Safe and enabling: composing ethically sustainable crafty-activist research on gender and power in young peer cultures

ABSTRACT

New materialisms have informed an array of creative methodologies, inviting scholars to rethink ethics in the practices of research with children. Participating in this rethinking, this study elaborates on ethical practices in creative research where new materialist and arts-based methodologies intra-act with children and the sensitivities of gender and power in young peer cultures. Drawing on experiences from the authors’ creative workshops, this paper investigates how new materialist creative practice allows children to explore and communicate their experiences of gender and power in safe and enabling ways. The authors suggest expanding their ethical practice by composing ethically sustainable encounters for children to engage with experiences of and visions for their peer cultures. They close by discussing practices for responding to the inherent un/safety of addressing gender and sexual abuses of power and for enabling microprocesses of change to – as a matter of sustainability – transform oppressive peer cultures towards social justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• creative methods
• ethical practice in research
• gender and sexual harassment
• new materialisms

Introduction

There is a long tradition of research ethics that focuses on the protection of children from harm, particularly in sensitive research settings (e.g. Powell et al., 2018; Graham et al., 2015). There is also a pressing challenge to seek new creative practices to engage with children to explore, address, and communicate sensitive issues – including issues of gender and sexual abuses of power that create unsafety in children’s everyday lives (Pihkala & Huuki, 2019; Renold, 2018). In such transformation-oriented research, there is a need to envision ethical practices beyond the rule-based focus of normative research ethics.

The work presented in this paper connects to a growing new materialist scholarship that has explored inventive and creative ways of engaging with young people to address questions of gender, sexuality, power, and abuses of power in the everyday lives of children and young people (e.g. Huuki et al., 2021; Osgood & Robinson, 2019; Renold, 2018; Ringrose et al., 2019). Drawing particularly from feminist posthuman and new materialist approaches (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013; Manning, 2016), this scholarship has expanded the field of research on children and creative methods. It has foregrounded heightened attention to matter and materiality, affect, and more-than-human relationality. In addition to having informed an array of creative methodologies, these approaches have also invited scholars to rethink ethics in the practices of research in new ways as inherent in the material practices of inquiry (Hickey-Moody, 2020; Strom et al., 2019).

Research with groups often understood as vulnerable, such as children, and on topics or in settings considered sensitive, such as research on gendered and sexual peer cultures, are closely governed by institutional ethics boards and regulated by national research ethics guidelines (e.g. Powell et al., 2018; Graham et al., 2015; Mallon & Elliott, 2021). In the practice of research, institutional and procedural ethics are paired with relational ethics, enacted reflexively in and through ‘ethically important moments’ (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004; see also, Powell et al., 2018; Rutanen & Vehkalahti, 2019). Most of these discussions on the ethical practices of research are grounded in humanist thinking and focus mainly on individual researchers or research subjects when considering matters of ethical concern. They are also often driven by concern (rather than care), putting emphasis mainly on the management of risks and harms (e.g. Bozalek, 2020; Mauthner, 2018; Romm, 2020), the success of which is assessed on a scale from good to bad (Bodén, 2021).

Research inspired by new materialisms pushes us to think of the ethics of our practices in new ways. There is an increasing interest in examining how ethical practice in research might be rethought and what else might matter as ethical concern when human being as the sole agent of ethical reasoning becomes decentred, when the focus on entanglements as opposed to separate entities dissolves binaries such as safety-unsafety, and when attention is drawn to the potential of becoming as opposed to managerial approaches to mitigate risks (Bozalek, 2020; Davies, 2018; Mayes, 2019; Osgood & Robinson, 2019; Pihkala & Huuki, 2019; Renold & Ringrose, 2019; Romm, 2020; Schulte, 2019; Strom et al., 2019).

