ABSTRACT
An important critique of much academic research is that so often it fails to collaborate in meaningful ways with those outside the university and to share the creation and dissemination of knowledge. The lack of inclusion and acknowledgement of research participants in the research process comes out of a tradition of empiricism that perceives research as an objective and disinterested activity, one that positions subjects as objects. Yet scholars from a range of disciplines have questioned this omission, challenging the ‘traditionally hierarchical relationships between research and action, and between researchers and “researched” . . . [in order to] empower “ordinary people” in and through research’ (Kindon, Pain & Kesby, 2010, p. 1). Feminist perspectives have been influential in this task, and have argued that we must recognise difference and facilitate ways for a range of voices to be given a space from which to speak (Cahill & Torre, 2010; Gibson-Graham, 1994; Kobayashi & Peake, 1994; Rose, 1993). Participatory research practices, for example, have sought to conduct research committed to social action that includes both the research process and its outcomes (Cahill, 2006; Pain & Kindon, 2007; mrs c kinpaisby-hill, 2011). Such approaches mean a radical acknowledgement of collaboration as an integral component of research, whereby researchers and those being researched work together at all stages of the research project. However, how we represent those involved in research and the data we collect is always going to be a complicated and contentious undertaking, as critical ethnographer Madison (2005) has pointed out. Feminist and postcolonial scholars have argued that research reproduces entrenched social structures and inequalities (Cahill & Torre, 2010; Schwan & Lightman, 2015). As Smith (2012) noted, Western research operates within ‘a cultural orientation, a set of values, a different conceptualization of such things as time, space and subjectivity, different and competing theories of knowledge, [and] highly specialized forms of language and structures of power’ (p. 92). The ways in which power is embedded within knowledge, and how it is then presented back to us, reinscribes notions of who has the right to speak (Spivak, 1988). The uncritical assumptions about academic work mean that
disadvantaged and vulnerable individuals, groups and communities are most often rendered silent. Moreover, these critiques raise questions about what we mean by knowledge, and that we need to recognise that knowledge is not simply located within certain forms of officially sanctioned text. More recently, social scientists have turned to the arts and artistic practice as a means to not only capture the various ways the world is lived but also to share and communicate research more broadly. The creative arts offer significant opportunities to challenge traditional frameworks of knowledge production through re-presenting how we inhabit and engage with the world. Artistic practice opens us to empathic feeling and fresh perspectives (Eisner, 2008). It focuses on the experiential, beginning ‘from one’s own lived experience and personal reactions’ (Barrett, 2010, p. 5) and facilitates the emergence of new forms of knowledge within particular sets of circumstances. These important critiques and research approaches are particularly pertinent to qualitative research undertaken with children. Some researchers working with children have challenged the theoretical and methodological approaches that underpin research about children and their conceptualisations, engagements and processes of making sense of, and being in, the world. The New Social Studies of Childhood (NSSC), for example, has encouraged researchers to consider children not as passive social actors, but as individuals actively perceiving and engaging with the world in ways that differ to that of adults (Ansell, 2009). Participatory research has produced rich and valuable insights into children’s place-making practices, uncovering the nuances and the complex ways children can, and do, actively create and attribute meaning to the everyday worlds they encounter (Béneker, Sanders, Tani & Taylor, 2010). Exciting and novel participatory projects in education research, for example, are designed to maximise children’s agency in the research process (Ansell, 2009). Many of these include practices such as school food gardens that encourage learning about growing, harvesting and cooking food as part of children’s dayto-day learning in schools (Green, 2014). Consequently, in considering children’s perspectives the significance of the everyday seems important, yet the mundane habits, practices and experiences of daily life often go unnoticed, even though recent arguments in social and cultural theory propose that such things matter profoundly (Horton & Kraftl, 2006; Lorimer, 2008). While everyday life has gained significance in our understanding of the world from an adult perspective, in terms of children, as Aitken (2001) pointed out, ‘the places and practices of children’s everyday life are rarely considered a dynamic context for understanding social and material transformations’ (p. 123). Further, as Horton, Christensen, Kraftl and Hadfield-Hill (2014) argued in their examination of children’s mobilities, there are exciting opportunities in experimental work that can ‘conceptually enliven . . . and extend . . . [research so as] to acknowledge bodily, social, sociotechnical and habitual practices’ (p. 95; see also Horton & Kraftl, 2006). Yet capturing these differing ways of being in the world can be difficult.
