Paper Short Abstract:

The paper discusses collaborative research with migrant children using engagement with literature, as a generative research design for unmoderated, unmediated ethnography and description of children’s lives.

Paper Abstract:

Migrant children are emerging as separate, fully-fledged subjects in anthropological research on migration, recently re-dubbed as ‘children on the move’ (Rosen 2023). The shift towards the dynamic, processual phenomenon of ‘being on the move’ and away from a more static ‘migrant’, has also facilitated whole new sets of questions researchers are asking, with the resulting fertile problematization of age, agency and children’s rights, through research on e.g. ‘emergent solidarities’ (ibid). Still, it can be argued that the questions we tend to focus on as researchers working with children are in dire need of un-writing – as are narratives about people we commonly see as children. Given the bias that may leads us to enact our authority as adult-moderators, I propose a research design that may generate unmediated linguistic, discursive, and reflexive ethnographic material – and a whole new set of emerging questions about children’s lives. Inspired by the approach by Carolyn Steedman in The Tidy House (1982) and Wendy Ewald in Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children 1969-1999 (2000), I listen in, record and follow children’s conversations and creative linguistic re-fashioning of a poem (by the Ukrainian-Czech poet Marie Iljašenko) by children with migration background now living in Poland. The poem is provided in three language versions – the original Czech, and its Polish and English translation by professional poet-translators, with the possibility of further fractalization of the text through spontaneous acts of (oral or witten) translation by children into their (m)other tongues.

Keywords: children, migration, literature, research design, representation