“Why Can’t We Just Talk?”: Rethinking Child-Centred Methodologies from/with Rejection.

In this paper, I reflect on the challenges (and joys) of engaging in child-centred research in the Global South, while walking the tightrope of adult-created research agendas, funding timelines, and Global North institutional ethics procedures. Following the participatory turn in the social sciences, research with children has adopted arts- and play-based methods, as these tap into children’s “natural” ways of communication, mimicking how they interact with each other and with the world. They decrease – if not dismantle – differences in power, engage children who may not prefer verbal communication, and embrace the "messiness" of children's expression. My PhD research with 9-14 year old children in an urban coastal village in Chennai, India, demonstrates that childhoods in the Global South have a spatial materiality distinct from those in the Global North. Children’s lived experience is shaped by their intersectional access to space as they combine play, everyday activism, and work.

Games, collaging, draw-and-tell, comic-making, songs, walking interviews... I went into the field with a sack full of methods to explore children’s experiences of playing in the city. But what does one do when the children reject all the methods that we, as adults, expect them to respond to, and instead ask to be treated as adults? “Why can’t we just talk?” This rejection, despite us having a comfortable rapport built on laughter, trust and friendship, pushed me to think critically about meanings and manifestations of consent, children’s “natural” preference for arts- and play-based methods, and reconciling child-centred research with the adult researcher. Just how far can one go, in going with the flow? In this paper, I consider the ethical and methodological dilemmas which reveal tensions in adult perceptions of play as method versus the reality of how it manifests in children’s agency as co-creators of research.