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.
Keywords
Introduction
The focus of this article is on critically investigating our role as researchers in creating certain frameworks, contexts and discourses in research with children. We take a reflective post-qualitative stance upon the construction and taking up of certain positions by children as participants, co-researchers and research advisers in contemporary research (Lundy et al., 2011; Lundy and McEvoy, 2011; Spyrou, 2011), as well as by adult researchers and gatekeepers. It considers different emerging constellations in the child–adult/participant–(co-)researcher relationship and how these are complexly intertwined with particular spacetimematterings. This article explores how the emergent assemblage of human and (non-)material agents shape how children’s voices are expressed and genuinely listened to. The authors sympathise with Spyrou’s (2017: 433) recent call to make childhood studies less ‘child-centred’ and accentuate the relationality and the process through which ‘entities come into being through their participation and entanglement in emerging phenomena’. Punch (2002) and Kirk (2007) describe how research with children is different from research with adults, not because children are inherently different as participants, but because we consider them to be other and therefore position ourselves as researchers in other ways. Adult researchers’ assumptions, use of language (Spyrou, 2011), and attitudes and behaviour towards children assume certain statuses of children and interpretations of childhood (as well as competence, expertise and agency) which influence choices in research with children (Punch, 2002; Tisdall, 2012). As a result literature describes methodological guidelines regarding child-centred and creative research methods, including visual activities (Elden, 2013; Spyrou, 2011), innovative methods and tools (Tisdall and Punch, 2012), observation and interview techniques (Einarsdottir, 2007; Fargas Malet et al., 2010; Kirk, 2007), mixed-methodologies (Elden, 2013), (non-)verbal behaviour by researchers, debriefing (Fargas Malet et al., 2010), credibility of their utterances (Komulainen, 2007) and difficulty in separating truth from fantasy (Einarsdottir, 2007), in addition to ethical warnings on the protection of vulnerable groups, issues of confidentiality, and privacy and informed consent (Einarsdottir, 2007; Fargas Malet et al., 2010; Kirk, 2007), as well as assent (Cocks, 2006; Fargas Malet et al., 2010) and power imbalances (Einarsdottir, 2007; Grover, 2004; Kirk, 2007; Spyrou, 2011), among others. These well-meant prescriptions often become a paralysing threshold for many scholars, ethical review commissions and students who are considering including children in their research.
Furthermore, the ideas of ‘managing the culture gap’ between adults and children (Kirk, 2007), and of the ‘different understanding of the world’ (Kirk, 2007) and ‘different ways of communicating’ (Kirk, 2007; Komulainen, 2007), create distance and position participants and (co-)researchers as radically different because of child/adult characteristics. It seems like the excess of protective discourses in academic discussions is not only reflecting on ‘how to listen to children’s voices’ but also restricting their voices and empowerment once more.
How then, can we genuinely meet multiple and emergent children’s voices in research contexts? This article strives to work with these tensions and rethink ‘voice’ by ‘plugging in’ (Jackson and Mazzei, 2013) post-qualitative concepts of ‘emergent listening’ (Davies, 2014), ‘response-ability’ (Barad, 2007) and ‘becoming-with’ (Haraway, 2016).
Problematisation of voice in research with children
Childhood scholars describe and criticise many discourses running through research with children today. Discourses based on developmental psychology (Spyrou, 2011; Tisdall and Punch, 2012) and socialisation discourses (Kirk, 2007; Tisdall, 2012; Tisdall and Punch, 2012) both target growth into a complete and mature adult, and social constructivist perspectives picture children as capable active agents (Horgan, 2016; Tisdall, 2012; Tisdall and Punch, 2012; Watson, 2012), whereas children’s rights frameworks highlight protection and privacy on the one side (Einarsdottir, 2007) and (informed and assisted) participation on the other (Lundy and McEvoy, 2011). By contrast, a relational approach recognises that power relations with adults produce childhood (Graue and Hawkins, 2005), while a critical paradigm illustrates how children construct and are constructed by their world (Kincheloe, 2005: xiii). A perspective on the plurality of childhoods calls for the experiences of individual children across different cultures and backgrounds, with different abilities/disabilities (Punch, 2002; Runswick-Cole et al., 2018).
