400001 SE Child-centered Qualitative Research in Sociocultural Research (2017S)

In recent decades, research has shown that children have significant agency within social processes, and that children contribute in their own right tosocial discourse overall. Letting children speak for themselves in research studies is important and, in many cases, daunting.
This course includes three topic areas and goals: 1) To highlight the consequential value of researching children's perspectives on social experience, both for purposes of theorizing and for practical application 2) To address the methodological challenges for researching children's first hand experience, and how those challenges can potentially be met through ethnographic methods (such as observation, participant observation, informant interviews, photoelicitation, drawings and the metaphor sort technique); 3) to reconsider the interpretive lens for findings that include youthful points of reference and points of view, drawing from case studies in medical anthropology, ritual studies, and applied reserch.
The course would make use of the workshop leader's book In A Younger Voice: Doing Child-centered Qualitative Research as well as selected readings from the author's extensive child-centered research on child illness and family rituals. The course will also consider and consult on works being planned or in process by the course participants.