Children’s Geographies: Special Issue: Minor Issues in childhood studies: Playful and storied approaches toward caring about the in-between. The Major and the Minor Carmen Blyth*, University of Cape Town. carmen.blyth@gmail.com Abstract My journey to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the minor was through many side doors: Haraway and Fricker, Fadiman and Conquergood, Code and Trinh, Richardson and St Pierre, Frank and Sparkes to mention but a few. Reading one through the many and many through the one eventually led me back to Derrida and Foucault and through them to Deleuze and Guattari, to the notion of the minor and its importance in literature, language, and life. This paper looks to explore my trajectory to the minor via the major and the stories I told (and continue to tell) about schools. These stories are minor ones, of the everyday, the ordinary, the banal (Golańska (2023), in which structural violence unfolds in ‘unspectacular/slow/private operations’ (10). They are told in a major language in an attempt to render visible and hence fragile the major theories that hold sway and deconstruct those ‘masters of truth’ whose function was and remains a hermeneutic one (Foucault [1976]1990, 67). They are told from the disposition and position of the ‘exile’, in the margins of institutional life. Keywords: Minor Stories, Affects, Emotions, Deleuze, Deleuze & Guattari I spent my entire life on the edges, on the fringes, in the margins both professionally and personally, where at times I became such a ‘monstrous’ sight that I literally ‘dys -appeared’ (Leder 1990). (The English word for monster derives from monere the Latin word for to warn and instruct and as such has much to do with demonizing and scapegoating. The word also has the same roots as to demonstrate, so although it was difficult and at times impossible to contest injustices from where I stood/stand, to demonstrate and demonstrate, monsters do indeed signify (Haraway 1992, 333).) The stories I told (and continue to tell) about schools were minor ones, of the everyday, the ordinary, the banal (Golańska (2023), in which structural violence unfolds in ‘unspectacular/slow/private operations’ (10). They were told in a major language in an attempt to render visible and hence fragile the major theories that held sway and deconstruct those ‘masters of truth’ whose function was and remains a hermeneutic one (Foucault [1976]1990, 67). For the school, in all its guises, continues to be (despite the ever loosening grip of disciplinary life on societies to one of control and code which through a digital sleight of hand is taking us from watchwords to passwords (Deleuze 1992)) a site ‘where power [is] articulated on bodies, where knowledge of human individuals [becomes] possible, and where souls [are] produced, reformed, and even, sometimes liberated’ (Rabinow and Rose 2003, ix). It is an apparatus that in its interactions with power can determine which ‘truth’ is produced, and as such makes truth ‘a thing of this world, intrinsically bound’ (ix) to the apparatus, the school, for its production,