The purpose of this study is to take part in these discussions by elaborating on the ethical practices in creative research where new materialist and arts-based methodologies entangle with children and the sensitivities of gender and power in young peer cultures. To do so, we draw on our research on gender and sexual harassment in young peer cultures, in which new materialist theorisations have informed our methodologies, bringing us to experiment with co-productive, arts-based, and research-activist methods in research with children (Huuki, 2019; Huuki et al., 2021; Pihkala & Huuki, 2019; Pihkala et al., 2019; Tumanyan & Huuki, 2020), and prompted us to seek more expansive ways for enacting research ethics.

In employing creative methods, we have endeavoured to co-construct conditions for children to explore, communicate, and address their desires and anxieties related to gendered and sexual peer cultures. Hence, we have aimed to co-compose what we conceptualise as ethically sustainable encounters in which our commitment to enabling change and transformation is brought together with the unwavering commitment to do so as safely as possible. New materialist theorisations come to play here as an aim to tap into art’s tendency towards what else (Manning, 2016) and to shift from merely ‘stating the state of things’ (Renold, 2018). Instead, we co-create entanglements for what Erin Manning (2016) calls ‘minor gestures’, that is, subtle shifts that might reroute us/them from the cruelties of normative gender and sexuality towards more ethical alternatives for and imagination of their peer cultures. Further, acknowledging the sensitivities of addressing issues of gendered and sexual abuses of power with children, our research is committed to research ethics principles of confidentiality and respect for children’s privacy, dignity, and self-determination (see, e.g. Romm, 2020) to allow children to explore such unaddressed issues safely, that is, in care-full settings without the fear of prejudice or harm. Underlying these dimensions is response-ability (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2008, 2016) – as explored further below – that informs an ethical orientation attentive to the capacity of our practices to cultivate possibilities for flourishing in young peer cultures.

In this paper, we focus on our engagements with preteen children from the latter part of the 2010s in creative workshops on gender and sexual harassment in young peer cultures. Our aim is to examine how the new materialist thinking-doing and the ethics of response-ability have informed how we co-compose ethically sustainable encounters and how this might help us rethink safety and the capacity to enable microprocesses of change as co-constitutive of the sustainability of our ethical praxis.

We start by grounding how feminist new materialisms are expanding the more conventional approaches to research ethics. Exploring what this shift might mean for our praxis, we consider two affective material moments from our research engagements with children that, being mundane and fleeting (Taylor, 2013), offer a microanalytical entry into crafty-activist workshops that enable children to explore, address, and communicate their experiences related to gender and sexual harassment. Thus, we show how art’s tendency towards what else and more than (Manning, 2016) that is put to work through these methods is an ethical matter (Hickey-Moody, 2020; Renold & Ringrose, 2019) but also a matter of ongoing response-ability. Such response-ability requires that we generatively complicate how we understand safety and how we incorporate the element of enabling into our encounters with children. Unpacking the ethics of such encounters, what is emphasised is response-ability to the inherent and emergent un/safety of addressing gender and sexual abuses of power, and the need – as a form of sustainability – to enable microprocesses of change to transform oppressive peer cultures towards social justice.

Towards response-able research and practice

To approach ethical practices of inquiry, the rigorous practices of what has been called ‘procedural ethics’ (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004) introduce important guidelines to delineate questions surrounding consent, privacy, anonymity, confidentiality, and prevention of harm (see, e.g. Romm, 2020). These questions have become the code of conduct for researchers and governed by institutional review boards. In the situational, relational, and embodied practices of research, the ethical principles and adjoined practices of informed consent, participation, safety, anonymity, and confidentiality are in-negotiation and in-becoming in a more ongoing manner (Rutanen & Vehkalahti, 2019). To address this ongoingness, researchers have navigated ethical complexities via reflexive sensitivity (Hesse-Biber & Piatelli, 2012; Powell et al., 2016).

