Paper short abstract:

I discuss participatory methodologies in studying translocal families with children in European migration contexts. To reach children's views and everyday practices of mobility we used story crafting, drawing and theatre performances. Collaborative work allowed children an active role in research.

Paper long abstract:

Capturing a child's perspective on everyday practices is a challenge for researchers as we tend to take the adult perspective for granted. In studying families with children it is deceivingly easy to slip into discussing children with their parents, following their standpoints on children's experiences. Young children particularly fall off the radar if researchers work excessively in the interview mode as even ethnographic interviews are difficult to conduct with under-school-age children. The paper presents and discusses participatory methodologies employed by a research team where we have studied families with children in North and East European migration contexts. The challenging task was to capture children's everyday practices, ideas and recollections of their family's translocal mobility. To get to know the children, and to reach to their views and practices of mobility, the research team members experimented with such methods as story crafting, draw-and-tell, and creating theatre performances together with children. The key idea was working collaboratively with children, allowing them an active and creative role in the research process, making them research participants.

Conducting ethnography is of course always participatory to some degree, as the researcher can never remain a neutral outsider in relation to her research participants. Working with children simply makes the two-way research relationship more transparent, and therein lies a potential for developing explicitly participatory methodologies that can work well with anyone, regardless of age. Thus, researching with children can contribute to developing less hierarchical and more co-researching epistemology of ethnography.

Paper short abstract:

Toma (r) Madrid: decolonial art is an experimental space in which ethnography and art have been put into play. For this, an investigation was carried out that focuses on the production of decolonial knowledge about urban spaces through urban cartographies produced by children of migrants.

Paper long abstract:

The proposal aims to open a reflection on the role of experimental methodologies in ethnographic research through the case of a group of migrant adolescents living in Madrid and participated in the project "Toma (r) Madrid: decolonial artefacts ". It is an approach that explores the dynamics that could be generated in a research space that is characterized by being open and experimental. The reflection that is carried out in this work focuses on three issues: 1. Community research as a means to investigate the world from a transdisciplinary and de-colonial perspective. 2. Migrant adolescents as privileged subjects of production of subaltern knowledge 3. The use of colonial techniques in the processes of ethnographic research as tools for the generation of empowerment processes by the people involved in the research.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the methodological and epistemological opportunities, affordances and constraints provided by multimodal interaction analysis (Goodwin, C. 2017; Goodwin & Cekaite, 2018; Mondada, 2018) in understanding children and childhoods in families and early childhood institutions.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the methodological and epistemological opportunities, affordances and constraints provided by multimodal interaction analysis (Goodwin, C. 2017; Goodwin & Cekaite, 2018; Mondada, 2018). On the basis of recent video-ethnographic studies, conducted on children and childhoods in families and early childhood institutions, the paper discusses how conceptualisation of actions as embodied and material can enrich the understanding of contemporary early childhood. It presents examples that illustrate how rich combinations and features of multifaceted socio-cultural, relational, material, ecological and semiotic practices can work in shaping children's everyday practices that constitute contemporary childhoods, and discuss constraints shaping them. The presentation argues that through close investigation of the sequential and simultaneous entanglements of bodies interacting with bodies and materiality, we can outline how children's everyday lives do not separate verbal, embodied and material. Rather, it is argued that such analysis can provide insights into the experiential corporeal aspects of children as embodied subjects with visual, aural, haptic sensorial experiences and characteristics.

Paper short abstract:

My paper is about adoption as experienced in contemporary Poland, especially by the children. I discuss numerous ethical and methodological challenges. How to represent children's voices which are often treated as suspect? How to relate to imbalances of power?

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary models of family undergo substantial transformations, thus the meaning and cultural patterns of adoption also change. This paper is based on a research project which aims to analyse, from the anthropological perspective, adoption as it is experienced in contemporary Poland; and especially, to allow for the voices of children to become a part of the adoption debate.

In such research, numerous ethical dilemmas and methodological challenges may arise. Some relate to knowledge and its sources. Parents may be aware with the facts of the child's life, which they do not reveal to him/her, but reveal to the researcher. This also refers to medical or psychological diagnoses. A question arises: is it possible to know too much about our research subjects? Or, on the contrary, parents may be afraid that the child will tell "too much" of her situation, or not tell the truth. This is because children's voices are often treated as suspect. In relation to other actors: how one should conduct research in the situation of disagreements between parents? How should we ethically conduct research in families, where interests and voices of actors differ? How to represent these voices? How should a researcher relate to imbalances of power? And, finally, how to represent the state as an important agent in the adoption's constellation, influencing the voices of the parties involved?

Paper short abstract:

We reflexively discuss methodological strategies used with children across different projects centered on "new" families in Spain. We pay particular attention to three processes: (a) negotiations around/within interviews; (b) the place of visual materials; (c) workshop events for data collection.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last decade we have been involved in a series of research projects in Spain focused on processes of "new" (Golombok, 2015; Rivas, 2009) family formation. These projects were conceived as multi-sited team ethnographies involving complex fieldwork process that included participant observation in different institutional settings, on-line ethnography, detailed analysis of legal and institutional documentations or extensive interviewing of different actors involved in these family projects: professionals, fathers/mothers, children and, more recently, donors.

