Doing Child-Centered Ethnography: Unravelling the Complexities of Reducing the Perceptions of Adult Male Power During Fieldwork

• Main Author: Emmanuel Mayeza
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2017-06-01
• Series: International Journal of Qualitative Methods
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917714162

In this article, I engage the argument of getting around adult power in child-centered ethnographic research by presenting and discussing my experiences as a man researching with South African children in the early years of schooling. I present and discuss the different strategies I used in order to try and disassociate myself from the presumed position of adult male formal power and authority among children who were in my study. In Gender Play, Barrie Thorne coined the term “learning from the children” to describe a critical child-centered ethnographic approach which seeks to engage children as experts in their everyday social lives. However, Thorne acknowledged that when adults seek to learn from the children, the major challenge for the researcher is reducing the perceptions of adult formal power while establishing child-centered relations with the children. While Thorne discussed the issues of gender power in her relationships and interactions with boys and girls during her ethnographic research, this article considers a different perspective. It provides a male perspective on the relational issues and dynamics around adult–child power relations during child-centered ethnographic research on Gender Play in a South African primary school. The focus is on my attempts to reduce perceptions of adult male power so as to establish child-centered relations with young boys and girls in my research. I highlight the challenges encountered in my attempts to reduce these perceptions, given the children’s variegated expressions of agency that manifest by way of resistance—serving to reinforce adult–child power differentials. The article highlights how adult–child power relations operate in complex ways during fieldwork. It highlights how this complexity compelled the adult male researcher to acknowledge that power is not the sole preserve of adults. Rather, power is fluid and is constantly in flux between the adult male conducting the research and the young boys and girls who are actively participating in the research process.