Ethical-symmetrical research with children as transgenerational mutually emancipating co-exploration of the more than human world

In the early 2000s, Christensen & Prout (2002) suggested the notion of ‘ethical symmetry’ for research with children in order to not preclude ontological differences between adults and children, but let differences in experiencing world exploratively emerge throughout the research process. This proposition has been inspirational for much participatory research with children (cf. Salamon, 2015). Critical voices, meanwhile, emphasize that despite its good intentions, much ‘participatory research’ reproduces a tokenistic knowledge from above that speaks and acts on behalf of rather than together with children as future global citizens. The paper argues that ethical-symmetrical research with children cannot merely focus on equalizing ontology at the beginning of a research project. The researcher needs to explicate, situate and renegotiate ethical relations among all participants anew all the time. This would revise what ‘ethics’ means in a qualitative-participatory research project with children (or any other participant), and implies three conceptual moves that the paper will shortly present: 1. An ontological, epistemological and methodological shift in the researcher’s self-understanding and of the knowledge produced: the researcher as co-explorer and transformative activist communicator (with inspiration from Stetsenko, 2008, 2009). 2. A more process-oriented, analytical-pedagogical notion of generalization: everyday concepts and scientific concepts as dialectically entangled artifacts, which are multimodal and relate to Wartofsky’s (1979) three forms of perceptual activity (genetic, reflexive, imaginary). 3. A notion of ethics as transgenerational ecocentric (Payne, 2017), thus grounded in global, more than human everyday life as ongoing and caring co-exploration of mutual response-ability (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017).