AAG 2010: CFP : Challenges in Children's Research: Bumps in the Road from Theory to Practice

[ebowditch]

AAG Washington 14-18 April 2010

CFP: Challenges in Children's Research: Bumps in the Road from Theory
to Practice

Organizers: Elise Bowditch, Annie Bartos, Dena Aufseeser
(University of Washington)

This session invites participants to discuss the challenges and/or
unexpected outcomes of conducting research with children and young
people.Changes in the global connectivity of politics, economies,
cultures and landscapes in the last thirty years have received
substantial geographic scholarship and in the most recent past within
the fields of childrens and youth geographies. Childrens/youth
geographers, informed by the “new social studies of childhood”, seek
to explore how children and young people are intertwined in these
global connections by highlighting the conditions, challenges, agency,
resourcefulness and participation of youth in actively creating their
lives. Within this vein of research, scholars take the role of adult
participation in research projects with children/youth seriously,
alerting researchers of the ethical and moral challenges of working
with children. Yet the public face of research can often present
results in a neatened manner, gliding over the dead ends, pitfalls or
surprises of research. In some ways, it appears that youth are always
participating, that rapport is easily established, and that research
proceeds roughly along expected lines. In this session, we invite
researchers to present a more reflexive view of the research process,
bringing attention to the ways that working with children presents not
only a unique ethics, but also challenges and constraints, especially
in attempts for more participatory research projects. We ask that
papers in this session highlight those various unforeseen challenges
and surprises, whether methodological or theoretical, in research
concerned with youth and children. A goal of this session is to
encourage a healthy dialogue of exchange for scholars to share
research tools that have worked or not worked in the past and what may
be useful to consider for future research with children and young
people.

Paper topics could include, but are not limited to, topics such as:

- applications and limits of photovoice
- unexpected ethical dilemnas faced when researching with children/
youth
- distribution of power in research situations
- the geographical spaces and places of the adult researcher
- challenges of working with gatekeepers in school settings
- participatory action research - how process leads to results
- participant observation and ethnography as a method for
participatory research
- identity politics such as age, race, gender, socio-economic
background, religion, sexuality, or parenthood as a barrier or an
entry point for adult researchers
- peer pressure as a form of children's/youths' agency in the research
project
- children's/youth's ambivalence in the research project
- the role of parents/adults in research with children/youth

If you are interested in presenting your work in these sessions,
please send your abstract to Elise Bowditch (bow...@u.washington.edu),
Annie Bartos (aba...@u.washington.edu) and Dena Aufseeser
(de...@u.washington.edu) by October 31, 2009.