Visual Anthropology Review - 2021 - Spray - Drawing Perspectives Together What Happens When Researchers Draw With Children

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VAR 37.2 Fall 2021
Drawing Perspectives
Together
What Happens When Researchers Draw with
Children?
JULIE SPRAY
ABSTRACT
Reflecting on drawing together, a methodological interven-
tion I developed through two child-centered ethnographic
projects, I explore what happens when researchers draw
together with children. While anthropologists of childhood
have called for critical attention to the use of child-friendly
participatory methods such as drawing, few have consid-
ered how researchers participate in these methods. Yet
drawing is embedded with value- laden cultural notions
of age and social status. Soliciting children’s drawings for
research is therefore a social act that produces identities
and relationalities. I argue that researchers must make the
nature of their participation a methodological choice rather
than an unexamined default.
KEYWORDS
drawing, childhood, reflexivity, participatory methods,
child-centered
Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 37, Issue 2, pp. 356–379, ISSN 1058-7187, online 1548-7458. © 2021 American Anthropological
Association. DOI: 10.1111/var.12244.
358
Drawing Perspectives Together SPRAY
I interviewed nine-year-old Teuila1 in a disused classroom

at Tūrama School where I was conducting fieldwork in
Auckland, New Zealand, in 2015. I typically try to sit perpen-
dicular to children, rather than directly across from them; it is
less confrontational, more companionable, and allows children
to avoid eye contact that, with adults, can be overexposing or
culturally inappropriate. I always bring drinks and snacks—
children are hungry when they share their time with me after
school—and drawing supplies: pens, paper, pencils, and eras-
ers. Sharpeners are important. Teuila chose her drink and then
pored over my colored pens as we parsed her feelings about the
interview. She was nervous, she giggled, but also not really, be-
cause she had been on television a lot already. Oh, that’s right,
I said. You’ve been on the news heaps of times. Teuila’s father
had recently died. The media had reported on his death; the
television broadcasts had infiltrated her classmates’ homes and
her teacher had read newspaper articles aloud to her class while
Teuila sat silently.
Do you want to tell me about what it was like being on the
news? I asked. Then, I picked up a pencil and began to sketch
Teuila.
I drew Teuila as she sat next to me for several reasons.
In my experiences interviewing children in school settings, I
found that when I drew, children relaxed. The experience not
only of being interviewed, but simply having an adult sit for
an hour and listen only to them was, for most children, quite
novel. The push–pull of excitement and intimidation para-
lyzed some, at least initially, and when I drew, children were
not alone in the spotlight of my eyes and attention. Originally,
I just doodled, in putting pencil to paper inviting them to draw
too. At Tūrama School, I had started to draw the child in front
of me—not particularly well—and they would see themselves
reflected through my eyes onto the page.
It was struggling, Teuila said, describing that time when
the news reporters came to her house. And … I was being … JULIE SPRAY
and I-um, I was so-so nervous? To talk to them? About it? Teuila
stammered, perhaps feeling the echoes of that day’s fear in the Julie Spray is an anthro-
room with me now. Or, she was grappling for the words in her pologist and ethnographic
second language. Teuila was a Tongan migrant, still gaining illustrator interested in
fluency in English. Despite the array of colors, she selected a visual representation as
black pen and began to draw too. collaborative processes in
childhood ethnography. She
In the audio recording of Teuila’s interview, our voices
is the a uthor of The Children
overlay a background of pencils scratching on paper, long in Child Health: Negotiating
pauses signifying where our communication was visual, not Young Lives and Health in
auditory. While Teuila watched my picture of her emerge, she New Zealand (Rutgers, 2020).
made a beautifully ornate image of herself sick in bed, and View her ethnographic draw-
drawings of vegetables, lungs, and a laboratory microscope to ing at www.juliespray.com.
359
VAR 37.2 Fall 2021
show me things she could explain better through image. Her

final picture surprised me, though. I’m just coppering you, she
explained, when I looked with curiosity.
Coppering me. Oh, are you drawing me? I exclaimed. And
there I was, rendered through Teuila’s eyes, just as she had seen
herself through mine (Figure 1).
I encouraged Teuila to draw during our interview be-
cause a vast literature advocates that researchers engage chil-
dren using child-centered methods, including drawing. I had
read about how drawing could help children express “the un-
recognized, unacknowledged or ‘unsayable’ stories that they
hold” (Leitch 2008, 37), how drawing can elicit different and
more “emotional” responses (Thomson 2008), and how draw-
ing can “empower” children through more horizontal and eth-
ical research conditions (Literat 2013). But while emphasizing
research with children, very few sources ever suggested what
I should be doing while children drew. Despite spending my
fieldwork participating in everyday activities alongside chil-
dren at Teuila’s school—lining up outside the classroom after
lunch, undertaking math quizzes, curling up on the mat listen-
ing to stories—I had not given great thought to my own partic-
ipation during the interviews I held after school. Interviewing,
after all, was not the same as participant observation, and
regardless, I was the researcher—not the participant. Despite
understanding that we co-constructed data through conversa-
tion, I did not think about how the drawings children made
FIG. 1
360
were also co-constructed through processes that reflected my