All of these discourses, and many others, run through both the history of research with children and what we think/make/tell of research with children today. The discourses (re)construct images of childhood (Grover, 2004), influence our choices in methodology and ethics in research with children (Graue and Hawkins, 2005; Lundy and McEvoy, 2011), and create a multitude of voices: voices about children, objective voices of children, dialogical voices with children and agentic voices, as well as the refusal of voices speaking for themselves (Mayes, 2019).
Mazzei and Jackson (2012: 745) and Spyrou (2011) warn about the drive to raise missing voices, which seems to claim that ‘authentic’ voices exist and reflect universal simplified truths while neglecting researchers’ impact on representing them. Several scholars have started to use the term ‘multivoicedness’ (Elden, 2013; Komulainen, 2007) to counter the conceptualisation of ‘voice’ as a verbal, rational and individual characteristic of a speaking subject (Komulainen, 2007). Post-qualitative literature recommends that we suspend the concept of ‘voice’ as a ‘singular, stable core self who possesses knowledge that may be transparently known and expressed’ (Mayes, 2019: 7). This invites us to think about voice in many forms – as dynamically flowing rather than separate, authentic or stable; and as pluralised, polyvocal and messy rather than attached to a coherent, individual self-knowing humanist subject (Mayes, 2019; Mazzei, 2016; Mazzei and Jackson, 2012).
Voice then becomes a process of connecting bodies, objects, relations, spaces, times 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 many other human and non-human agents (Mazzei and Jackson, 2012). Voice becomes an assemblage that resists simplification and essentialisation while allowing new ways of thinking to emerge (Mazzei and Jackson, 2012, 2016).
This reconceptualisation of voice brings ethics and politics to the frontline as a continuous responsibility (Mayes, 2019). ‘If researchers are part of that which they seek to study then researchers are never distanced (“objective”) nor unproblematically politically aligned with others’ (Mayes, 2019: 14). It calls the researcher to account for what comes to matter in their material-discursive practices and research encounters where there is no clear-cut boundary between the ‘use’ and the ‘misuse’ of voices (Mayes, 2019). Rethinking voice using post-qualitative frameworks makes voice and agency material assemblages and transforms ethics as an immanent responsibility (Mayes, 2019). Listening to what these voices do within intra-active research encounters, therefore, can never be repetitive listening to fit in what we already know. It requires the openness to be transformed in and through the encounter; it requires emergent listening (Davies, 2014).
Context
This article contains key incidents that emerged during a research process carried out in Flanders within the scope of a larger international study (Lundy et al., 2019) which investigated the rights of children with disabilities in the digital environment across several European countries (Flanders, Germany, Moldova, Portugal, Turkey and Northern Ireland). The objectives were to investigate children with disabilities’ perspectives and experiences of their rights in online and digital environments and to formulate advice pertaining to policy, education and health care. The project was commissioned by the Council of Europe and coordinated by the Centre for Children’s Rights at Queens University Belfast (Lundy et al., 2019). These core researchers co-created a set of research questions with an advisory group consisting of children with a disability.
The Flemish researchers, Geert Van Hove and Silke Daelman, were asked to organise group interviews with different groups of Flemish children with particular disabilities. This focus led us to two Flemish special schools: one school providing secondary education for children and young people with a physical disability and another for children and young people with an intellectual disability. Informed consent forms were – alongside information sheets – distributed by teachers and principals and signed by the youngsters and their parents. We were warmly welcomed at both places, and enjoyed two inspiring semi-structured group interviews with two groups and fifteen very different youngsters. We guided the conversation through main questions (based on a manual provided by the core researchers), and encouraged them to elaborate upon their answers by offering additional questions, making sure that everybody had a chance to speak. After the interview we made field notes containing observations and situational comments. We replayed and transcribed our interviews, and shared recurring themes and interesting topics with one another.
