but that they also wanted to leave the flood behind and “get on with life.” Such categorisation of loss may function as a coping mechanism, an attempt to draw boundaries around what is within and beyond individual control, resisting the intra-active (Barad, Reference Barad2007) nature of the metacrisis. Yet, it also reveals a sophisticated and empathetic awareness of the layered impacts of disaster.
The flood’s timing – at the start of a new school year and immediately following two years of fires and COVID-19 disruptions to school routines during 2020 and 2021 (Verlie & Blom, Reference Verlie and Blom2022) – intensified its affective impacts, including feeling unsafe and isolated. For some young people, the flood coincided with other crucial, impactful transitions. These included the transition from primary to secondary school and the inherent establishment of new friendship groups, as well as the onset of puberty. One young person described this convergence of impacts as “apocalyptic” (Figure 3) and expressed a longing for lost “normality”: “It’s not like how it’s supposed to be… I like it when it is how it is supposed to be… normal is what keeps me sane.” Another young person shared how they felt different amongst young people from other schools: “It felt really weird to be like “eeiw, flood rats,” like “stay away from us” …. That’s not like how it was, but it was how it felt.” These statements, emerging from the young researchers’ data through an interview-based discussion with peers, powerfully encapsulate the psychosocial overwhelm that characterises the metacrisis as a collapse not only of systems but of the ability to imagine a coherent present, let alone a coherent future (Stein, Reference Stein2022).
Diffractive mapping 2: Lack of clarity
When we turned to the data, young people’s voices were frequently shared through photographic imagery, which were often presented as blurry, hazy, indistinct and lacking clarity. Without words, their research spoke loudly of the ways the floodwaters had affected them and their worlds as complex and beyond standard representation and common understanding (see Figure 4). These blurry dimensions captured in photographs, suggested micropractices of harm, symptoms of the metacrisis that highlighted the tension that teenagers are experiencing in navigating the lack of clarity around their place in their post-flood ways of being and knowing. Perhaps in the metacrisis, a turn to a “metaphysics of presence” (Barad, Reference Barad2011, then Mika, Reference Mika2017) where humans are conceptualised as part of a whole and not in separation, enacts posthuman thinking with climate (em)urgencies in ways that the human adult eye has not yet perceived with clarity.
Thinking with posthuman, these watery depictions (Figure 4) illustrate this undefinable and indeterminate way that human bodies intra-acted metaphysically with flood waters. Barad (Reference Barad2011) proposes that this indeterminacy, which is so visibly and viscerally portrayed and experienced in these images, is at the heart of what matter is. In this case, the matter of water and human bodies is “iteratively reconstituted through its various intra-actions” (Barad, Reference Barad2011, p. 215). Perhaps the flood waters made boundaries less clear, and ways of knowing and being in the world for these young people were reimagined through this blurry-scape.
The shapes of human bodies were shown as flowing in the surrounding environment, mimicking water movements in an enactment of “childhoodnature” (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al. Reference Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Brown, Osborn, Blom, Brown and Wijesinghe2020); young human bodies and water (e)merging. These images blur boundaries, redefining children and young people with/as nature in the face of climate disasters and challenging the ecological/societal boundaries of the metacrisis. These posthuman, material-discursive (Barad, Reference Barad2007) narratives of childhood work to resist the economic rationalisation, business-as-usual conceptions that infiltrate standard educational practices (Huckle & Wals, Reference Huckle and Wals2015; Wheatley, Reference Wheatley2025). The blurred childhood–nature boundaries challenge the “broader socio-economic structures and the inequalities they produce…[which] are noted as significant contributors to children’s flood vulnerability and resilience” (Verlie et al., Reference Verlie, Rousell, de Kleyn, Hartup, Rickards, St Clair, Bayes, Widdop Quinton, Blom, Hotko, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, de Rivera, Lasczik and Ofosu-Asare2025, p. 18). As a result, children and young people are enlivened into different ways of being, and of being known in the world, where their voice reflects a mature awareness and understanding of the social structures and metacrisis they are oft restricted by. The research practices in this research, which push against normative education structures by encouraging youth agency, work to lessen the impact of the metacrisis by providing ground for new ways of thinking, being and acting after the rains.
