The Small Matters project, a collaboration with a small group of Grade 1 primary school children and their teachers consists of various research activities that have started in 2024, and will continue in the upcoming years. The first part of the research consisted of six weeks of philosophical enquiries, enacting the community of enquiry pedagogy (P4C).

The second part involved a walk in a local park, where the children were invited to collect things they found along this walk. Small parts of the treasures picked up during this walk (leaves, twigs, seeds and even a plastic band) were dried, placed on specimens and covered in platinum, to be viewed under an electron microscope. Our logo is a photo of a platinum-coated specimen and one of the material artefacts that has been co-created during the project. Objects like these help us critically think about the blurring of boundaries between life and death, researchers and researched, and the different scales of these phenomena.

The logo embodies our multispecies collaboration, pushing the limits of what it means to perceive the world as humans. It forces us adult researchers and the children we work with to wonder about the various ways in which death, dying and the dead can be understood.