Paper short abstract:

Participatory research with children with disabilities enacts field changes. Vulnerability shapes the practice and intersect field interactions from different dimensions and the process of knowledge co-production with children - as selves, is often affected by power relations.

Paper long abstract:

There is an increasing recognition to the need of bringing the diversity of disabled children voices into research and to include their perspectives alongside of those from the ones of other children. Capturing their agency and individuality (Goodley & Runswick-Cole, 2012) can highlight research with disability-specific views (Wickenden & Gayatri Kembhavi-Tam 2014). The participatory research and the mosaic approach has been broadly adopted to understand children as social agents and experts while acknowledging the diversity of their voices and forms of expression (Goodley & Runswick-Cole 2012). Yet, in our own process of conducting a research in the context of Animal Assisted Therapy sessions at four school contexts co-constructed with 48 children, with multiple and complex disabilities, we found several factors regarding key aspects for accessing children voice´s and voluntary and meaningful participation. A central idea in Participatory research is that participants are empowered, affecting the balance of power relations which are therefore expected to shift (Ajodhia-Andrews, 2016), participatory methods can therefore change the nature of the relationships and power status. By drawing upon concrete examples from our research we expect to foreground the challenges created by the field gatekeepers showing where their impact has delayed accessing children's voices and often (re) introduced power relations that affected children voluntary participation and to shad a new light on the intersections of the different dimensions of vulnerability enacted by research course.