Suchergebnisse

This case study explores the contribution of participatory visual methods for understanding children's everyday lives in marginalized neighborhoods. In this, it has two aims. First, drawing on two visual research projects in which children used video, photography, and drawing to record, analyze, and communicate their experiences, it will explore the ways in which these methods can help make visible children's lives from children's perspectives. Second, the case study will engage with current debates about the nature of children's participation in "child-led" research. Here, the case study will explore the ways in which children can be practically supported to contribute to the generation, analysis, and dissemination of research, as well as considering the limits of their participation and the implications for our understanding of children and childhood.

This article examines the ethical responsibilities engendered by participatory visual research with children and young people, focusing on the challenges that can emerge in the production and dissemination of research seeking to visually portray their experiences. The article considers the possibilities of a feminist ethics of care for working co-productively with participants in order to resolve conflicts between individual and collective voices, researchers' agendas and the ways in which images may be understood by audiences.

This paper shares methodological insights from our research which sought to centre children in the production of knowledge during the 2020 global pandemic to consider how this can inform research with children beyond the crisis. Drawing on our longitudinal participatory arts-based research with 30 children aged 9–12 during 2020–22, the paper illustrates our response to the shifting research landscape which included navigating social restrictions to develop child-centred ways of working with socially distanced arts-based methods and technologies. The paper sets out key principles focused on foregrounding children's ways of knowing and attentive seeing which underpinned our reframing of the research encounter from one in which adults are intent on extracting children's ready-made thoughts to a space in which knowledge generation is recognised as a process of co-construction and engagement with children. Central to this process is our commitment to feminist care ethics and the application of principles from early childhood research and pedagogy which prioritise attentiveness to younger children's rhythms and pace. Our aim, in setting out an approach which makes a space for playfulness with older children, is to elaborate the potential of slower, attentive methods and to offer a methodological framework to address to wider questions about what arts-based methods do.

'Our Voices' is an animation co-created with children aged 9–11 during the 2020–2021 global pandemic. A short, stop-start animation of children's visual, audio and textual representations of their experiences offers a visceral account of the pandemic in England from their perspectives. In making available the animation in this inaugural issue of 'Beyond the Text', we have two key aims. The first is to enable children, who have been barely seen and little heard during the pandemic, to voice their experiences in accordance with their aspirations. The second is to reflect upon the process of transforming creative data made by and with children into an animation that is representative of children's diverse experiences and acknowledges their contributions in ways which enable audiences to engage through 'seeing'. Accordingly, our accompanying text explores how, through a feminist ethics of care, we sought to co-produce an animation with children which delivers key messages from them and acknowledges their role as co-researchers while maintaining their anonymity. In describing our methodological and ethical practices, we aspire to make visible the relational, dialogic processes inherent in co-production, offering viewers a way of seeing the complexity of children's experiences through the multi-layered affordances of participatory animation.

Drawing upon a growing interest in the impact of visual culture and the use of visual data within the health and social sciences, the introduction to this interdisciplinary collection of papers examines what visual methodologies and visual 'evidence' can bring to the study of social inequalities. It sets out the specific contributions by authors in order to identify their different methodological approaches, theoretical interests and analytical concerns and to explore the implications and possibilities of their visual methodologies for those researching and working in the policy arena. With a particular emphasis on the dialogues between context, text and image, the paper highlights the insights generated by the collection into the forms and experiences of inequality that have shaped and continue to shape societies, communities, families and individual lives. It also suggests how the visual might contribute to extending understanding of the ways social inequalities are imagined, constituted and reinforced.

Our research is concerned with cultural representations of birth and mothering and, as part of this, we are engaged with debates concerning competing theoretical and methodological approaches to the analysis of visual images. In particular we are interested in how meanings of an image are reflexively produced, managed and negotiated. That is, whether and to what extent interpretation is influenced by personal experience, emotion and memory; the ways in which the context of viewing may mediate meaning; and how the relationship between researcher and research subject may shape the interpretative process. In order to explore such questions, this paper draws on the tape-recorded discussion of a group of women collectively viewing images of new mothers. These included photographs of mothers and their newborns taken by the Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra, and photographs of us, the authors, as new mothers, taken by our respective families.The paper blends the analytic framework of conversation analysis and discursive psychology in order to consider both our own and the discussants' responses to these photographs as they emerge through the dynamic and discursive process of collective viewing. In addition we consider the significance of our own and the discussants' biographies and reproductive experiences, as they are made visible in the talk-in-interaction, for the meanings generated by the group's engagement with the photographs. Through this reflexive approach we highlight the significance of the interplay between broader cultural narratives, genres, memories and experiences for the interpretive process and the analytical challenges posed by collective viewings of images in which meanings are discursively situated, negotiated and silenced.

This inaugural special issue of 'Beyond the Text' brings together a collection of visual arts (animation, creative and fine art, film, photographs, and zines) produced by children, young people, families, artists, and academics as part of co-created research during the 2020–2021 coronavirus pandemic. Our aim, in making these pieces available in this new publication format, is to illustrate the potential of visual arts as a form of co-creation and knowledge exchange which can transcend the challenges of researching 'at a distance', enable participants and co-researchers to share their stories, and support different ways of knowing for academic, policy, and public audiences. This is not to suggest that such methods offer transparent windows into participants' worlds. As the reflections from the contributing authors consider, visual arts outputs leave room for audience interpretations, making them vulnerable to alternative readings, generating challenges and opportunities about how much it is possible to know about another and what is ethical to share. It is to these issues of ethics, representation, and voice that this special issue attends, reflecting on the possibilities of arts-based approaches for knowledge generation and exchange in and beyond the coronavirus pandemic.

Our article draws on research undertaken with children during the 2020–21 COVID-19 pandemic in order to consider the potential of digitally mediated participatory research for child-centred research practice. Our specific focus is on how children's inclusion can be centred in the absence of opportunities to meet in person. We reflect on how we sought to support children's engagement through offline and online creative activities and explore how these digitally mediated spaces can facilitate children's inclusion, creative engagement and dialogue. We offer examples from our arts-based, digitally mediated research to consider how researchers might work remotely, yet inclusively, in contexts where children have been marginalised and their voices silenced. Our research suggests that scaffolding creative activities through bespoke digital animation and asynchronous chat can facilitate children to participate in ways of their choosing. However, to address equity of inclusion researchers must attend to the contingencies of children's digital, material and social exclusion.