Becoming-with research participants: Possibilities in qualitative research with children

Abstract

This article takes a post-qualitative stance upon the construction and taking up of certain positions in research by children and adults, and explores how emergent assemblages of (non-)human agents shape how children’s voices are expressed and genuinely listened to within intra-active research encounters. Plugging in post-qualitative concepts as ‘listening’, ‘response-ability’ and ‘becoming-with’, this article analyses key incidents (that emerged during a research process in Flanders) in order to reconfigure voices, discourses, methodologies and ethics in research with children.

Connective Collaboration Around Alex – A Constant Searching Around Inclusive Education

“…Beyond that, we also built on our earlier work on ethics in research with children. We picture qualitative inquiry with children-in-their-web as intra-action in which we affect and are affected (Daelman, De Schauwer & Van Hove, 2020). This makes every research encounter with children an ethical entanglement where emergent listening and attunement are prominent.…”

Listening Beyond Words: Swinging Together

“…In response, some scholars coined the term 'multivoicedness' (Elden 2013;Komulainen 2007) and have started to pluralize voice, in order to highlight already the polyvocal and multiple nature of voice within chaotic and constrained contexts (Mazzei & Jackson 2009: 1). With this they counter the conceptualization of 'voice' as a verbal, rational, and individual characteristic of a speaking subject (Daelman et al 2020). Post-qualitative researchers, like Mazzei and Jackson, argue that 'multivoicedness' indeed highlights the ways in which voices are not singular, but the concept still implies that voices are still 'there' to search for, retrieve, and liberate.…”

“…Voice here becomes a process of connecting bodies, objects, relations, spaces, times, among others. It is a process of becoming (Mazzei 2016;Daelman et al 2020). With this reconceptualization of voice, Mazzei and Jackson experiment with the affective, corporeal, and material entanglements that confound, exceed, and escape a more traditional analysis of voice.…”

Visiting borders in education: A creative approach with children in primary education

“…Well‐meant ethical warnings, methodological prescriptions and protective discourses create distance between adults and children in research and restrict children's participation. As in previous research (Daelman et al., 2020), we were inspired by Spyrou's (2017) call to make childhood studies less ‘child‐centred’ and focused on relationality and the process of becoming a participant in research. Within this study, we strived to create intra‐active research encounters and to focus on genuinely listening to children (Davies, 2014).…”

“…This motivated Allan (2007) to call children ‘the most troubling absent voices in research’ (p. 44). Elsewhere, we have problematised ‘voice’ to counter its conceptualisation as a verbal, rational, individual characteristic of a speaking subject (Daelman et al., 2020; Komulainen, 2007). In order to resist simplification and essentialisation of ‘unique voices’, we consider voice to be a process of connecting bodies, objects, relations, spaces, time and utterances, among others—a process of becoming (Mazzei, 2016), which is sensitive to power relations as well as the role of the researchers among other (non‐)human agents (Mazzei & Jackson, 2012).…”