For many of the young researchers, being a teenager represented a tumultuous time and an indeterminate place where they were neither adults nor children. This lack of clarity in how they are perceived by the world and also, their place and role within it, including in the flood response and recovery, generated feelings of confusion where they were “expected to act like adults, but we’re treated like kids,” as one participant mused. Moreover, the young researchers c shared that their voices weren’t heard, that teachers sometimes forgot about them, and they felt “hated.” Others acknowledged school for providing critical support, commenting “I feel like being a teenager is easier for me because the school that I go to is very supporting and I have supporting people around me.” The young researchers offered that as they approach adulthood, they feel the weight and stress of added responsibilities, yet they are still considered by many (under classical conceptions of childhood), too young by society to make decisions that concern them (Murris, Reference Murris2013) or to contribute meaningfully to the flood clean-up efforts. Hence, the emergent flood–child entanglements produced new experiences and subjectivities for the young researchers, resulting in metacrisis feelings of marginalisation and being surplus to society (Stein, Reference Stein2022).
Murris (Reference Murris, Cutter-Mackenzie, Malone and Hacking2020) refers to the injustice of age discrimination shouldered by young people as ageism and misopedy. These concepts describe how conventional conceptualisations of children and young people can be harmful and separative, despite their normalisation in society. The word normal was frequently used in the young researcher peer interviews that they undertook with each other, where they yearned for a return to normal (see Figure 5). Perhaps this demonstrates that children and young people are operating in a riptide. In one direction, the children and young people want things to remain normal, yet in the other direction, they are constantly challenging normal by voicing the pain points of inhabiting their teenage life with a lack of clarity about who they are. Which begs the question, what does normal mean in post-flood metacrisis?
Diffractive mapping 3: Place
The impact and importance of place is not a new concept in climate change and environmental education, with educators recognising that place has a significant influence on learning and being (Osborn et al., Reference Osborn, Blom, Widdop Quinton, Aguayo, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Lasczik, Wilks, Logan, Turner and Boyd2020). Place has long been part of traditional knowledge of the ways of knowing and being shared by First Nations culture where Country as place, is everything (Bawaka Country et al., Reference Country, Wright, Suchet-Pearson, Lloyd, Burarrwanga, Ganambarr, Ganambarr-Stubbs, Ganambarr and Maymuru2015; Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., Reference Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Brown, Osborn, Blom, Brown and Wijesinghe2020). In posthuman thinking, place is an entanglement when human bodies intra-act and are re/conceptualised through and with the places they inhabit (Malone, Reference Malone2016). The inseparability of place, in particular natural spaces as described in environmental education research, was conceptualised as childhoodnature in 2020 (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., Reference Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Brown, Osborn, Blom, Brown and Wijesinghe2020).
For the young researchers in the Floods + Me project, place was conceptualised in various ways, yet was disturbed and disrupted through the flooding events, consistent with flood studies in other places where “homeplace” bonds were changed, damaged and even completely severed (Carroll et al., Reference Carroll, Morbey, Balogh and Araoz2009; Mort et al., Reference Mort, Walker, Williams and Bingley2018). The young researchers described their world as being changed overnight, demonstrating the way the flood waters destabilised their earthly foundations and known boundaries, becoming fluid and temporary, as water. Home was no longer the physicality and materiality of a house in their town of Lismore. Home was swept into a menagerie of places and meanings including the evacuation centre at Southern Cross University’s Lismore campus, Grandma’s house, a cabin, a caravan. Akin to the materiality of homes being washed away and inconsideration of the way materials are considered in posthuman thinking, young people had their conceptualisation of home awash with new experiences and new places.
One young researcher described their home as “with my friends” (Figure 6) demonstrating their understanding of home as a feeling of connectedness rather than the physical location where they live. Others felt that they had lost friends and connections as people left Lismore to live in the major cities on the southeast of Australia. A sense of survivor’s guilt came between friends at times, as some young people felt uncomfortable because they still had their homes when their friends did not. Survivor’s guilt, first observed in Holocaust and Hiroshima survivors, is associated with natural disasters, military service or other traumatic events which can cause a range of psychological and mental health impacts (Bistas & Grewal, Reference Bistas and Grewal2023).
