Contested voices? Methodological tensions in creative visual research with children

This paper contributes to the body of work within the social studies of childhood on creative visual methods and the emerging critique on the participatory assumptions of child-centred creative visual methodology. Drawing on ethnographically informed research with a group of children aged 8–12 years which utilised a range of creative methods including child-led video and photography, the paper provides a methodological focus on the children’s interactions with the adult research team, each other and with the children whom they filmed, interviewed and photographed. The paper suggests that attention to the dynamics between children as researchers and participants is essential for understanding how children’s voices are made (and diminished) in child-led creative visual methods. Methodological attention to the ways in which children’s voices are differently (and unequally) heard in the research encounter is essential for evaluating what such methods bring to research with children and challenges theorisations of a singular children’s voice suggested in the literature.