The core researchers collated data sets across the participating countries, conducted a meta-analysis and wrote the combined report (Lundy et al., 2019). The management, analysis and publication of data regarding the presence of youngsters with a disability in online environments are in the hands of the core researchers. However, the core researchers granted us the opportunity to work with our experiences in the Flemish substudy to offer new insights on methodology and ethics in research with children. The data used as key incidents in this article are additional observational data extracted from the field notes of the Flemish researchers.
Methodology
This article reflects upon this research project while thinking about different possible constellations in the child–adult relationship as well as the emerging positions of participants, researchers and gatekeepers. It analyses key incidents that occurred during the process of the Flemish study as objects of critical reflection upon contemporary discourses, methodologies and ethics in research with children. Following Emerson (2004), a key incident can be an ordinary occurrence that intuitively attracts a researcher’s attention. In this article, we consider key incidents that offer rich observational data illustrating elements in the process that are crucial to understanding the complexity of research practices (Emerson, 2004).
We analyse these key incidents using Jackson and Mazzei’s (2013) idea of ‘plugging in’, which shows how theory and practice can and do continuously compose and transform each other. ‘Plugging in’ the concepts of ‘emergent listening’ (Davies, 2014), ‘response-ability’ (Barad, 2007) and ‘becoming-with’ (Haraway, 2016) will ‘shake us out of the complacency of seeing/hearing/thinking as we always have’ (Jackson and Mazzei, 2013: 269). This reading-the-data-while-thinking-the-theory, as Jackson and Mazzei (2013) describe ‘plugging in’, will help us to sensitively analyse the multiple layers within these key incidents to draw implications on the complexity of voice in qualitative inquiry with children (Emerson, 2004). The concepts we use fit well within Spyrou’s (2017) call to highlight the relationality, encounters and entanglements of children with the world in order to rethink our usual ways of ‘knowledge production’.
Key incidents in research with disabled children
Access to children – Super Mario next level 1
Adult researchers attempting to reach children (as co-researchers and/or participants) in research are regularly confronted with large questions from ethics boards. Punch (2002: 323) states how ethics is often considered ‘the central difference between research with children and research with adults’; this consideration is often translated into technical prescriptions. Within the scope of this project, the ethical board focused on how, precisely, the children would, within a school context, be contacted to take part in the group interview: what to tell the principal, the teachers, the parents; how to select ten children out of a school population, for example. Receiving access to children as research participants is about negotiation and passing different protective levels (Cowie and Khoo, 2017) – as is the case in the Super Mario computer game. Once the agents at one level are satisfied, the next challenge begins. Our relationships with children are always already mediated through other relations (Graue and Hawkins, 2005; Komulainen, 2007). Mediation by gatekeepers and the ethical processes of informed consent seem to go hand in hand with selection, which might not always be just towards the group we want to give ‘voice’.
Cowie and Khoo (2017) highlight how ‘potential vulnerability’ and ‘the best interest of the child’ are important considerations for gatekeepers when selecting participants. But how is it possible to maintain a balance between the principle of ‘the best interest of the child’ and the importance of participating in topics that affect them? A paternalistic focus on vulnerability risks granting the right of protection the power to limit other children’s rights and interests (i.e. participation, information and adult guidance) and risks – especially when talking about children with a disability – reproducing the image of children as ‘dependent’, (Komulainen, 2007; Watson, 2012), ‘helpless’ and ‘to be protected’, which sidelines the value of their participation once more. On the other hand, an unnuanced accent on active participation might also underestimate the inherent vulnerability of certain groups (Tisdall and Punch, 2012) and overaccentuate individual agency above interdependency and connections.
On the issue of informed consent, formal ethics procedures for research with children give preference to elaborate forms for parents to read and sign, a process intended to protect their children’s privacy. Less space is available for accentuating close comprehensive connections between parent and child, discussing participation in the research and jointly consenting in research as an assemblage, a mutual entanglement in continuous becoming.
