Ethnography, Multiplicity and the Global Childhoods Project: Reflections on Establishing an Interdisciplinary, Transnational, Multi-Sited Research Collaboration

Abstract

This article offers a description and rationale of the Global Childhoods Project, initiated by a group of researchers from Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand and Australia. This transnational and interdisciplinary network embarked on a collaborative research endeavour concerned with investigating questions of childhoods and globalization in the Asia-Pacific region. A central premise of the group is that researching global childhoods is best conducted by local researchers with knowledge of their own culture and contexts. This article considers the ways in which such collaboration offers opportunities to productively explore the possibilities and dilemmas associated with collaborative interdisciplinary, transnational, multi-sited ethnographic research. While all the researchers taking part in what we termed the Global Childhoods Project are established scholars and experienced researchers, the group quickly realized that the multiplicity of cultures, languages, perspectives and research backgrounds that furnished us with such potentially rich ground for collaborative work also presented us with a number of unanticipated conundrums and challenges.