Posthuman and new materialist theories take foundationally different approaches to ethics than more conventional humanist research ethics do. The starting point for this rethinking unfolds from relational ontology and the co-constitutive nature of matter and meaning, human, nature, subject, and object (e.g. Fox & Alldred, 2015). According to Karen Barad (2007), the world is an ongoing iterative reconfiguring of boundaries and properties in ever-unfolding intra-action. Here, the neologism of intra-action replaces the assumption of bound entities with ‘dynamism of forces’, where bodies and objects, discourse, matter, and meaning do not pre-exist their relating (Barad, 2007).

This dynamism of forces carries particular ethical implications that are captured in the notion of response-ability. Barad (2007) and Donna Haraway (2008, 2016) place the ethics of response-ability within the material-discursive intra-active entanglements of the world in its ongoing becoming. Ethics is understood as immanent to materialising encounters in which we become response-able with and for host of human and other-than-human others. As Bronwyn Davies (2018) puts it, it is an ethics of being/becoming open ‘to the diffractive forces through which the doing of life takes place’ (p. 125). By diffracting the individual-centric ethical stance, ethics of response-ability shifts attention to the ‘world-making powers’ of research while also inviting us to be in touch with how ‘we’ become response-able and – to open its varied nuances – how we render each other capable (Haraway, 2016).

In our research with children, response-ability offers us an affirmative ethics (Braidotti, 2013) that expands the protectionist frames of traditional research ethics. This new materialist shift allows us to attune to the relationality of researchers, children, materiality, art-making, experience, and an inconceivable number of others in ever-unfolding intra-action (Barad, 2007). With this thinking, matters of ethics are immanent to the intra-active flows of events. Thus, ethics is not an evaluative layer of universal principles imposed upon research but a situational, ongoing praxis of responsiveness to what comes to matter and what is blocked from mattering (Barad, 2007). From this, it also stems that the ethics of an encounter works in a mode of worldly entanglements through which change and the potential for transformation are always in process in unpredictable and explicitly political ways (Renold & Ringrose, 2016). This paves the way for a more expansive vision of ethics that commits to unpicking our response-abilities to make children’s experiences matter to cultivate conditions for flourishing (Barad, 2007; see also, Renold & Ringrose, 2016).

Gnawing moments in crafty-activism

To flesh out the parameters of ethical practices of our research, this paper draws on the authors’ engagements in co-productive arts-based practice from the latter half of 2010s. We have implemented an array of workshops with preteen children (aged 10–12) for addressing gender and sexual abuses of power in their peer cultures. All these workshops have been purposefully co-designed and implemented in varying combinations of artists, researchers, student teachers, educators, and children. The children participate in the workshops as part of their regular school curriculum, with the consent of the school, children, and their legal guardians, in varying combinations and sizes of groups, ranging between 5 and 20 children in each. Aligned with feminist new materialist arts-based practice (e.g. Hickey-Moody et al., 2021; Renold & Ringrose, 2019; Strom et al., 2019), the aim of the creative research workshops is not only to explore experience but to also seek ways of igniting change towards healthy and positive relationships in young peer cultures both with children and in the wider realms of social debate and decision making. For this, arts-based, activist, and creative methods of multiple modalities – captured here in the notion of crafty-activism – are employed.

Based on this broader work with creative methods, the particular workshops referred to in this paper were part of one of our wider research projects.¹ Carrying out the workshops followed ethical codes of conduct and the project had been approved by the ethics review board at the University of Oulu in Finland. Furthermore, acknowledging sensitivities permeating the research in manifold ways (e.g. Mallon & Elliott, 2021) from the topics of gender and sexual harassment to the research setting with children and experimental methods, we were also committed to continuously seek ways to strengthen our ethical practices.

