Messy Ethics In Childhood Studies: Rethinking Ethical Principles through Practice

Childhood studies has long been committed to ethical principles concerning issues such as participation, care, and social justice. Methodological accounts often present these commitments as generally coherent, readily enacted, and unambiguously realized. Yet informal discussions at conferences, within research networks, and among colleagues often reveal a different picture. Ethical commitments may collide, prove difficult to enact, generate unintended consequences, or appear inadequate in light of unequal childhoods across global and social contexts. For example, a consent procedure can protect institutions while silencing children, and a participatory design can reproduce inequalities it seeks to challenge. By attending to the messiness of ethics in practice, often smoothed over in methodological accounts, this session approaches ethical messiness as a critical resource, and seeks to articulate the tensions, examining what they reveal about the assumptions, limitations, and consequences of ethical principles.

We invite contributions that draw on experiences of ‘messy ethics’ to interrogate, challenge, or rethink ethical principles in childhood studies. We understand messy ethics as arising from tensions between ethical principles; between ethical principles and their enactment in practice; between dominant ethical frameworks and the diverse and unequal realities of childhoods; and within structurally unequal relations between adult researchers and child/youth participants. We welcome contributions that examine whose ethics become institutionalized or how ethical principles and practices may inadvertently reproduce inequalities. By foregrounding ethics in practice, the session seeks to open a space for critical reflection on what messy ethics can reveal about the possibilities and limits of ethical principles in childhood studies.