Ethical boards and gatekeepers control the access of children (with disabilities), among other groups in research, and thus influence the knowledge we construct with them (Graue and Hawkins, 2005; Punch, 2002). Ensuring that children’s humanity is not violated through the research process (Cocks, 2006) seems to go hand in hand with the risk of subjugating children’s willingness to that of their parents/relatives/gatekeepers (Pluquailec, 2018), thus making power in research more pertinent (Horgan, 2016). The emphasis on protection might inadvertently hinder (participatory) research with children, accentuate adult–child inequalities (Horgan, 2016) and create ‘less ethical’ situations of exclusion from research (Cocks, 2006), potentially even exploitation (Naseem, 2018). Most ethical questions arise in the process of the research and require time for reflection (Spyrou, 2011) – striated ethics procedures are not meant to stand alone against possible exploitation (Ellis, 2016; Naseem, 2018).
Plugging in the concept ‘emergent listening’ transforms research into an intra-active encounter and helps us see beyond formal ethics procedures and repetitive protectionist discourses. Genuinely meeting children in research requires an openness to the not-yet-known, to being affected and being changed (Davies, 2014). Emergent listening refers to ‘listening with all your senses’; it is an attitude which accentuates how ethics are part of every particular and changing relationship (Davies, 2014: 15) and how they are always relational (Ellis, 2016). Listening emergently is about decentring ourselves as researchers and opening up to many other ways of learning and knowing (Spyrou, 2017), to ‘difference in all its multiplicity’ (Davies, 2014: 1). It requires the vulnerability of both the researcher and the participant in order to make ‘visible, within the everyday, the extraordinary capacities children have, and the emergent, the creative, the intra-active encounters they engage in’ (Davies, 2014: 15). Emergent listening allows movement and creative evolution within ethical practices of research, pedagogy and life (Davies, 2014). Plugging in emergent listening in this critical incident motivates us to consider ethics procedures as continuously moving – reflexive, never finished, always-in-negotiation (Davies, 2014; Renold et al., 2008). It might help us to consider both researcher and participant as vulnerable and competent at the same time (Komulainen, 2007), to be protected while participating borderless. It drives us to see the value of consenting in research as ungrabbable in a single document and encourages us to value the entangled collective ways in which children (connected to parents, teachers, caretakers, etc.) mutually become participants. Their voices become multiple, creative, assembled, polyvocal, full of potential and fragility, and mutually produced.
Considering ethics as emergent listening does not deny our responsibility as researchers nor the vulnerability of our research participants (Davies, 2014). It makes the researcher and the participant mutually dependent and urges us to carry responsibility for both our actions and our consequences in a never-ending process (Ellis, 2016). It transforms our responsibility, rendering it situated, multifaceted and emergent (Cowie and Khoo, 2017; Renold et al., 2008), and therefore genuinely attuned towards the responses and desires of participants (Cocks, 2006).
Joining in research – about doctors
Asking children to participate in research creates expectations in relation to who is asking the question (e.g. a strange researcher, the principal of their school or their favourite teacher), what information they receive, what wording is used and numerous more linguistic, discursive and contextual factors. This became very clear when meeting Steve:
Steve was waiting for us in the school’s cafeteria. When meeting Steve and giving him a handshake, his hand was rather hesitant, his eyes shifting from the lamps in the ceiling to cracks in the kitchen floor. While finding spots around a table and filling coffee cups, we ask Steve whether he is a little bit nervous to talk to us? ‘A little bit, yes’. At that moment, the principal tells us a little story about how some of the youngsters did not understand our intention to ‘do research about their presence in the digital environment’. ‘They all thought they had to pay a visit to the doctor!’
Knowing that the Flemish term for ‘research’ (onderzoek) is the same as the term for ‘medical examination’, it is logical that some youngsters were confused about our position as ‘researchers’ at their school. Knowing that a lot of those children with disabilities have quite intense experiences with tests, doctors, hospitals and surgery, it becomes obvious why they hesitated to participate in this ‘research’ of a ‘university’ with a ‘professor doctor’ and a ‘researcher’.