own participation.
Over recent decades, scholars have called for greater crit-
ical attention to the processes implicated in “participatory”
or “child- friendly” methods such as drawing (Eldén 2013;
Hunleth 2011; Mitchell 2006). Rather than emancipating chil-
dren as research collaborators, scholars suggest that participa-
tory methods differently structure children’s involvement in
research, with different forms of adult power, with different
constraints on children’s agency, and serving different adult
interests and goals (Gallacher and Gallagher 2008; Hunleth
2011). The problem, as anthropologist Jean Hunleth (2011)
argues, is that the evangelization of “child-centered” meth-
odological approaches as a solution to adult-centric methods
can elide what research with children actually means and can
preclude deeper consideration of the social dynamics shaping
the always dialectical processes of qualitative data collection.
Researchers must therefore attend to the social contexts in
which children’s participation occurs and interpret drawings
in light of the processes through which they are produced.
These processes include the researcher’s participation. As
anthropologist Spyros Spyrou (2018) argues, researchers are
also participating in the worlds and co-producing the phenom-
ena we seek to describe. If childhood is a mutable, socially con-
structed phenomenon enacted through social relations, then
as adult researchers, we are always participating in processes
of making childhoods. Rethinking what research with chil-
dren means therefore requires deep attention not only to how
children participate, but also how researchers participate with
children. Yet despite this critical attention to how participatory
methods restructure children’s participation, considerations
of adult researcher participation have not moved far beyond
considering the ethical implications and effects of attempts
to redistribute power. Even anthropology, where participant
observation is a cornerstone, has seen limited explicit theoreti-
cal attention to how adult researchers participate with children.
Notably, anthropologist Pia Christensen posits the “different
kind of adult” role to circumvent issues of power and the con-
straints of social rules delineating adulthood and childhood,
positioning researchers as adults who operate differently from
those whom children may have typically experienced (2004).
In my own research at Tūrama School, I discovered the limits
of such a role when, having established myself as an adult who
did not condemn or report their misbehavior, I became privy FIG. 1 Julie Spray and Teuila
to children’s taboo activities and was later obligated to report (age 9), Drawing each other
instances of harm that children told to this “different kind drawing each other, composite
of adult” (Spray 2020). Brokering research across adult–child drawings, Auckland, 2015.
361
VAR 37.2 Fall 2021
boundaries therefore requires a deep consideration of how

adult researchers participate that is rare, especially outside of
participant observation.
In this article, I investigate adult researcher participa-
tion through the processes of drawing together that I first in-
advertently and then deliberately explored with children and
research assistants across two research projects: an ethnog-
raphy of children’s experiences of health at “Tūrama School”
in Aotearoa New Zealand (Spray 2020), and a child-centered
study of children’s asthma experiences in the United States.2
In reflecting on both projects, I ask a simple question: what
happens when researchers draw together with children?
Underlying this question are much deeper provocations about
what we do with ourselves as researchers. How does our man-
ner of participation symbolically and relationally constitute the
categories of participant and researcher, child and adult? When
children draw and adults watch and ask questions, what are we
saying to children about how we recognize and value drawing?
What might we gain from processes where adults participate
and children observe and ask questions, where roles are fluid
and interchangeable?
In asking these questions, I call for more critical attention
to the ways in which researchers participate with children (and
by extension, how children research us), and the possibilities
that might emerge from rethinking the dichotomy between re-
searcher and researched. This is not to say that adult research-
ers must draw with children, but rather, that not drawing is
also a methodological decision, observation is a form of par-
ticipation, and reflexivity requires awareness of and conscious
decisions about our participation’s effects.
How Did Drawing Become “Child-Friendly”?
That drawing is a “child-friendly” method is a taken-for-

granted assumption of child research. Yet children’s draw-
ings have regularly been implicated in particular symbolic
and ontological constructions of childhood—and of adult
researchers—meaning that to use drawing in child research
carries sociological baggage. In early twentieth-century
psychology, the prominence of image interpretation in the
psychoanalytic thought of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud in-
fluenced popular interest in children’s art alongside a paral-
lel interest in the art of people with mental illness (Malchiodi
1998). Aligning the child with the mental patient, psycho-
logical inquiries produced constructions of both as mysterious,
semiconscious fonts from which drawings can extract meaning
otherwise inaccessible, while also producing the psychologist
362
as the diviner who uses projective drawing tests and other

