Approaching the Not-Yet-Known with Children

Emphasising Ethical Attentiveness and Methodological Manoeuvres

Abstract

Within childhood research, children’s perspectives are conceptualised in fundamentally different ways. Drawing on agential realism, this article understands knowledge as relationally and materially constituted through the entanglements of children, researchers, discourses, materials and ethics, rather than as a representation of a pre-existing reality. From this perspective, children’s world is approached as not-yet-known, open to that which cannot be fully anticipated or determined in advance, enabling the co-production of knowledge with children. Engaging with empirical material from my PhD research, I foreground how this stance can be enacted methodologically. In doing so, the article unfolds how research encounters are not merely sites for generating data but also spaces of becoming in which children, researchers and possibilities emerge together. The article contributes to qualitative studies by showing how an agential realist sensitivity to the relational and material constitution of research encounters can support more responsive, participatory, and ethically attentive research practices with children.