This is about more than claiming that children have ‘a more limited vocabulary’ or use ‘different language’ (Punch, 2002: 328) and/or ‘interpretative frameworks’ than adults do (Spyrou, 2011); it is about own histories and relations interfering (Renold et al., 2008) and discursive and communicative practices connecting the present research situation to past medical experiences, creating expectations of participation in research and diffusing the roles of participant-patient and researcher-doctor. Mayes (2019), using Barad’s work, describes how the past is never finished – past, present and future are entangled, which increases the researcher’s responsibility to engage with these entanglements. Forgetting the ‘patient’ in ‘participant’, the ‘doctor’ in ‘researcher’ and the ‘medical’ in ‘research’ requires taking up this ability to respond. Barad discusses a response-ability that is greater than an individual one; it is ‘not about the right response to a radically exterior/ised other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part’ (Barad, 2007: 392). It is a responsibility that is not calculable, a force that continuously invites us to respond justly in each intra-action (Barad, 2007).
Plugging in ‘response-ability’ in this key incident sees assumptions and expectations in intra-active encounters with children as an invitation to respond and ‘to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly’ (Barad, 2007: x). The plugging in of ‘response-ability’ invites us to try to understand what is entangled (past, present, future) in the voices we encounter in research and how our sensitive role (as well as that of previous researchers) constitutes what matters in these assembled voices (Barad, 2007). Response-ability invites us to be open in each meeting, to listen emergently and acknowledge that ethics is always (before, during and after) at the core of every research encounter (Barad, 2007). ‘Responsibility entails an ongoing responsiveness to the entanglements of self and other, here and there, now and then’ (Barad, 2007: 394).
Safe research spaces – the ‘fancy floor’ and the white room
When negotiating a safe and comfortable research space, spacetimematterings come to the forefront: everything which comes together at/in a particular time and space. Consider the variety in both conversations with the same group:
We have a first conversation with ten children in their home room
2
of the group. We are around the table in their kitchen, close to some comfortable looking couches. There are Belgian flags in the hallway – the Red Devils
3
won a great match yesterday! The youngsters are all packed to go on a week[-long] trip to the sea. There is an atmosphere of anticipation and holiday feelings. Every child is present in a balanced way during our two-hour chat; it seems as if it could go on for a bit longer too, but the bus to the sea is waiting. We have our second chat with this group in a meeting room on the first floor of the school building. One o-clock is the moment after eating fries, before one youngster has to go to the dentist (which he finds frightening), before playing wheelchair hockey for two other boys (quite exciting!), before going home for some others. It is a white room, with a formal white table and ten white chairs. A white screen and a computer with a red light – one of the boys mentions the light is flickering continuously, which catches his attention. When we ask two boys whether they are in this room frequently, the answer is clear: ‘Are you Crazy? This is “the fancy floor”! It is the floor of the principal, the place for meetings. We only come here once a year during a parent-teacher meeting to discuss our progress’.
Many things are present in these conversations. The ‘fancy floor’ and the white room seemed to hold many matters we were not aware of. It shows how our research intra-actions are part of discursive-material practices. Agential forces of matter move within the voices we assemble and ‘the data’ we materialise (Mayes, 2019). Therefore, our ability to respond cannot be restricted to entanglements in human encounters but extends to the material and non-material becomings altering what comes to matter and what is excluded (Barad, 2007).
There is a great difference between the power contained in the home room, where the children collectively supported the Red Devils the night before, and the ‘fancy floor’, where the children discuss their progress once a year. Very often, research environments are adult-controlled spaces (Horgan, 2016; Punch, 2002; Spyrou, 2011) in which contextual (institutional) factors are often neglected (Graue and Hawkins, 2005; Spyrou, 2011). Both research spaces described above carry different expectations and go together with different discourses and roles to play: the good student, the enthusiastic supporter and the child that makes his parents proud. And what about what is coming next – the annual frightening visit to the dentist or the trip with friends to the sea? Within each intra-action, space, time and matter are continuously reconfigured (Barad, 2007) and reconfigure the voices we are assembling. These voices become ‘attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman agents that exceed the traditional understanding of an individual’ (Mazzei and Jackson, 2016: 1). Considering voice within material-discursive assemblages changes and extends our entangled responsibility (Mazzei and Jackson, 2016). Mayes (2019) urges us to think critically about what our methodological moves and presence at a certain place/time have or haven’t brought to matter.