arcane interpretive methods. Meanwhile, developmental psy-
chologists used drawings to discern children’s developmental
progression until adolescence when, according to psychologist
Viktor Lowenfeld (1947), a “crisis” of drawing occurs wherein
children become self-critical of their attempts toward more
realistic representation and eventually cease drawing (Jolley
2010). By naturalizing drawing’s association with develop-
mental stages and the absence of drawing with adulthood, this
research reinforced a developmental construction of children
as progressing through linear stages, from scribbling to real-
ism to a complete adult form who writes words rather than
draws pictures. This two-pronged association of drawing with
childhood and the unconscious psyche therefore established
drawing as a so-called “developmentally appropriate” mode
of communication that promises, through its presumed spon-
taneous and intuitive processes, to elicit that which children
may themselves not consciously know or e xpress verbally.
The psychological origins of drawing in child research
have, however, meant a tendency to overlook the cultural and
social elements that influence what is drawn by whom, when,
why, and how. Modes of communication in research and in
societies more broadly are not value-neutral but reflect and
reinforce social hierarchies, such as class, ethnicity, and age
(Berman 2019). In the United States and New Zealand, as else-
where, age hierarchies structure society, though these tend to
be undertheorized compared to other identity categories such
as gender, class, or race (Field and Syrett 2020). While early psy-
chologists may have naturalized drawing’s supposed develop-
mental stages, often based on homogenous, Western samples of
children (Alter-Muri 2002), the cultural association of drawing
with childishness suggests a feedback loop whereby children
draw so adults do not. Indeed, a survey study of English chil-
dren’s drawing enjoyment found that, although there was no
discernible decline in children’s drawing time between ages 5
and 14, a majority of parents and teachers reported a perceived
decline, and this was commonly attributed to, among other
things, a “natural part of development to draw less” (Jolley
2010, 306). Children in the study agreed that drawing less “is
part of growing up” or that others could think drawing “is a
bit babyish” (306–7). In our asthma study, we found that teen-
agers were less likely to draw, often differentiating themselves
from younger siblings who did use art materials. Moreover,
because drawing is childish, for adults drawing can elicit feel-
ings of childlike vulnerability (Galman 2009) and function as
a form of “aged agency” (Berman 2019) that constrains adults
363
VAR 37.2 Fall 2021
similarly to gendered forms of agency that constrain men from

enjoying so-called feminine activities.
Likewise, academia has tended to privilege the perceived
adult, verbal mode of communication and representation,
while the association with childishness may have contributed
to drawing’s historical devaluation in research. Although early
ethnographers commonly drew field observations, drawing
was superseded by photographic and videographic technolo-
gies that continue to dominate visual anthropology (Causey
2017; Galman 2009). Drawing’s construction as a “child-
friendly” research method appears to have implicitly precluded
adult participation, as I have written previously, “the drawing
is for children, while researchers tend to get on with the ‘real’
business of interviewing or taking notes” (Spray 2020, 195).
Consequently, scholars promoting drawing methods encoun-
ter a double challenge: to have drawing legitimized as a seri-
ous and professional method and to convince adult researchers
that they can draw. Workshops and books often actively work
to help adults relearn how to draw as they knew how to do as a
young child (Barry 2019; Causey 2017). Returning to the sup-
posed free drawing of childhood is used in several therapeu-
tic modalities to help adult patients access what is often called
their child self. All of these things suggest that drawing is not
only symbolically but also psychosocially enmeshed in the cul-
tural construction of childhood, adulthood, and the develop-
mental processes between. Accordingly, adult researchers who
draw or not can reinforce or disrupt the categories of child and
adult, shaping how data are co-constructed and interpreted.
I do not claim to be the first researcher to draw with par-
ticipants (cf. Galman 2009). Drawing together has also been
used in therapeutic contexts; for example, pediatrician Donald
Winnecott developed a technique of iterative squiggle draw-
ing as an intervention to catalyze communication between
therapist and child (Malchiodi 1998). However, by conceptual-
izing drawing together as more than a communication tool—
that is, as a relational mode—I show how researchers can play
with identity categories, reshape who researchers and partic-
ipants are in relation to one another, and subsequently, alter
the foundation upon which knowledge is co-constructed. As a
relational mode, then, drawing together does not entail a spe-
cific process or product but may take many forms, including
researcher and children both drawing what they see, drawing
FIG. 2 Julie Spray, Drawing
together at the school
on the same page, or sequentially adding to a drawing. This
lunchbreak, Copic marker on relational mode also invites adult researchers who have little
paper, Auckland, 2015. [This experience or confidence with drawing,3 since the objective is
figure appears in color in the not to produce a realistic representation but to engender social
online issue.] processes (for a practical guide, see the supplemental resource).
364
What Happens When We Draw Together in the Field?
As a participating “student” at Tūrama School, the notebook

where I undertook exercises in spelling, math, and handwrit-
ing became full of illustrations and diagrams of volcanoes
and recycling. When I was not teaching or assisting with art
projects, I drew alongside children, sketching castles and il-
lustrating a Harry Potter poster for Book Week. Toward the
end of my fieldwork, when I had started to collect children’s
drawings for a picture book I intended as an age-appropriate
way to report my research to the community who hosted me,4
I brought colored pens and paper out to a picnic table outside
during breaks and invited children to draw with me (Figure 2).
As such, I already drew with children as routine participant
observation before I consciously cultivated drawing together
as a research method.
I have written elsewhere (Spray 2020) about how stark
distinctions between adults and children were maintained at
Tūrama School through spatial and symbolic means: adults
always sat on chairs while children, when not at their desks,
sat on the floor; children wore uniforms while adults chose
FIG. 2
365
VAR 37.2 Fall 2021
their own dress; children were not permitted to enter adult