Schools were also dis-place-d by the floods. Some 1,000 schools in the greater Northern Rivers region were closed permanently or temporarily (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., Reference Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Lasczik, Rickards, de Rivera, Rousell, Blom, Bayes, Hotko, Ofasu-Asare, Widdop Quinton, St Clair, de Kleyn and Verlie2025). Some of the young researchers expressed positive emotions about not having to attend school immediately after the floods because their parents gave them permission to stay at home, and also, because of the road closures and wide-scale damage. One young person described how their school was “completely trashed” and how they had to go to all these “different places… like a [sporting] club… a university… a community centre… and it was a bit annoying just moving from place to place and not having any settlement.” The young people described the negative impact the school displacements and movement had on their learning, demonstrating how much the place of school matters (Figure 7).
Some young researchers expressed strong emotions towards the place of Lismore claiming to “hate Lismore” and claiming that “Lismore’s kind of a dead town now” perhaps as a way to demonstrate their sadness, frustration or anger at the town for turning their lives upside down. Juxtaposed with this, other young people expressed hope and being proud that “we’re still here” (Figure 8).
Diffractive mapping 4: Multispecies relationships
The young researchers recognised that the animal members of their family were greatly impacted in the floods, revealing deeply “intra-acting” multispecies ethics (Barad, Reference Barad2007, p. 89). While media coverage often highlighted stranded livestock and wildlife, the narratives of the young people centred on their personal relationships with family pets and a responsibility to protect them from harm. The account of “Jake” (pseudonym) detailed the heaviness of the rain during the flood and the reason the family did not evacuate was “because of our pets.” His sibling, “Fred” (pseudonym), echoed this sentiment: “We said to ourselves: “we’re not leaving unless we know our pets are probably going to be safe.” These decisions reflect not only emotional attachment but also a moral stance that challenges dominant evacuation protocols and anthropocentric disaster planning (Russell, Reference Russell2017); indeed, posthuman thinking disrupts the notion that humans can be separate from the world they are a part of (Barad, Reference Barad2007; Brown et al., Reference Brown, Siegel and Blom2020). Further, the collage of stranded animals and pet portraits gathered through the diffractive research process becomes an artefact presenting a space in which human and more-than-human suffering, care, and survival is co-articulated (Figure 9; Young & Bone, Reference Young and Bone2020).
This multi-species and intra-relational concern can be read through the lens of the metacrisis and its inherent breakdown of climate, social and technological systems (Stein, Reference Stein2022; Wheatley, Reference Wheatley2025). Children and young people demonstrate an awareness of the existential dimensions and impacts of the metacrisis by turning to embodied, affective and relational practices to generate relational sense-making; as Stein (Reference Stein2022) highlights, the metacrisis is an educational crisis with a sense-making crisis at the core. Jake’s narrated flood night account (Figure 10 text snippet) included highly sensory descriptions, with great attention to colours, and a detailed affective flood narrative that presented multiple points of view, suggesting his story potentially evolved as an entanglement of storying (Phillips & Bunda, Reference Phillips and Bunda2018) and sense-making from people inside and outside his immediate family following the original impact. A series of Post-It notes from the “think-tank” (Figure 10, top segment), urging to “Stay Happy! Don’t lose hope. Don’t lose your pashion (sic),” can be seen as counter-narratives to adult responses to the flood disruption from their perspective. These Post-It notes are not naïve sentiments but can be regarded as philosophical acts of compassion, resistance and hope in the face of the metacrisis; as acts of agency pushing back on conventional practices that exclude children and young people from the flood and disaster narratives of which they are inherently a part (Barad, Reference Barad2007).
