Ethnographic research in childhood institutions: participations and entanglements

Barbara Dennis & Christina Huf

Published online: 06 Feb 2020

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 https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2020.1722951

ABSTRACT

Drawing on a critical debate in the social studies of childhood on the empowerment of children to
participate in research, the paper illustrates how ethnographic research in childhood institutions
has the potential to destabilise hierarchic power relationships towards an open, dynamic, playful
engagement between ethnographer, children, and the material of the classroom. Ultimately, we
suggest that conceptualizations from new posthumanist materialism open up new ways of
theorising participation in ethnographic research in childhood institutions and fine-tune its
capacity for reflecting processes of knowledge production with children.

KEYWORDS: Ethnographic childhood research, new materialism, posthumanism, participatory

methods, critical ethnography