Moving beyond utilitarian perspectives of infant participation in participatory research: film-mediated research encounters

Abstract

Drawing on Thomas, Whybrow and Scharber's four participatory perspectives, this paper describes and complicates endeavours to move beyond utilitarian perspectives of infant participation in participatory research. It proposes that film-mediated encounters between researchers and infants have the potential to be more than sites that privilege researchers' representations of infants' experiences and subjectivities.

Keywords:

• infant early childhood education and care
• participatory research
• video research
• infant participation

Acknowledgements

This paper has been informed by the Australian Research Council Linkage Project LP0883913 and is supported by Industry Partners, Family Day Care Australia and KU Children's Services. We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing discussions with the research team that have helped to clarify some of the ideas raised in the paper. Also, we would like to extend our gratitude to reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions for improvement on an earlier version of the paper.

Notes

1. In this paper, infants are defined as persons under the age of 18 months.