Toward transformative-activist research collaborations: Co-exploration of young children’s wellbeing

The paper explores emancipatory co-research ideals engrained in Psychology from the Standpoint of the Subject (PSS) and the cultural-historical Transformative Activist Stance (TAS), and discusses their implications for developing a methodology for learning together with and thereby about very young children’s wellbeing. While both approaches build on dialectical materialist notions of the human being as both constitutive of and constituted by the world, they draw different conclusions as to how this has consequences for conducting research projects with fellow human beings: PSS practice research produces knowledge from within institutional contexts, for instance daycare centers, so as to diversify the knowledge base upon which professionals arrange and act in practice; TAS seeks to actively transform practice together with the participants throughout the research project. The paper proposes combining the two to develop an everyday life methodology that enables very young children to actively engage in research as mutual learning processes.