spaces without permission. These differences did not con-
struct two equal groups but consolidated the power already
accorded to adults through institutional authority. As a par-
ticipant observer, I had some ability to symbolically align
myself with children, for example, by insisting on sitting
with children on the floor, but my adult privilege was not
discardable.
Through drawing, however, I could identify myself as a
“different kind of adult” (Christensen 2004). While drawing is
commonly encouraged for children’s learning in New Zealand
primary schools, except for demonstration purposes, teach-
ers themselves did not typically draw. As when I took basic
facts quizzes and handwriting exercises, my participation in
drawing activities disaligned me from other adults who did
not take quizzes, complete handwriting exercises, or draw. On
one occasion, I brought drawing materials to the library and
the children who joined me—k ids I had encountered often
in the playground but who were not in the study—decided to
make me birthday cards. While I sketched, they asked me my
age. What do you think? I asked, always curious to know their
impressions. To my amusement, they guessed 13, 14, 16, and
25. I’m about to turn 31, I told them, laughing at their shock.
Though I was similarly aged or older than many teachers or
parents, children, trying to make sense of the contradiction be-
tween my adult size and my symbolic disalignment with adult-
hood, fit me into the in-between “teenage” category.
Yet there is also a special category of adults who draw.
Often fascinated by my drawing practices, children would
peer over my shoulder and exclaim: you’re a artist! By virtue
of exceptional skill, artists are free from the aged agency that
constrains most adults from drawing, but their social status
is culturally variable and the struggling artist trope invokes
a youthful idealism counter to social ideas about what adults
should be doing. The artist is a different kind of adult—one
whose perceived creativity, freedom and social vulnerability
socially locates them in sympathy with children.
Moreover, the artist role is also present among children:
You must be like Rachel, ten-year-old Soraya told me after
examining my drawing of two girls hugging, referring to a
classmate known to take Saturday art lessons. After critically
considering her drawing copied from a book, ten-year-old Mila
asked me if I knew a six-year-old at the school who could draw
wolves, butterflies, and flowers that even Mila could not draw
at age 10. I remembered those other children in my own child-
hood classes who were the good artists, and the special social
366
position they held, though I had never been one of them (my
skills result from long practice not innate talent).
Because Tūrama School children admired artistic ability,
my skills credited me with a cultural capital that I held in few other
domains, incentivizing me to draw alongside children more. My
drawing of Ironman one rainy lunchtime won me approval from
adolescent boys who would normally ignore me, and they showed
me their drawings in return. If I was a different kind of adult, chil-
dren also recognized me as this different kind of child.
One lunchtime when smatterings of rain had moved us in-
side, Teuila joined me at the desks to draw and told me how her
father, who had died, is an artist. As I drew more throughout the
year, so did she, watching me and extending her own technique.
When I face-painted at the school fair, she watched alongside
and visibly inflated when her teacher suggested that next year
Teuila would be the face painter. Shortly after, I gave her a pri-
vate face-painting lesson one lunchtime and gave her products
to practice with. By the time I left Tūrama School, Teuila had
established her identity as the class artist, and it mattered less
that her writing and verbal English skills were below the ex-
pected standard for her age. Seeing her confidence in her social
value grow as she expressed ambitions to study art, but knowing
materials were scarce in her home, I gifted her with a paint set
and brushes at the year’s end. Teuila may have been the same
artist without me, but I also knew how adult endorsement can
influence children’s identities. By drawing together with Teuila
all those times, I validated her skills as valued strengths that
made her like me, a different kind of child.
My drawing practices were therefore deeply stitched into
the fieldwork engagements that generate adult and child identi-
ties. As a relational activity, drawing constitutes and reinforces
social relations by its symbolic significance to different catego-
ries of person. My drawing helped to position me as a different
kind of adult, both an adult who drew as children did and that
special category of person called an artist. In making myself
as this different kind of adult, I also influenced the making of
different kinds of children.
What Happens When We Draw Together in Interviews?
Having experienced the way mutual drawing had fostered to-

getherness at Tūrama School, I sought to more purposefully
experiment with forms of drawing together in the U.S.-based
asthma project. This project differed from my work at Tūrama
School because a research team visited children, previously un-
known to us, in their homes for only a couple of hours, engag-
ing in much more formal and bounded visits than my informal,
367
VAR 37.2 Fall 2021
daily interactions with children at school. We brought art sup-

