Writing as new understandings of social phenomena: The practice of including children's perspectives

CLEMENTE, ANGELES; GUERRERO ALBA LUCY; MILSTEIN DIANA

ETHNOGRAPHIC WRITING

E&E Publishing

Lugar: New Cottage; Año: 2020; p. 139 - 152

The explicit incorporation of children as interlocutors and collaborators in ethnographic field work basing the relevance this has on the processes of writing field notes, papers and monographs, dates to the end of the 1960s and over the last thirty years, the sphere of Ethnography and Education has been enriched by the variety of different ways of incorporating children as collaborators, with reflections on this collaboration and the ways they are constituted and how the perspectives of children on social phenomena that we study are woven into ethnographic texts.Hirschfeld (2002) pointed out that the lack of interest that anthropologists have shown towards children is related, partly, to the little appreciation they have of their cultural imprint in the configuration of what he called the culture of adults. In fact, when we interact with children, in certain moments, when faced with a comment or ?unusual? interpretation of a child, we researchers find it difficult to write, because we do not know how to do it, how to incorporate this way of acting, perceiving and understanding in field notes. It is the very process of writing that has allowed us to discover the richness of these displacements and of the children as co-producers of our adult age (Johansson, 2012). Through two examples, we will show in this paper some of the ways in which children participate as collaborators/interlocutors in ethnographic research, and how they have made us deconstruct our schema and ways of thinking when we are in the process of writing down our interpretations of the social phenomena that we register and attempt to analyze for understanding.