Getting invited into participation: Teleogenetic psychological explorations with children (or anyone else) as applied ethical sustainability

The paper is concerned with how contextual developmental practice research with children can reclaim its emancipatory impetus without falling into the instrumentalist trap of prescribing others what values are best to follow. Such prescriptive tendencies have been criticized from within feminist ethics, relational childhood studies as well as Psychology from the Standpoint of the Subject (PSS) and its practice research tradition. Synthesizing their critiques, empirical psychological research with children (or anyone else) would require to develop a radically situated, constantly renegotiated ethics, an ethics which does not preemptively reify its conceptualized values and norms and thereby seek to create instrumental knowledge in order to predict and control human living. Instead, it calls for sustainable invitational ethics for co-creating situational-relational knowledge that seeks to purposefully co-develop better arrangements from within everyday praxis.
For this purpose, the paper proposes applying a methodology of teleogenetic exploration of value rational questions as a form of engaging in ethically sustainable praxis together with children. Such questions include: Where are we going together? For whom is it desirable? And how to progressively renegotiate this directionality of fellow action given the diverse experiences, (generational) positionings and hopes at stake? Theoretically, it draws on social scientist Bent Flyvbjerg’s conceptual development of Aristotle’s term phronesis. It is argued that Flyvbjerg’s progressivist reading of Aristotle’s value ethics through the lens of Foucault’s power analyses offers an applied ethics for questioning and sustainably developing emancipatory psychological research with children – once the child/adult divide is ontologically and methodologically transcended.