Diffractive mapping 5: Support structures failure
Schools are a principal locus of support structures in the lives of young people, but these were significantly impacted in the aftermath of the flood. Multiple schools across the Northern Rivers were closed and dis/re/located (Verlie et al., Reference Verlie, Rousell, de Kleyn, Hartup, Rickards, St Clair, Bayes, Widdop Quinton, Blom, Hotko, Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, de Rivera, Lasczik and Ofosu-Asare2025). This instability around young people’s educational environments following the flood created not only logistical challenges but affective and existential ruptures to the relational, spatial and temporal continuities schools ordinarily provide – daily routines, social networks and a sense of place. Moreover, when thinking with the metacrisis, we consider how the floods disruption of school is equally a disruption of the metacrisis while contributing to it (Stein, Reference Stein2022; Wheatley, Reference Wheatley2025).
Young people described their schools as “lost,” “shut” or “moved” and repeatedly expressed how they had lost their “comfort zone” (Figure 11). The absence of stable school environments was experienced as a loss of psychosocial anchoring, amplifying feelings of anxiety, frustration and disorientation, again, the “invisible” crisis of the metacrisis (Stein, Reference Stein2022). One young person described the post-flood period as marked by “rushing, not knowing,” while another noted “massive holes in our learning” (see Figure 12). Others expressed concerns about the well-being of friends. Challenges during a period of home schooling, and what were considered poor communications from schools, created a stressful learning experience. These expressions reflect not only educational disruption but a broader crisis of coherence and meaning in the young peoples” lives with the insufficient support from their flood-damaged education environment. Stein (Reference Stein2022) frames the metacrisis as a convergence of crises in sense-making, legitimacy and relationality. The floods followed two years of COVID-related disruptions, which had already destabilised educational routines and social development (Australian Early Development Census, 2023; Crinall, Rowbottom, Blom & Blom Reference Crinall, Rowbottom, Blom and Blom2020). For many young people, the flood compounded these effects (Campbell et al., Reference Campbell, Edwards and Gray2025), creating a layered crisis that blurred the boundaries between personal, ecological and institutional breakdowns. One young person’s reflection – that there was a ‘before the flood’ and an ‘after the flood’ – reveals a temporal rupture that echoes the existential disorientation described in metacrisis literature (Rowson, Reference Rowson2021; Stein, Reference Stein2022).
The young researchers” data spoke of ”gaps, holes, spaces“ in relation to their post-flood educational experiences, demonstrating the young people’s material-discursive entanglement (Barad, Reference Barad2007) of space, emotion and education: “Small spaces [were] very anxiety inducing;” “my education went to shit;” “massive holes in our learning;” “annoying moving from place to place;” “wasn’t enough space for us … We moved;” “We had very big gaps in our learning;” “we had to go into multiple environments;” “we’re in different places;” “was a really unstable learning environment,” and “but I didn’t want to go” (Figure 12).
These diffractions clearly articulate the concepts of disruption, frustration and a lack of agency for young people in both home and school environments. In this context, the expectation placed on students that they would simply return to ”normal’ schooling reflects a modernist educational paradigm that fails to account for the entangled, multisystemic nature of the metacrisis (Schmachtenberger, Reference Schmachtenberger2024). Our diffractive entanglement with the experiences of the young researchers reveals how young people were not just “coping” with a flood, but were navigating a crisis of continuity, care and collective meaning as support structures failed to meet their changed needs.
Diffractive mapping 6: Silence and healing
Some young people shared that they did not want to talk about the flood (Figure 13). They said they had talked enough about it and wanted to move on. As one young person described, “I didn’t feel I was affected like others were. I want to move on.” To provide some context, we had entered the data collection phase approximately two years after the floods, as we grappled with institutional grant and ethics administration processes. Children and young people work in different conceptualisations of time (Murris & Kohan, Reference Murris and Kohan2021), or in no time at all (Crinall et al., Reference Crinall, Rowbottom, Blom and Blom2020), which did not always align with institutional timelines. Despite this, some youth shared that there was still healing to be done through the research. This divide demonstrates the disconnection between experiences of those young people wanting to move on while others needing more time. Such an affective dualism for children and youth further dismantles their pre-flood social support structures through “survivor’s guilt” divisions and loss of peer community connections and support.
