Situated ethics in collaborative research with children

That research ethics are to be renegotiated with the respective participants throughout the research process is a demand strongly promoted throughout feminist research. Ethics are to be re-situated according to the concrete interrelationships, including the power relations and positionings in play, the agendas, accountabilities and responsibilities at stake. Due to the insight that human beings are situated beings, who have limited possibilities for understanding their respective being in the world, it emerges that a collaborative and yet conflictual exploration of joint becomings is both an epistemological as well as an ontological necessity.
The paper discusses how a renegotiation of ethics is particularly difficult whilst engaging in a project investigating everyday media experiences of young children (aged 3-6) at a German day care centre. Albeit the children were explicitly considered co-researchers to the research questions, the most visible negotiations of enacted ethics took place among the participating adults: researcher, parents, and pedagogues – thereby potentially shunning the children’s perspectives on the research process.
Nevertheless does the paper argue that an iterative renegotiation of ethics took place also with the children, and that the principle challenge lies in rendering these renegotiations visible in academic publications. It proposes conceptual developments that draw on both New Materialism and the Psychology from the Standpoint of the Subject in order to tackle this challenge.