‘’Situated research practices - how contradictions in professional practices become contradictions in research practices’’

Abstract

Within child and childhood research, contextual approaches are foregrounded thus emphasizing children as active agents who take part in the social world and thereby challenge and reproduce everyday social practices.

However child researchers seem to differ when it comes to understanding and exploring children and adults engagements as separated or interwoven. When understanding children and adult’s engagements as separated, adults are positioned as potentially disturbing  children’s engagements. Thus adults must distance themselves from adults perceptions of children. From a researcher position this implies that the researcher, as an adult, can work from a position as ‘least adult’. This article analyses how adults and children take part in a common social practice and thereby how their engagements are interwoven and interdependent. The researcher also takes part in this common social practice and thereby becomes intangled in conflicts in the practice. This article invites to further investigations of how conflicts in the professional practice also become conflicts in the research practice.