In this exposition, seven research practitioners investigate how creative practice can be applied as a form of knowledge production in order to disrupt or re-define the dynamics of power in a range of different contexts. These applications of creative practice take varied and complex forms, often transferring creativity from the practitioner-researcher to their participants, increasing participant agency or re-defining existing hierarchies, as they form, empower, and enlighten real and conceptual communities. This collaborative exposition has been developed through presentations and discussions over the course of two years. Although each researcher applies different methodologies to their individual projects, our work as a group followed a pattern of creative practice, reflection, and reformulation, as we responded to each other’s research, creating a research community of our own. We want to emphasize that creative practice can not only disrupt or re-define the dynamics of power in a range of different contexts, but that it can do this in an infinite number of ways. In this variety and adaptability lies the potential of creative research.

Recent immersive theatre practices being developed by UK theatre companies invite children to believe that a book story has come to life and is really happening to them within their school environment. The thrill of being able act within a story motivates children’s embodied agency to physically explore an immersive set installation and acts of creative writing performed during the story experience, which allow children to co-create the narrative alongside the adult practitioners. These acts are fictionalised into the narrative frame of the children as heroic story writers, offering new perspectives on how child co-creation of adult narratives can be enabled intra-textually, within the bounds of the adult-initiated story, rather than extra-textually after it has finished, as is the case with fan fiction. However, it raises questions about the nature and limits of this co-creative agency the experiences purport to elicit from their child participants, especially in terms of their critical agency to manipulate fictional devices presented to them through such a hyper-real aesthetic. Drawing on theories of children’s literature and participatory performance, this article argues that it is the way these immersive productions uncannily overlay real and fictional temporalities that enables the child participants’ critical agency within them. Approaches for further participatory, practice-based research in this understudied corner of children’s reading universes are suggested for harnessing the potential of immersive story worlds to generate research data from within children’s first aesthetic engagement with stories.