Children’s Participation in Research as a Knowledge Practice

Abstract

This chapter provides a critical review of children’s participation in research focusing in particular on ‘research by children’, a methodological approach which has been popularized in childhood studies for promising to offer a qualitatively superior form of knowledge about childhood from an insider perspective. The chapter seeks to deconstruct this form of knowledge, not by discrediting or invalidating it, but by grounding it and drawing out both its limits and potential. Turning to children’s participation in research as a process and knowledge practice rather than product and outcome, the chapter seeks to reposition children’s participation as a critical research tool for knowledge production in childhood studies.