Drawing Perspectives Together: What Happens When Researchers Draw with Children?

Abstract

AbstractReflecting on drawing together, a methodological intervention I developed through two child‐centered ethnographic projects, I explore what happens when researchers draw together with children. While anthropologists of childhood have called for critical attention to the use of child‐friendly participatory methods such as drawing, few have considered how researchers participate in these methods. Yet drawing is embedded with value‐laden cultural notions of age and social status. Soliciting children’s drawings for research is therefore a social act that produces identities and relationalities. I argue that researchers must make the nature of their participation a methodological choice rather than an unexamined default.