Reproducing Power Asymmetries Through Voice, Collaboration and Change: Opportunities for Children to Re-Shape Contemporary Global Challenges
Establishing Child Centred Practice in a Changing World, Part A
ISBN: 978-1-80117-407-7, eISBN: 978-1-80117-406-0
Publication date: 14 November 2022
Abstract
The expansion of research with children offers new opportunities for the development of child-centred practice. Children's participation in research has been championed as a positive way to challenge the processes and practices that affect their everyday lives. Yet opportunities for collaborating with children, and leveraging their voices, remains heavily guided by adult-led priorities. In this chapter, we offer a critique of ‘child-centredness’ and related voice-based and participatory discourses in the absence of a full-fledged engagement with the power imbalances between adults and children. We draw on examples from our research with children on contemporary global challenges (COVID-19 pandemic, health and migration) to expose the ways that adult-led agendas for, and definitions of, participation can affect children's engagement in research. We highlight how children also effect change and display their agency through the sharing of their experiences with adult researchers. The dynamic nature of social change highlights children's considered engagement with contemporary challenges but also the importance of reciprocity and willingness of adults to listen and respond to the issues that children identify as being central to their lives. We attend to the ways our methodological decision-making offers opportunities for leveraging children's perspectives, but also highlight the dangers of reproducing dominant adult/child power relations when seeking to be ‘child-centred’. We conclude by offering some critical questions to prompt further debate in this field, In doing so, we highlight the value of reciprocity and critical reflexivity as necessary first steps towards a more considered engagement with adult/child power relations in ‘child-centred’ research.
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Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all the children and young people and their parents and legal custodians for taking part in the research projects discussed in this chapter. The Health Experiences of Young Migrants Study was conducted in collaboration with Dr Stephen O. Kwankye and Dr Ernestina Dankyi from the University of Ghana and funded by the ARU QR-GCRF (Research England) funding scheme.
Citation
Spencer, G. and Thompson, J. (2022), "Reproducing Power Asymmetries Through Voice, Collaboration and Change: Opportunities for Children to Re-Shape Contemporary Global Challenges", Frankel, S. (Ed.) Establishing Child Centred Practice in a Changing World, Part A (Emerald Studies in Child Centred Practice), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 9-23. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80117-406-020221002
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2023 Grace Spencer and Jill Thompson. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited