Abstract
ABSTRACTEngaging marginalised children, such as disabled children, in Participatory Design (PD) entails particular challenges. The processes can effect social changes by decidedly attending to their lived experience as expertise. However, involving marginalised children in research also requires maintaining a delicate balance between ensuring their right to participation as well as their protection from harm. The resulting tensions are politically charged, affected by myriads of power differences and create moral dilemmas. We present seven case studies, drawing from two participatory design research projects. They illustrate the in-situ judgements taken to address specific dilemmas and provide nuanced insights into the trade-offs required by child-led participatory design processes. Subsequently, we identify three challenges: positioning our work to the children’s carers’ values, protecting ourselves, and enabling the (relative) risk-taking associated with participation for children. We call for this micro-ethical approach to be used when reporting research ethics in practice, and as a guidance for the training of researchers and practitioners.
Highlights
Involving children in research, in participatory research, comes with heightened ethical challenges (Holland et al 2010)
Our research projects combined a set of standard deontological guidelines with a strong focus on researchers’ virtue, which is consistent with recommendations for research with children (Graham et al 2013; Alderson and Morrow 2011) and with the roots of virtue ethics in participatory design (Steen 2011)
We focus on marginalised children as a way to counterbalance this under-representation (Watson 2012), which is consistent with the aims of participatory design
Summary
In participatory research, comes with heightened ethical challenges (Holland et al 2010). While conducting activities with marginalised children, researchers are required to make situated judgements on the spot, which are often politically charged – as these pertain to questions of power – and may be unforeseeable or, in consequence, create a contradiction to the over-arching ethical principles of participation and protection (Frauenberger, Rauhala, and Fitzpatrick 2016). We argue that such situated judgements, which often remain tacit and implicit, need to be explicitly foregrounded and examined. We articulate an under- standing of micro-ethics in the context of PD with the view to speak to researchers and practitioners alike
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