This study examines how emotion matters in an early childhood critical inquiry curriculum and how “doing emotion” contributes to creating spaces for critical dialogue. The focus is on the inquiries of relatively affluent five and six year old children in an urban summer enrichment program in the Deep South of the United States around an injustice that occurred on their playground, which led to an investigation about Rosa Parks. The notion of creating spaces is discussed in educational literature, however, what creating spaces might mean and look like in early childhood classrooms is hard to find, usually implicitly stated. Critical inquiry curriculum typically focuses on analytical responses to texts; there is a need to understand how emotion is inextricably a part of social injustice dialogue. Historically, emotion has been discussed as something to control in schools, located in individuals, and not ideologically based. However critical, feminist and post-structural scholarship about emotion challenges these assumptions. Drawing upon an overarching methodology of crystallization, which embraces a multigenre approach to research, this study shifts through three fluid and recursive stages to analyze multiple critical narrative events: (1) autoethnography to unpack ideologies that influenced teaching/researching; (2) practitioner inquiry while spending a summer teaching children; and (3) a performative analysis of emotion drawing upon narrative theory. Eight insights and recommendations are: (1) it is important to expand traditional views of emotion in schools, embracing emotion as a verb; (2) young children are curious to explore social injustices which is evident through verbal role-play and persistent questions; (3) fissures are productive spaces of instruction and support the idea of a curriculum of uncertainty; (4) it is valuable to rethink traditional notions of social action as embodied; (5) spaces for critical dialogue with young children are fostered through dialogic performances and moments of shared power; (6) teaching/researching from a critical inquiry stance is hard however, tensions can be viewed as resources; (7) autoethnographic reflexivity as a teacher/researcher is a dynamic process; and (8) the crystallization of theories, analytic tools and genres are beneficial in research.