In the data, we noticed one voice that was silenced. In applying the diffractive methodology, it was apparent that there was a story, and a voice, that was not seen or heard through the data. The silence that stood out was the voice of First Nations Peoples, at a painful point in time for many in Australia’s history when “The (Indigenous) Voice” referendum was undertaken (Biddle et al., Reference Biddle, Gray, McAllister and Qvortrup2023). However, in some of the interview data, the young researchers did include an Acknowledgement of Country at the interview beginning (Figure 14).
Yet there was no talk of Country, of the traditional custodians, of what the floods mean for First Nations Peoples by the youth researchers despite a formal “Acknowledgement of Country” being given at the beginning of all co-research gatherings. We turn to First Nations researcher, Whyte (Reference Whyte2020), who refers to the “relational tipping point” where capitalist and business-as-usual ways of living have taken precedent over respectful and authentic collaborations. This speaks to the metacrisis and compounding of thought that neglects prioritising relational and ecological ways of being. The “relational tipping point” is considered to come well before the ”ecological tipping point” is reached, that “the relational tipping point is crossed, and relational qualities must be established or repaired for justice-oriented coordinated action to be possible” (Whyte, Reference Whyte2020, p. 4).
Figure 15 shows one of the adult researcher’s visual diary recognition of First Nations relating, however, the meaning making of the floods by the young researchers in this study appeared to be dominated by colonised practice, and not one that foregrounds First Australian cultures and perspectives of valuing relationships, which is perhaps, another symptom of the metacrisis.
Through the diffractive mapping, one adult researcher highlighted another binary, that they titled “imperfect healing.” The young researchers shared their two sides of post-floods life, being brave at times and silly at others, they talked about “playful processing” and “laughing it off” as their form of resilience and recovery. Perhaps this was their sense-making process (Stein, Reference Stein2022) in the metacrisis where they experimented with being serious/brave and silly/laughing as their form of resilience. Perhaps this was their response to a school that encouraged them to be resilient without “showing” them how: “I don’t know how to be resilient – I need to be taught how to be. Don‘t just tell me to be it.” The young researchers” concerns about personal resilience echo an increasing focus in popular wellness culture and in medical and developmental research and practice (see for e.g. Zolkoski & Bullock, Reference Zolkoski and Bullock2012). According to the ecological relational thinking of Masten (Reference Masten2001) and Ungar (Reference Ungar2011, Reference Ungar2021), a young person’s resilience is determined by their individual capacity interactions with the supports and resilience of family, school and community. This suggests that such connecting of young people into broader socio-ecological networks of resilience, as well as strengthening of educational and community systems” resilience, could be areas for future research and practice responding to the young people’s call for resilience strengthening.
Diffractive mapping 7: Affect and emotion
The emotional and affective landscape of disaster impact and recovery for the young researchers revealed itself as clustered around concepts of disorder, displacement and disrespect, and entangled in their relationships to memory, time and place, represented in a “River of Feeling” by one of the adult researchers (see Figure 16). The flood and its aftermath fractured and disordered children and young people’s sense of time (which may also be due to childhood perceptions of time, see Crinall et al., Reference Crinall, Rowbottom, Blom and Blom2020; Murris & Kohan, Reference Murris and Kohan2021), creating fragmented “sparks” of memory rather than coherent autobiographical narratives of their lives prior to, during and after the flood. While they may have recalled specific moments with some clarity, these recollections were interspersed with longer passages of blankness: memory and time without narrative or affective anchors, with some relying on others” (re)storying of the flood. This affective response to personal history may impact on evident recurring “rain worries” about future floods: “I was worried it was gonna flood again every time it rained.” These embodied emotions provide another example of the way the floods become entangled with the human body in a posthuman act of inseparability.
