Arriving at a question: Retrospections on post-qualitative slow research with children

Abstract

This article presents retrospections on selected methodological explications of a slow research process with child citizens living in the urban, Sør-Trondelag region of Norway. The process was akin to what Gallacher and Gallagher have termed “muddling through” and was about primarily about ‘arriving at, asking and then attempting to answer the question: What is the scope for the philosophical blossoming of adults when they enter children’s playfully constructed worlds as guests? Particularly, I engage with a post-empirical phase colloquium with one of my main co-explorers, Enaya Mubasher, in the Child and Youth Seminar at the Department of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Trondheim (Norway) in March 2017. Enaya, a (primary school student at that time) and I first met in 2012 during our commonly shared time in a kindergarten in Trondheim, where I was a kindergarten assistant for Enaya’s group and played with Enaya as part of my job. While I did not first meet Enaya as a “research participant,” our relationship evolved into a co-explorer dynamic after I had stopped working in the kindergarten. Playing with Enaya, included among other efforts, consistently playing with my understanding of what it means to be “me” as an independent “I,” and with it what was expected of me as an (adult) researcher within adult-centric institutional framings. The retrospections accentuate relationality as a defining dimension of rationality in research processes to advance conversations at the intersections of postqualitative and slow research with children from a childist standpoint.