Improvising end-of-life with young children: death/s and its absolute

Young children engage with and discuss diverse childhood realities, including death. Routinely characterised as unknowledgeable based on normative developmentalist assumptions, children’s engagements with death are frequently dismissed as ‘magical’ and irrational, despite their close resemblance to normative cultural and religious narratives of death offered by adults. This work takes children’s wor(l)ds seriously. By showcasing children’s (5–7-year-old) engagements with death – collected using artistic, play-based, child-centred, and video-reflexive methods – this work ‘makes nonsense’ of death. Drawing on a Meillassouxean speculative philosophy, I radically depart from rational meaning-making and foreground death’s contingency. Methodologically, I innovatively draw on improv performance art traditions (e.g. ‘Yes, and … ’) to develop and operationalise improv analysis, attending to children’s dynamic engagements with death as improvisations emerged from their socio-material-relational expertise, instead of concrete representation of reality/-ies. Through this playful yet philosophically sound lens, I argue that children’s intra-actions with death matter philosophically as they afford death to be thinkable in itself – rather than being mere representations – through a speculative lens of contingency. Embodying artistic and philosophical traditions, this work constitutes a multidisciplinary methodological double move that attempts to bring philosophical innovation into existing ways of (un)knowing about death/s.