And what about group dynamics? The researchers did not start to build their ‘safe research space’ on the day they entered the school. Children living together in a group, some sharing transport together, some joining each other in class – the ideal of ‘having control’ in the selection of research participants, in the creation of research contexts and in excluding possible influencing factors, is fiction.
One boy enters alone, two girls enter together – the second pushing the wheelchair of the first. They maintain eye contact as they take a seat. Three youngsters engage in a chat about climate change while waiting for the others. Is there enough electrical energy to make sure all cars drive electric? Can we join the Youth for Climate protests in Brussels? What would that look like – asking our assistants to bring us? Two more boys come in – the one without wheelchair asks the other one where he wants to sit.
Engagement in research is fluid and in constant movement – engaging and disengaging, and connecting and disconnecting (Renold et al., 2008). Although we ask participants individually to sign a consent form, the individual is never present in the research, the moment, the place. ‘There are no individual actors of change’ (Barad, 2007: 394). It is about connections, contexts and all material and non-material agents affecting what we become-with certain people, at certain moments and within certain spaces.
When other people join – becoming a fantasist or an activist?
Another round of negotiation starts when one of the gatekeepers asks whether he or she can stay. Who is this person to the children? A teacher? An educator? Is he or she the contact person for your parents at school? Is he or she the person processing your progress at school? Is he or she a teacher you exchange high fives with in the hallway? Does he or she add to a safe, supported atmosphere or to the feeling of being watched? Some key incidents illustrate how the attendance of gatekeepers is a multifaceted thing to negotiate when attempting to create a safe research space:
After the group interview, one of the teachers comes by and we narrate with enthusiasm that it was an enriching conversation with interesting opinions. We got to know the children and everybody participated comfortably. Suddenly the teacher says, ‘only with Jambo, you have to watch out a little bit. He has difficulty telling apart fantasy and reality. You have to take his stories with a little bit of salt’.
This is about more than a culture difference between adults and children or than having different views of the world (Punch, 2002); many layers are present in both the utterances of Jambo and his teacher. The teacher is trying to negotiate and to take genuine ethical responsibility for ‘true research findings’, thereby categorising Jambo as a research participant with ‘vivid imaginations’ (Einarsdottir, 2007: 99); expecting/predicting his stories will offer little credibility. He is trying to fit what he hears into the already-known (Davies, 2014) and is disqualifying Jambo as a child with a right to be heard and taken seriously. The literature has widely discussed the credibility of children’s statements regarding age, maturity and capability (Komulainen, 2007). However, the grown-up talk of ‘you have to take it with a little bit of salt’ is a powerful adult position claiming to know which contributions are (not) important – an attitude which is even more present when talking about children with disabilities. It refers to a dangerous position which was, for a long time, a strong argument in excluding children (with a disability) from research contexts (Kirk, 2007; Komulainen, 2007; Lundy et al., 2011).