plies to each visit that we left with children to keep. I had care-
fully selected good-quality products that would appeal to older
and younger children and offer a range of materials, includ-
ing markers, colored and graphite pencils, a large pad of thick
paper, a pencil sharpener, and an eraser.
A research assistant, Cass, and I visited our first participant,
ten-year-old Jasmine, at her home in the disadvantaged, predom-
inantly Black north St. Louis area. Jasmine blinked sleepily at us,
having just been roused from bed by her mother, who had not
told her we were coming. We hastened to explain the research to
Jasmine, emphasizing that her participation was optional, and
we did not need to stay if she was not comfortable. Jasmine, con-
fusion melting into interest, widened her eyes at my suggestion
that perhaps adults did not know everything about children,
and beamed at the idea of being interviewed. To our surprise,
Jasmine’s mother, Ruth, announced that she was leaving to run
errands, she said, for about twenty minutes. Disconcerted to be
suddenly left alone with a child we had just met, I was conscious
of the need to rapidly build trust. We presented Jasmine with the
art kit. I love it, she said, commenting, a boy in my class. He know
how to draw very, very good. Insane good.
What do we wanna do next? I asked Jasmine, after she
showed us her bedroom. These are the options. We could do
some drawing. We could do some photos. If you wanna take
some photos, we have a camera, or we could do an interview, or
we could do brainstorming ideas, or we could do all those things.
I wanna do all of them, but first, I like to draw, Jasmine
replied, decisively.
So began a period of conversation about Jasmine’s child-
hood experiences, interspersed with requests for the eraser,
exclamations over the brilliant double- sided markers, and
commentary on drawing style. Cass shared her drawing of her
mom helping her when she had an asthma attack in a soccer
game, and Jasmine reciprocated with her own story about a
volleyball game (Figure 3). When I asked Jasmine if I could
draw her, she worried that her hair was not done. Well, I’ll
tell you what, I said. When I’m drawing you, you could tell me
FIG. 3 Products of “drawing things that you want me to change about the drawing. If you
together,” clockwise from want, you could tell me how to do your hair different. Jasmine
left: Jasmine by Julie Spray
fetched a photo of herself for my reference, and as she drew
(featuring hair “puffs” as
her feelings about asthma, she directed my drawing of the two
directed by Jasmine); Crying by
Jasmine (age 10); Playing soccer
Mickey Mouse puff balls that were her usual hairstyle.
by Cass; Cass interviewing What do you think?
Jasmine by Julie Spray, St. Louis, I love it.
2020. [This figure appears in In this visit, drawing was more than a tool to extract data.
color in the online issue.] Rather, drawing was implicated in a process of establishing
368
who we were in relation to one another (Christensen 2004)—a

process made more critical in the ambiguous wake of Ruth’s
disappearance. In framing drawing as an activity that we
would do together, not a task we set for Jasmine, we created
a companionable co working space and found each other as
mutual interlocutors. When Ruth returned several hours later,
Jasmine jumped up to show her our drawings, which only
hinted at the intimate details of Jasmine’s life we had traversed.
The drawings’ value as products was in the relationship they
had facilitated. We exchanged our drawings, and then while
her mother spoke with us, Jasmine leaped and spun around the
room, our respective adult and child identities reinstated.
Besides producing new adult–child relationalities, our
encounter with Jasmine showed how drawing together with
children creates togetherness, enabling new forms of social
connections: witnessing, empathy, reciprocity. Drawing could
foster these processes in unexpected ways. When I sat down
to interview nine-year-old Harrison in the Tūrama School li-
brary, he only wanted to copy sharks from a book while we
FIG. 3
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VAR 37.2 Fall 2021
spoke. Mildly disappointed I would not be getting what I ex-

pected to be traditional data from his drawings, I picked up a
pencil to draw sharks too. Harrison was new to Tūrama School
and frequently got into trouble for violence. He began with
stories of the filling he had gotten in his tooth the day before,
describing the pain when he bit down. As I became absorbed
in my shark, he told me how he had been expelled from his last
school, where he would lash out in anger at his teacher, who
would hold him very tight until he calmed down. Harrison said
he missed that teacher. He had heard the teacher had now re-
tired due to illness, and he was sorry he had called him names.
Sounds like he was a really special teacher for you, I re-
flected, adding curly teeth to my shark.
Yeah he was, said Harrison.
It’s always good to have a teacher like that eh, that you
have that bond with.
Does sharks have four gills or three? After telling me about
another violent incident, Harrison paused. Oh hell, what kind
of fish is that?
It’s a shark with interesting teeth. I’m just experimenting a
bit. So, you gave him the smash?
I wanted to, said Harrison, sinking back into his experi-
ences with school bullies. Then, as we wrapped up the inter-
view, I asked him if he wanted to keep my shark drawing. He
did.
I had conducted and concluded this interview thinking
that only Harrison’s drawing mattered and, dismissing his sub-
ject matter, had not taken copies of our drawings. But in retro-
spect it was my drawing, or rather, our drawing together that
was significant in this exchange. If empathy, as psychiatrist
philosopher Jodi Halpern (2001) suggests, means an experien-
tial understanding of another person’s perspective, then draw-
ing a shark with Harrison was the most important way I could
find affective resonance with his experience. In matching his
chosen subject, my drawing matched him, meeting him where
he was as a nine-year-old boy drowning in feelings. My draw-
ing was the only material record Harrison had of our conver-
sation, and in its metaphors—for the tooth that hurt when he
bit down, his need to attack and fight and protect himself—my
drawing witnessed that I had seen Harrison. When I offered it
to him, it was more than a picture of a shark.
Sympathetic Magic Is Aged
How do you do them? nine-year-old Rhianna asked me, looking

at the face I was drawing during our interview. Use your power
like that. Amused by her phrase, I echoed back to her, use your
370
powers. Our interview had morphed into a drawing lesson after