Disorder and displacement were experienced as multidimensional, with a sense that their taken-for-granted worlds were broken apart. A young person living “on a hill” above the flood line described their sadness at seeing a “white sea below of flood.” Yet, one young person expressed a sense of emotional distance from the flood because their home did not flood, until they discovered a friend’s home was. They then marked their friend’s house on a map with a heart – a symbol which became the symbol of flood recovery embraced by the broader community – and thereby relieving their affective detachment by providing a surrogate to which they could direct their feelings. After the flood waters receded, this watery world was revealed as street after street of muddied and drowned “broken” homes, cars, shops and previously familiar landmarks now rendered unfamiliar, echoing other flooded places where people’s sense of place bonds were broken (Carroll et al., Reference Carroll, Morbey, Balogh and Araoz2009).
Beyond the flood’s destruction of physical structures, children and young people’s sense of certainty and security was shattered as the usually reliable and entangled physical and social infrastructures of schools, homelife, routines and social connections that constituted their everyday realities left them displaced from emotional anchors and even a sense of continuity with their pre-flood selves (Mort et al., Reference Mort, Walker, Williams and Bingley2018). Changed settings, such as an interim school site, were experienced, not as a return to routine but as a disruption (Mort et al., Reference Mort, Walker, Williams and Bingley2018). Such overwhelming, persistent feelings of uncertainty that characterised the immediate aftermath of the flood and beyond produced an ontological insecurity (Bell et al., Reference Bell, Reid, Dyson, Schlosser and Alexander2019) and are indicative of the emotional work of flood recovery (Whittle et al., Reference Whittle, Walker, Medd and Mort2012). Some young people were unable to return to pre-flood emotional baselines. While the flood heightened this ontological insecurity for the children and young people, this state of being had emerged on the back of a set of rolling crises over consecutive years: the 2019–2020 bushfires, the COVID pandemic and the 2022 floods (Figure 17). These negative events had snowballed, intra-acting and amplifying the impacts, generating a sustained affective polycrisis (Lawrence et al., Reference Lawrence, Homer-Dixon, Janzwood, Rockstöm, Renn and Donges2024) for some of these young people and children, where anxiety around this uncertainty had become an undercurrent percolating beneath the surface of everyday life. In the face of climate events, eco-anxiety and grief are coloured with a “dual sense of helplessness and responsibility” for young people (Izydorczyk et al., Reference Izydorczyk, Gruszka and Kałwak2025, p. 84). While a managerialist focus of disaster recovery is on community mental health and well-being (Grove, Reference Grove2014), our data did not reveal that children and young people gained access to youth-specific mental health services, which would allow them to process what had happened (Peek, Reference Peek2008). This suggests that, from the perspectives of our researchers, institutions failed to account for the diffractive effects of trauma across all aspects of young people’s lives.
Conclusion
The Floods + Me project took a child-framed, arts-based, posthuman informed approach to researching the climate disaster of the extensive 2022 NSW, Northern Rivers, Lismore floods. Together, the seven diffractions mapped the experiences of children and young people after the Lismore flooding events through the metacrisis framework. The metacrisis acknowledges the way global structures and systems cannot be considered outside of the climate crisis and are indeed an entanglement within it. The metacrisis encourages creative thought to challenge social normativity such as the way children and childhoods are perceived; which aligns with posthuman thinking. As such, perhaps the most critical finding to be elucidated from this research, is the significance and importance of including children and young people in research and associated conversations about climate disasters that directly impact their present and future lives. Moreover, through conceptualising the metacrisis in response to a climate disaster, individualised ways of knowing and being in the world are challenged. To this end, posthuman invites a thinking with other where multispecies family relationships are prioritised and the boundaries of bodies are blurred. The blurring of bodily boundaries required reconceptualising place and materiality beyond the censored capitalist viewpoint. Young researcher data demonstrated the intraconnected and entangled ways that childhoods cannot be separated from nature. Furthermore, the young researcher data illustrated that being restricted by current paradigms of childhood was disempowering and upsetting during this climate disaster. The metacrisis calls for a deeper listening to the voices of the planet and children and young people in climate disasters and not continuing with business-as-usual adult constructed disaster management plans.
The seven diffractive mappings of our young researchers” perceptions, responses and concerns about the flood and post-flood experiences revealed the uncertainty and blurriness felt by young people about their agency and orientation in flooding and recovery; their disconnection from the people, places, animals and support structures of their lives (particularly home and school); and the emotional work of recovery. These diffractive mappings reveal the entangled effects of the floods as symptomatic of the metacrisis.