However, the teacher’s utterance is also part of a caring discourse, as if saying: ‘I know Jambo, we understand each other’. Listening with all his senses, the teacher understands Jambo’s unique forms of communication and feels the invitation and ability to respond. As a supportive voice, he attunes to Jambo’s perspective in order to make it accessible for an adult interpretation. With this transfer, he heightens the probability that Jambo will be taken seriously. The way we listen emergently to children in every ethical intra-action makes ‘visible the extraordinary capacities children have and the emergent, the creative, the intra-active encounters they engage in’ (Davies, 2014: 15). It demands a vulnerable openness to being affected, to the not-yet-known (Davies, 2014), to ‘the imaginary’. Jambo and his teacher come to matter and are engaged in making a difference through intra-active processes:
During the group interview, the principal enters the room – he seems to be proud and curious because ‘research’ is happening at his school – and asks whether he can participate for a minute. The children agree and the principal takes a seat. Suddenly the children seem to seize the opportunity, turning the conversation from ‘we are not allowed to use our cellphones in class’ towards ‘We notice teachers using their cellphones in class and don’t think it’s fair. Don’t you, Mr. Principal?’. The next topic becomes ‘Why is it that teachers and students cannot become friends on Facebook?’. The principal answers how this is a complex issue and how they are thinking about making Facebook groups for each class. A couple of minutes later, the children utter their wish to have a student council at school. ‘Why isn’t there one? We know there was one before!’. With two researchers and ten students around the table, the principal promises to take a look at it, invites the children to take a selfie with him to put on the school’s website and goes out.
When the children become aware that they are in a significant position with a person that makes decisions, they seize the opportunity to express their thoughts on some important topics. Becoming a participant in research seems to give them a more assertive and powerful role – they feel they are being listened to and they become activists. This situation tells a lot about the positions of both principal and students towards each other: there is an option to express your thoughts and to be listened to. Within this constellation there is space to affect and be affected and for creative evolution to occur (Davies, 2014). However, the principal will have to reveal himself as vulnerable in a transformative situation and take the risk of moving from the already-known to the not-yet-known (Davies, 2014).
These key incidents show how our continuous response-ability is connected to an ethics of emergent listening and to making ourselves vulnerable. In using our response-ability (or not), we render the other (in)capable and impact the way we value assembled voices as activist of fantasy.
Imagine becoming participants— ‘it was cool’
Taking up your response-ability to render children capable in research is about more than assessing ability, separating fantasy from reality or providing compensatory techniques to overcome children’s immaturity or ‘naivete’ (Malewski, 2005). It is about imagining that children have power and agency and that their position can become recognisable in research contexts (Davies, 2014); it is about imagining that their views can be given due weight (Lundy, 2007; Lundy et al., 2011).
Imagine the creation of ethical encounters of listening that allow the not-yet-known to occur and map new possibilities (Davies, 2014). Meeting Timo during the following key incident can illustrate that exercise. This key incident occurred during the last stage of our research project – we were in full preparation for a study evening with lectures on the project and wanted to involve the children:
[Researcher] asks who wants to come to the research evening in a big auditorium in Ghent – we will talk about the Flemish data in this study. Two girls look each other in the eye ‘I will go if you go. If you don’t go, I won’t go’. Other youngsters remain silent and watch each other. When one of the researchers wants to continue the conversation – one youngster, Timo, interrupts. ‘Actually, I would like to go. I am interested to listen to what people say on such an evening. I want to join’. Nobody says ‘me too’ or ‘I’ll think about it’. We negotiate about Timo’s participation in the research evening. Does he want to sit and listen? Or does he want to share something with the audience? Does he want to prepare answers on some questions together? After our group interview, all youngsters leave the room with a quick ‘Thank you, bye!’. All of them except Timo, who lingers around the doorway and wants to know everything about where and when the evening will take place. We tell him about the big auditorium of the university and about the people that will be present. Suddenly – before leaving – he turns around and says ‘I don’t think I will forget this any time soon’.
What matters when Timo decides he wants to join in the evening with lectures? Timo shows a creative desire to explore, to disrupt the quotidian and expand his capabilities towards an experience ‘he will not forget’ (Davies, 2014). Together with the researcher, he imagines a way to enter this event and bring his perspective to an adult audience. Timo imagines the ‘big auditorium’—he imagines being there. Yet he is unsure that he can imagine talking in the ‘big auditorium’. This encounter between researcher and participant holds the potential to open up a space to imagine things differently and expand their capability (Davies, 2014). It holds the potential to become-with each other (Haraway, 2016):
Timo spoke at the research evening about the Flemish results of the study. He prepared some answers to my questions with his mother. After question one he forgot about his preparation and started to narrate freely. He enjoyed the audience’s attention and even made some jokes. He thanked everyone for being able to participate in the research and received applause. Afterwards, the principal investigator from the Belfast research team, who was speaking at the event, approached Timo in order to thank him. Timo asks me what she is saying. I translate between the two of them. However, suddenly Timo takes his cellphone, opens Google Translate and types the Dutch sentence ‘Het was tof’. He shows the English translation, ‘it was cool’, to her. Timo’s eyes sparkle; Professor Lundy is very glad to meet a Flemish research participant. They continue their conversation for several minutes.