I struggled to gain rapport early on; before leaving us alone in
the classroom, her teacher joked that Rhianna took a long time
to crack. We eventually connected over our shared experience of
drawing; my nine-year-old self liked to draw sunsets too. I had
begun sketching her, and now we were both working on faces.
Drawings, and the people who make them, have a pow-
erful magic. This can be the “sympathetic magic” of mimesis,
as James Frazer (1922) suggests, or of witnessing, as Michael
Taussig (2009) adds, but this is a magic that works differently
for adults and children. Through its transportive powers,
drawing changes where people are, taking adults into child-
hood, and children into fantasy worlds. Through its imaginal
powers, children can use drawing to care (Hunleth 2019) and
cope (Clark 2003) with their realities. And drawing has power
over adults, who resist and retreat from this magic. Adults fear
drawing, but children do not.
For Rhianna, my drawings’ magic was in whose stories
they would tell. Fascinated by the face I was drawing, she in-
sisted on seeing herself as the subject, pointing out how I had
drawn her bush-whack hair. Like other children, when I showed
her the picture book I was constructing, she had few comments
on the content, instead wanting to know who each picture rep-
resented.5 Who’s that? she asked me over and over. What do you
think? It’s a person. Nobody in particular. Though I had gen-
erally avoided drawing individual children’s likenesses, chil-
dren still tried to recognize each other in my drawings. Being
a subject confers a social status: they are seen, rendered into a
person of value.
Yet because I was drawing in adult mode—I led the draw-
ing; I chose to draw faces instead of sunsets—in that moment;
I was not working with children’s magic. When Rhianna asked
how to use your power and she was asking me to demystify an
adult, artists’ magic that bestowed social capital, and by study-
ing my technique she was learning a social power to make
peers into subjects. By drawing as an adult, I learned that even
this reticent girl who giggled quietly in the corner was acutely
attuned to the hierarchical social ecology and that children
who can harness adult forms of “sympathetic magic” acquire
special power within their social worlds. In this encounter, it
mattered not only that I participated but also how I was draw-
ing and whose magic I was using.
Children use their magic for a different purpose. In my
time at Tūrama School, I received many drawings as gifts from
children. Many came from children I was close to and featured
depictions of me with the child artist, symbolically as well as
literally drawing the self together with one another. My gift
371
VAR 37.2 Fall 2021
from my ten-year-old friend Ngawaina, with whom I shared

a birthday, illustrated the two of us in imaginary celebration,
an enormous cake symbolizing the importance of the occasion
and of the relationship (Figure 4). Though in life Teuila was
much smaller, in a gifted drawing she drew us at the same,
equal level, with our names in hearts claiming our mutual
affection.
As anthropologist Jean Hunleth (2011) notes, unlike
other research forms such as surveys or interviews, drawings
often have a particular social function for children as gifts.
Gifting, of course, is a relational practice; we give gifts to ac-
knowledge or strengthen a relationship, and gifting incurs
obligations of reciprocity (Mauss 1990 [1950]). For children,
gifting transforms dependencies into interdependencies, recip-
rocating adult material care with affective care (Hunleth 2019).
Moreover, as Hunleth (2019) compellingly shows in the story
of Gift, the boy who flew himself on a balloon to his sister’s
hospital bed, through drawing’s fantasy, children summon the
relationships they wish to have. When asking children to draw
for us, therefore, researchers may be unknowingly requesting a
symbolic relationship that invites greater attention.
Indeed, drawing together with children can create oppor-
tunities for reciprocal exchange that may enhance researcher
relationships with children, as well as demonstrate a valuing of
children, their perspectives, and their personhood, part of an
“economy of dignity” (Pugh 2009) that operates outside of con-
sumerism. I have few of the drawings I made together with chil-
dren at Tūrama School because I gave them away or exchanged
them for those the children had made. For the asthma project,
we took photographs of our own drawings before offering them
to children to keep (Figure 5). We also asked whether children
wanted to keep their drawings. On all occasions, children wished
to keep the researchers’ drawings but give us their own. Families
expressed delight with the simple sketches I made of children
and sometimes immediately hung them on a wall. Even when my
drawings were terrible, families loved them. I thought my draw-
ing of thirteen-year-old Trevon looked like an elderly turtle, but
despite my embarrassed promises to do a better one next time, he
FIG. 4 Ngawaina (age 11) and and his family exclaimed over the details (his mother: Oh, she
Teuila (age 9), Gifted drawings, put your little twists in your head you been doin’ all week. Lord.).
Auckland, 2015. (Teuila’s real
While families accepted the gift card that represented official
name, which she originally
reimbursement (and often a primary motivation for their partic-
wrote underneath “me” in
the heart, has been erased
ipation), in their exchange the drawings represented gifts rather
from her drawing to protect than commodities, signaling a different kind of relationship.
her anonymity.) [This figure The drawings as material objects alone did not pro-
appears in color in the online duce these relationships, however. When we visited ten-year-
issue.] old Lion at the home he shared with his mother, Pamela, in
372
FIG. 4
Florida, I drew him as he was interviewed by another re-