By including children and youth as researchers, the project mapped a child and youth view of flood events through the metacrisis that often contrasts with adult perspectives outlined in public health and DDR literature of what was and is important to consider. Highlighted by the young researchers in our study was that they were advised by adults to be resilient, but they did not know how to be resilient, and that they wanted to be taught how to be resilient, and to understand more about what it meant. This focus on resilience is indicative of the emotional work of recovery and return to (a version of) normality, where children and young people need time and support.
The “return to normal,” “business-as-usual’ practices that underpin the metacrisis was an adult initiated narrative that the children and young people in our research disrupted. Their lives so far, a succession of crises - climate change warnings, fires, pandemic lockdowns and floods – is far from normal or business as usual. In the depths of the murkiness, our young researchers found the transition from flood-related school closures and periods of home-schooling back into face-to-face schooling, tumultuous. Not surprisingly, the participating children and young people felt their lives had become disrupted, disconnected and destabilised by the floods, particularly regarding the support systems of home and school. The findings also strongly indicate that a flood metacrisis is an entanglement of geographical, social, political and psychosocial factors, while signalling responses and recommendations (Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles et al., Reference Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Lasczik, Rickards, de Rivera, Rousell, Blom, Bayes, Hotko, Ofasu-Asare, Widdop Quinton, St Clair, de Kleyn and Verlie2025) before, during and after the floods that can address children’s and young people’s needs. In addition, we noticed that children and youth were not forthcoming in considering the impacts on First Nations Peoples or about First Nations perspectives about the floods. Future research could consider how scaffolding through meaningful engagement with local Cultural Custodians would make a valuable contribution for future environmental educational and disaster research.
Engaging and privileging children and young people’s voices in climate disaster research is not only critical but essential and necessary in the future that concerns them. During the 2022 Lismore flood events, our young researchers shared that their schooling was “falling through the gaps,” while they feel like they are being treated like “flood rats.” Their voice is real, raw and not subject to the same agendas as adults. As such, their bodies and lives are inherently entangled in the metacrisis of climate and societal crises such as the floods in their own unique ways. This paper has shown that children and young people are not victims of climate disaster; they are interpreters, researchers, relational actors and knowledge producers. Moreover, human–animal boundaries are challenged by children who live with and alongside their multispecies companions disrupting adult-centred disaster protocols. The authentic collaborative acts of children, youth and, adults thinking with posthuman, through the metacrisis, such as in this research, may result in a climate future that is not dictated by the dominant privilege of adulthood but inspired by the future within childhood.
Acknowledgements
As the research team extends across multiple Indigenous language groups across the East Coast of Australia, we acknowledge the Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and acknowledge their continuing connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respects to the people, the cultures and the Elders past and present.
Financial support
The research presented in this article resulted from a project funded by the Southern Cross University Vice Chancellor’s Flood Recovery Scheme in 2022.
Ethical Standard
This research was approved under Southern Cross University HREC (Southern Cross University HREC approval 2023/138).
Author Biographies
Simone Blom is a senior lecturer in science education and an executive member of the Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education (SEAE) Research Centre. Simone’s research focuses on environmental education pedagogies and practices, posthuman theories, creative and innovative methodologies and science and STEM education. Simone is dedicated to improving both pre and in service teacher confidence and competence in their work as a teacher. Simone published her first book in 2025 and is currently on the ARC funded project, Disaster Ready Schools.
Jeanti St Clair is a researcher, academic and storycatcher at Southern Cross University whose work explores how storytelling deepens community understanding of place and climate impacts. She creates locative audio and documentary works that centre the flood experiences of Northern Rivers communities, including Lismore Flood Stories, Rescue: Stories and Portraits of Civilian Rescuers from the 2022 Floods and Dear River. Jeanti is a founding member of Creative First Aid, which supports creativity recovery activities in the Northern Rivers, a researcher on Floods and Me: Education in a Changing Climate project, and was appointed NORPA’s inaugural research artist in 2023.
