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.