searcher, Hannah. At the visit’s end, he and his mother enthu-
siastically welcomed the finished drawings, and Lion handed
his portrait to his mother, transferring my gift to her. Due to
the pandemic, however, Hannah conducted the second inter-
view alone over Zoom. Viewing the video far away in St. Louis,
I thought I could replicate the earlier relational processes with
another drawing of Lion in the Zoom frame. When Hannah
sent Pamela a photograph of the drawing over text message,
Pamela was politely appreciative, but she expressed some dis-
comfort and declined our request to use the drawing in pub-
lications. I called her to apologize, acknowledging that I had
overstepped by drawing her son without her knowledge, and
offered to mail her the original drawing. I had not recognized
that while the drawings we made were important to the rela-
tionship, the relationship was also important to the drawings.
373
VAR 37.2 Fall 2021
Drawing Data Together
That researchers influence data is a standard premise of so-

cial science. Researchers are always participants in research;
in asking questions and co- constructing relationships,
“the researcher is both written into and writes that story”
(Walkerdine, Lucey, and Melody 2002, 164). We co-produce
children’s drawings, too, through the art materials we supply
(paper size alone encourages dramatic differences in drawing
style and content), with the prompts we offer, and through our
FIG. 5
374
own form of participation. Whether we are present or absent,

engage in activities or observe from a distance, our choices
produce different relationalities and consequently different
kinds of data.
Although many researchers undoubtedly already draw
with children, the co-production of children’s drawings has re-
ceived little scholarly attention. Often during interviews either
children or I would use drawing to construct and communi-
cate knowledge: Teuila showed me the shape of the talo leaves
her family ate, diagrammed her understanding of the relation-
ship between sore throat and rheumatic fever, and drew how
she imagined her test swabs were processed in the laboratory.
I drew bugs to illustrate the importance of completing an anti-
biotic course. Drawing by both participant and researcher may
already be a common but undert heorized method of reaching
mutual understandings.6
For the asthma study, we purposefully experimented
with co-constructing visual data in household visits, sprawl-
ing across the floor, drawing alongside or on the same page as
children. Research assistants and I experimented with draw-
ing children’s stories, asking children to direct our drawing,
suggesting children annotate our drawings, and drawing our
own stories. These collaborative drawings often became ma-
terial records of wide-ranging topics, the paper functioning,
as researcher Hannah described in her field notes, as a work-
space for our conversation. On her sketch of a house floorplan,
the six-year-old next to her added dogs, cats, and bats to var-
ious rooms, imagining the spaces that pets the family did not
have could occupy. I illustrated six-year-old Unicorn’s story of
her recent asthma attack, asking her questions to elicit details
about her location and the EMTs who came with the ambu-
lance, and then invited Unicorn to take over the drawing to
finish the story, which she did, requesting that I add a square
with the word “safe” (Figure 6). Through conversation it trans-
pired that for Unicorn, the “safe” square represented an imag-
ined goal rather than a literal place of safety; this exacerbation
had taken place over several days and included a time in the
sickroom at school where the nurse tried over and over to con-
tact Unicorn’s mother.
Toward the end of my Tūrama School fieldwork, when I
was drawing my impressions of children’s lives for the picture
FIG. 5 Julie Spray, Field
book, I showed these drawings to the children and invited them
drawings gifted to families, St.
to draw their own pictures. I scanned and digitally colored our Louis and Gainesville, 2020.
drawings and compiled these into the book, which I ultimately Some have been digitally
distributed in print to student contributors, interviewees, enhanced for clarity. [This
teachers, and the school library. Though, due to school con- figure appears in color in the
straints, I held executive and editorial control and wrote the online issue.]
375
VAR 37.2 Fall 2021
FIG. 6
text, I hoped that the book would convey both children’s emic
and my etic perspectives toward an imperfectly co-constructed
representation of children’s worlds. Children’s contributions
included experiences of which I did not have knowledge, in-
cluding of children’s home life and what happened in their
school bathrooms. My drawings, which I often composed or
colored alongside children at lunchbreaks, captured children’s
taken-for-granted experiences, such as walking in lines, but
also uncomfortable parts of school life such as bullying and
isolation. Just as the book would have been impoverished with-
out children’s drawings, it would not have been the same with-
out mine. The book literally draws our perspectives together,
beginning with a composite image of the drawings Teuila and
I made of each o ther.
Drawing Conclusions Together
So, what happens when researchers draw together with chil-

dren? In my fieldwork at Tūrama School, drawing with chil-
dren shaped social identities, positioning me as an ambiguous
adult/child and influencing children’s own identities and so-
cial positions. By drawing in interviews, my research assistants
and I witnessed and supported children’s stories with empathy.
By attending to drawing’s aged magics, we made children into
376
subjects of value and built relationships through reciprocal