The individual techniques used across these projects are not construed as particularly innovative or developed outside the rich toolkit of ethnographic methodology. Yet, in this communication we focus in particular on the methodological processes that emerged when working with children in an attempt to explore their own perspectives regarding their family experiences. We reflexively examine three processes: (a) negotiations with parents as the first interlocutors in the process and gatekeepers but also negotiations with children as they emerged within interviews; (b) how visual materials generated by the children were used as interview prompts or complementary analytical material; (c) how workshop-type events and literary narratives were used and generated in the research projects. Within these projects on new/non-conventional family formation in Spain, children emerged as "hard to reach" participants (in comparison to the accessibility of parents and adults) and in this communication we open up the discussion to the different strategies we developed to confront these obstacles and how we -not always successfully- extended and experimented with conventional research techniques to work with children.

Paper short abstract:

In our work, we will think about the construction processes of experimental collaborations in the research. The starting point will be the analysis of an ethnographic investigation with role game players in which the forms of participation change along the fieldwork.

Paper long abstract:

The purpose of our work is to think about the construction process of experimental collaborations in the ethnographic research with young people and children.

Experimental collaborations are a kind of practice that understands the research as a creative activity. It is an open-ended process, a tinkering with methods (Kullman, 2012). Participants stop being simple informants and they are considered to be experts in the area of interest with an active role in the research (Estalella and Sánchez-Criado, 2018).

Experimental collaborations are the methodological choice in some works (Estalella and Sánchez-Criado, 2018). Nevertheless, there are many ethnographic studies (Kullman, 2012; Mendoza, 2017) in which, for different reasons (the fieldwork entrance, the participants' aims, the participation structures in the fieldwork, etc.) the experimental collaboration cannot give supposed a priori. Thus, departing from a role game players experience analysis, we will show how collaboration is gaining ground in a traditional ethnographic design so that the participants' decision making and their initiatives are shaping the relation established with them as the own fieldwork process.

We will think about how participation and relation structures are built and re-built in a way to be open or close to experimental collaborations.

References:

Estalella, A., and Sánchez-Criado, T. (2018). Experimental collaborations: Ethnography through fieldwork devices. New York: Berghahn Books.

Kullman, K. (2012). Experiments with moving children and digital cameras. Children's Geographies, 10(1), 1-16.

Mendoza, K. (2017). Adolescentes y jóvenes migrantes en Bizkaia: prácticas de vida y socialidad. Tesis doctoral. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on the possibilities/limitations of autoethnography in researching experiences of girls living with chronic illness. How can the researchers' experience of living with disability be used during fieldwork and writing-up to deepen the understanding of childhood with disability?

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Poland among girls and women with Turner syndrome. For the past 2,5 years I have been interviewing girls and women with TS and conducting observations at summer camps for girls and youth with TS. Being myself a women living with a disability, I use autoethnography as another lens to look at how girlhood, femininity, and womanhood are constructed vis-à-vis disability and chronic illness.

I argue that my own experience of living with a disability can be not only a useful tool during the fieldwork, making it easier for me and the girls with TS to understand each other and establish connection, but also can be of value at the time of writing up and interpretation.

Regardless of the nature of illness/disability, the position of the "unhealthy" child vis-à-vis the parents, doctors, and teachers is to large extent the same, and the questions of how to raise a ill child, when caring becomes controlling, and the attempts to empower are actually disempowering, remain similar. What does the perspective of the ethnographer who was once a girl with a disability bring to fieldwork among girls living with a chronic illness? How do my own childhood experiences influence the ways in which I look at the girls with ZT their parents and teachers? How can autoethography deepen the understanding of life as a disabled/chronically ill child?

Paper short abstract:

The paper aims to discuss my post-doc project 'Boys will be boys' a narratological study of men's stories on boyhood., the aim of which is to do an analysis of qualia constructs (Herman 2009) in men?s biographical re-telling of their childhood

Paper long abstract:

Lately the notion of boyhood and masculinity have been elevated into public discourse worldwide. Issues of how boys ?become men? have been subject to documentary projects (The mask you Live in, 2015) and journalistic scrutiny. Through issues like ?gamer gate? and ?Wheaton?s law?, and the #meetoo twitter uprising the issue of ?boys become men?, have gained an acute relevance in the public eye. At the same time, the emphasis on male childhood narratives in research, have been on literary and media representations of boyhood, rather than biographical childhood narratives.

The paper aims to discuss my post-doc project ?Boys will be boys? ? a narratological study of men?s stories on boyhood, the aim of which is to do an analysis of qualia constructs (Herman 2009) in men?s biographical re-telling of their childhood. The concept of qualia is defined as ?the sense of what it?s like for someone or something to have a particular experience? (Herman 2009, 144). The paper will present the project aim and ponder ethnographic/folkloristic questionnaire and method. The core focus is on the issues of the questionnaire as a dialogue between researcher and informant, highlighting the seen and unforeseen issues in using questionnaires to establish researcher/informant exchange.