Haraway (2016: 4) states, ‘we become-with each-other or not at all’. Researcher and participant compose and decompose each other in their ethical entanglement. Research exists of intra-active encounters during which we require each other ‘in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles’ (Haraway, 2016: 4). In this critical incident, Timo and the researcher imagine a space to become differently, to render each other capable in collective knowing and doing (Haraway, 2016). Plugging in the concept of ‘becoming-with’ has important implications for research (with children), which often stresses the agency and autonomy of the individual child (Elden, 2013; Komulainen, 2007): the individual was and is never present – it is always about movements, about making-with, composing-with, becoming-with (Haraway, 2016). The critical incident shows how response-ability, vulnerability and capability are continuously shifting and reconfiguring in their search for ethical research practices and assembled voices. Polyvocal and emergent voices are reconfigured and configuring in collective knowing and doing; voices are becoming-with.
Conclusion
By plugging in concepts of ‘emergent listening’ (Davies, 2014), ‘response-ability’ (Barad, 2007) and ‘becoming-with’ (Haraway, 2016), this article took a post-qualitative stance upon the construction and taking up of certain positions in research by children and adults, and explored how emergent assemblages of human and (non)-material agents shape how children’s voices are expressed and genuinely listened to within ethical encounters.
Emergent listening challenges us to seek beyond formal ethics procedures, ‘data’, ‘methods’, ‘researchers’ and ‘participants’ to an ethical encounter during which subjects-as-intra-active-becomings affect each other (Davies, 2014). It inspires researchers in childhood research to listen to the crystallisation of all discourses (instead of one belief) and assembled voices in the field towards a nuanced and intra-active understanding of meaning that is created in our encounters. In doing so, children can be seen as valuable, vulnerable and agentic actors in research. Voices can be seen as multiple, entangled, emergent, polyvocal; ethics procedures as continuously moving, reflexive, relational, never finished, always-in-negotiation (Davies, 2014; Renold et al., 2008).
Plugging in ‘response-ability’ invites us to be aware of (past, present and future) discursive, linguistic, ideological practices and specific spacetimematterings we engage in. It doesn’t only urge us to be ‘formally prepared’ but also to be continuously sensitive and attuned to what might pop up. It is an invitation to account for discursive-material practices, agential forces of space, time and matters that are continuously remaking our ethical encounters and reconfiguring the voices we are assembling. It urges us to move towards understanding ‘our role in helping constitute who and what comes to matter’ (Barad, 2007: x).
Plugging in ‘becoming-with’ shows how ‘power’, ‘voice’, ‘selection’, ‘informed consent’ and ‘technical guidelines’ are all parts of promising collaborations, of collective knowing and doing. Vulnerable and capable voices become-with each other in emerging constellations and combinations. These post-qualitative concepts collaboratively imagine ethical practices in research with children, which requires mutual entanglements between participants, gatekeepers, (co-)researchers and ethical committees, among other partners.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article is based on a Flemish substudy within the scope of an international research project commissioned by the Council of Europe and coordinated by the Centre for Children’s Rights at Queens University of Belfast (Lundy et al., 2019). Many thanks for this inspiring collaboration to Prof. Lundy, in particular. Many thanks also to KeKi (Knowledge Centre for Children’s Rights) and Kathy Vlieghe, in particular, for their cooperation during this project.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The first author is a PhD student at the Department of Special Needs Education (Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Ghent University) with the support of a Special Research Fund fellowship (Grant 01D23017).
