Doing ethnographic method with babies – Participation and perspective approached from the floor

Abstract

This article focuses on the insights we can gain about children's participation and children's perspectives by exploring babies' engagements with the researcher and research technology during ethnographic fieldwork in babies' homes. The article argues that attending to what is unplanned, troubling and messy offers opportunities for reflection on how participation and perspectives is done with babies in specific embodied and material research encounters. The article further argues for a cautious curiousness towards bringing in the notions of babies' participation and babies' perspectives into the discussion on children's participation and children's perspectives.