gifting. We discovered new ways of co-constructing data.
The processes produced through drawing with children
suggest that not drawing with children is a methodological de-
cision that affects researcher positioning, children’s social sta-
tuses and identities, intergenerational relationships, and data
generation processes. The decision not to participate has sim-
ilar implications for other creative “child-friendly” methods
such as games, dramatic plays, or doll or puppet play, which
may similarly be reconceptualized as relational modes. When
only children draw, or perform, or play in our research, we risk
reinforcing these activities as “childish” and establishing rigid
binaries of child p
articipant and adult researcher that overlook
the insights we might gain as adult participants and child re-
searchers. We forget to ask ourselves that multivalent question
that Christensen (2004) heard from her child participants:
“who are you?” What kind of person are we making ourselves
for child participants, and how will this person influence the
data we generate together?
These questions do not demand that researchers draw
with children—or assume that all children will want to draw
with us.7 Rather, they challenge us to consider how we are par-
ticipating in research with children and to make our partic-
ipation a methodological choice rather than an unexamined
default. If we choose to observe while children draw, then what
are we creating, and what are we forgoing? Likewise, draw-
ing with children is not a superior choice—as Gallacher and
Gallagher (2008) note for participatory methods more broadly,
it simply brings different processes and dynamics to the fore,
which may or may not serve particular research purposes. For
a critical research approach that is cognizant of who we are
to one another, we need to consider whether we are drawing
sharks or faces.
Notes
1. All participant names are pseudonyms, as is the name of Tūrama School.
Many children chose their own pseudonym.
2. The New Zealand ethnography involved a year’s fieldwork at “Tūrama
School” in 2015, engaging in participant observation alongside 81 chil-
dren aged 8–12 and interviewing 38 to understand their experiences of
health. These children, the vast majority of whom were Māori or Pacific
(mainly Tongan and Samoan), lived in an area of high socio economic
disadvantage in Auckland. The child asthma study (2019–present) is part FIG. 6 Julie Spray and Unicorn
of a larger NIH-funded project investigating caregivers’ perceptions of (age 6), Co-constructed story of
asthma management in Gainesville, Florida, and St. Louis, Missouri.
Unicorn’s asthma exacerbation,
This child-centered study involved ethnographic household visits to
St. Louis, 2020. [This figure
work with children aged 6–16 through a range of child-centered activ-
ities. Research assistants and I made initial visits with nine families in appears in color in the online
issue.]
377
VAR 37.2 Fall 2021
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS early 2020, before pivoting to Zoom interviews in late 2020 following the
COVID-19 outbreak. In total, we worked with 24 children with asthma
My deepest gratitude goes and siblings.
to the four researchers 3. In fact, my drawing skills could sometimes inhibit children when they
compared their drawings unfavorably with mine.
who assisted me with the
4. The picture book is viewable at https://juliespray.com/2021/02/20/our-
childhood asthma project for
school/.
their openness to experiment 5. At the time, I found these responses from children frustrating. I was try-
with drawing with children ing to solicit their feedback on my interpretations of their worlds to make
and for sharing their the book project more participatory.
reflections on the process: 6. Undoubtedly, our drawings influenced each o ther’s perspectives,
Hannah Fechtel, Cassidy just as did our talk, and these issues should be considered through-
Sykes, Sienna Ruiz, and Gaby out the co-production of visual data just as they should be with verbal
Pogge. I especially appreciate co-constructions.
Erika Waters and James 7. Researchers should, of course, accommodate children who do not wish
to draw within the research design. Our asthma study offered drawing
Shepperd for generously
as one option among a menu of child-oriented activities. Drawing was
supporting the inclusion of
popular, but some older children preferred only to talk.
both children and drawing
methodologies in an NIH-
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doi/10.1111/var.12244/suppinfo
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15487458, 2021, 2, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/var.12244 by National University Of Singapore Nus Libraries, Wiley Online Library on [16/02/2024].

I interviewed nine-­year-­old Teuila1 in a disused classroom

show me things she could explain better through image. Her

were also co-­constructed through processes that reflected my

boundaries therefore requires a deep consideration of how

How Did Drawing Become “Child-­Friendly”?

That drawing is a “child-­friendly” method is a taken-­for-­

as the diviner who uses projective drawing tests and other

similarly to gendered forms of agency that constrain men from

What Happens When We Draw Together in the Field?

As a participating “student” at Tūrama School, the notebook

their own dress; children were not permitted to enter adult

What Happens When We Draw Together in Interviews?

Having experienced the way mutual drawing had fostered to-

daily interactions with children at school. We brought art sup-

who we were in relation to one another (Christensen 2004)—­a

spoke. Mildly disappointed I would not be getting what I ex-

Sympathetic Magic Is Aged

How do you do them? nine-­year-­old Rhianna asked me, looking

powers. Our interview had morphed into a drawing lesson after

from my ten-­year-­old friend Ngawaina, with whom I shared

Florida, I drew him as he was interviewed by another re-

Drawing Data Together

That researchers influence data is a standard premise of so-

own form of participation. Whether we are present or absent,

Drawing Conclusions Together

So, what happens when researchers draw together with chil-

subjects of value and built relationships through reciprocal

Additional supporting information may be found in the on-

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I interviewed nine-year-old Teuila1 in a disused classroom

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How Did Drawing Become “Child-Friendly”?

That drawing is a “child-friendly” method is a taken-for-

who we were in relation to one another (Christensen 2004)—a

How do you do them? nine-year-old Rhianna asked me, looking

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