Helen Widdop Quinton, PhD, is a lecturer in science, sustainability, health and well-being education. She is also a Research Fellow at ISILC (Institute for Sustainable Industries and Liveable Cities) at Victoria University. Drawing on her past work as a school teacher and environmental education project manager, Helen’s research focuses on identifying the connections between people and planetary well-being - particularly people’s interactions and relationships with place, space and nature. Her research incorporates intercultural environmental learning and links with initial teacher education.
Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles is the Research Leader of the Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education (SEAE) Research Centre at Southern Cross University. Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles’s research centres on climate change, childhoodnature, post-human philosophy and child-framed research methodologies. She is particularly focused on the pivot points between education, science and philosophy. Professor Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles has led over 40 national/international research projects and is presently the lead researcher on a 2024–2027 Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery grant on climate change education on/with Country. She has published more than 180 publications with her latest book entitled Posthuman Research Playspaces: Climate Child Imaginaries (with Rousell, Routledge).
Alexandra Lasczik is Professor, Arts & Education, and co-leader of the Sustainability, Environment and the Arts in Education Research Cluster [SEAE]. Movement, displacement and climate change education are themes in Lexi’s work, as are the Arts and Arts-based Educational Research [ABER], particularly A/r/tography. Lexi is an Artivist, committed to equity and social justice, and her spirited advocacy of a high quality Arts education for all spans her entire career. Her projects include the recently funded ARC Discovery Project, Advancing Child and Youth-led Climate Change Education with Country.
Katie Hotko is an arts-based educational researcher with expertise in a/r/tography, participatory methodologies and arts-informed inquiry. Her doctoral thesis, We Make Art and It Makes Us: An A/r/tographic Exploration of Generalist Primary Teachers’ Creative Self-Belief (2022), employed Whiteheadian process philosophy to investigate the relationship between art-making and teacher identity. Another focus of Katie’s research is climate justice and environmental education through child-framed participatory research. Katie is a member of the Sustainability, Environmental and the Arts in Education (SEAE) Research Centre. A self-taught visual artist, she is committed to making the visual arts accessible and inclusive for all learners.
Lauren Rickards is Director of the Climate Change Adaptation Lab at La Trobe University, Melbourne. Lauren recently contributed to the Australian Government’s forthcoming National Climate Risk Assessment and has been part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Assessments. Her research unpicks the complex, cascading nature of climate change impacts on social, ecological and infrastructural systems, their relationship with the world of work and the implications for adaptation and mitigation.
Blanche Verlie is Sydney Horizon Fellow in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Learning to Live with Climate Change: From Anxiety to Transformation (Routledge, 2022).
David Rousell is a transdisciplinary researcher living and working on the unceded lands of the Eastern Kulin Nation in Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. He is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at RMIT University where he co-directs the Place, Language, and Culture in Education (PLaCE) research group. David’s current research programme includes projects and initiatives exploring urban counter-histories, climate justice, atmospheric well-being, critical forest studies and regenerative education.
Liberty Pascua de Rivera is Vice-Chancellor Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education of Southern Cross University. Her research interests include analysing and evaluating policies and their implementation in the areas of education for sustainable development, climate change and disaster risk reduction.
Chantelle Bayes is a creative writer, educator and postdoctoral research fellow at the Sustainability, Environment and Arts in Education Research Centre at Southern Cross University working on an ARC project about climate change education and an ARC linage about making schools disaster ready. Her book Reimagining Urban Nature: Literary Imaginaries for Posthuman Cities is available open access from Liverpool University Press.
Lisa de Kleyn is a human geographer and Research Fellow at the Climate Change Adaptation Lab. Her research is qualitative, collaborative and applied and focuses on environmental governance including how we construct, connect to, and care for the environment. Lisa’s current projects analyse the impacts of climate change on people’s daily lives including their work, and she has received funding to research impacts on Natural Resource Management, and Emergency Management work, in rural and regional Victoria.
Yaw Ofosu-Asare is a lecturer in communication design at RMIT University. His work focuses on decolonial design, participatory methodologies and climate justice, with particular attention to community-led and culturally responsive approaches to environmental change.
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