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Contribution short abstract

This argues on conducting ethnographic fieldwork with young children, challenging the taboo surrounding family accompaniment in anthropology. Drawing on lived experience and care ethics, to explore how researching with children reshapes ethics, responsibility, and knowledge production in the field.

Contribution long abstract

This contribution reflects on the practice of conducting ethnographic fieldwork with young children, a reality for many anthropologists that remains largely unspoken within academic institutions, funding structures, and ethics review processes. As I prepare for extended fieldwork with my children, I engage critically with the ethical, practical, and affective dimensions of family accompaniment in research, asking how care, responsibility, and knowledge production intersect in such arrangements.

Anthropological discussions of fieldwork often assume an unencumbered researcher, obscuring the relational labour involved in sustaining family life during research periods. Drawing on care ethics and emerging scholarship on researching with family members (Korpela, Hirvi & Tawah 2016; Hope et al. 2025), this contribution situates accompaniment as neither an ethical failure nor a personal compromise, but as a situated response to structural constraints, gendered expectations, and uneven care responsibilities. Whether children are left behind or brought to the field, both choices carry ethical and affective consequences for caregivers, children, and research trajectories.

Rather than treating children as passive dependents or disruptions, this reflection considers how their presence reshapes field relations, temporalities, and sensitivities, while also raising questions about safety, consent, and institutional accountability. Positioned within the roundtable’s collaborative spirit, my contribution does not seek to generalize but to open dialogue around what supportive infrastructures, ethical frameworks, and institutional recognitions are needed to make fieldwork with family members viable and just. It invites anthropology to take seriously care not as a private concern, but as a constitutive condition of knowledge-making.