Our analysis for this paper starts with two moments that occurred during the above-mentioned research processes and are used here as the entry point for our analysis. By doing so, we align with the new materialist avowal of the messy, ephemeral, and minor (Taylor & Hughes, 2016). The first affective moment in focus here occurred during a series of two-hour workshops in which 150 children participated in crafting cards and writing statements and experiences on the topic of sexual harassment. The workshops combined inquiry, activism, and impact work and were understood as explicitly research-activist (Strom et al., 2019). The moment that we focus on was one that materialised for the first author, Suvi, both as an object of inquiry and as a matter of inarticulable gnawing. Whilst standing out for its affective charge, the more we thought about it, the more it started to draw in other moments from our research encounters with children. One of these included the second author’s, Tuija’s, creative research engagement with a group of girls making a booklet about their experiences of sexual harassment in their romantically charged relations with boys. Although both processes were carefully planned and based on our long-term work with similar research settings, the moments prompting our analysis gnawed at us, challenged what counts as matters of ethical concern, and pushed the ethical practices of our inquiry forward.

To tap into the generative potential of these gnawings, we briefly present the research encounters. In the subsequent analysis, we focus first on the microflows of these events. The notion of microflows is used to attune our analysis to the mundane affective materiality (Taylor, 2013) of creative ‘intra-activist assemblages’ (Renold & Ringrose, 2016), or more specifically the relationality of materiality, space, methods, and activities for exploring and addressing gender and power. New materialist attention to such dynamic constellations of materiality, space, methods, and activities allowes us to pause to attend to the flux and flow of safety, as the art-making enabled children to explore things that matter to them in their peer cultures – including its pains and unsafety. Then, as a mode of responsiveness to this contiguity of safe and enabling intra-action, we move on by slowing down to envision ways for co-composing ethically sustainable encounters predicated on being both safe and enabling towards flourishing.

Starting with a note: MeToo Postscriptum

Suvi notices a girl rise up from where she is seated at her desk and walk to a makeshift mailbox on another table close by. Throughout the short walk, she presses the paper note, about half an A4 sheet in size, firmly against her chest. Carefully curving the paper so that the writing cannot be seen, covering it with her hand, she reaches towards the makeshift mailbox and, carefully curving the slip of paper to shelter it from others, slips it in, begins to walk away, turns to look back once more and then leaves, hands in the pockets of her hoodie.

The excerpt above is a moment that ‘stuck to’ Suvi as a sense of unease during her engagement in a series of research-activist MeToo Postscriptum workshops (see, Huuki & Pihkala, 2018; Pihkala & Huuki, 2019; Pihkala et al., 2019). MeToo Postscriptum took place around the time of the MeToo movement and invited preteen children to creative Valentine’s day-themed workshops to explore issues of gender and sexual harassment and to communicate their experiences to national decision makers. The workshops involved iterations of activities that employed embodied, talk-based, and creative methods for us and the children to explore the complex ways gender and sexuality come to matter in young peer cultures.

The walk to the makeshift mailbox described above occurred at the end of one of the workshops with a group of eight girls. It was preceded by the girls engaging in activities (see, Pihkala & Huuki, 2019) and, as one of the main activities of the workshop, crafting their own Valentine’s Day cards. Before the activities, we had shared the activist aims of the workshops with the children. The idea was that in the cards the children could write notes of, for example, experiences, desires, or statements they would like to convey to decision makers to whom they could personally address the cards. At the end of the workshops, the research team took the responsibility of mailing the cards to each member of the Finnish Parliament.

In the case described above, the girl had ended up writing a note after having already finalised her card earlier than others. This had left her moving about in the room, looking through the materials, including a collection of notes from our previous work with children. We might speculatively imagine that perhaps seeing, reading, and feeling the collection of notes enabled something to come to matter that she might have otherwise deemed irrelevant. The girl ended up writing the note, and when the note eventually journeyed to the makeshift mailbox, it was pressed to the girl’s chest, shielded from the eyes of her peers, perhaps peers directly addressed by the experience she had written in her note, working as a cue of the potential risk of the note being seen. Despite seeming to shelter her note from others, she nonetheless slipped it into the makeshift mailbox as a signal of desire to address and communicate the unjust and unsafe encounters in her peer relations. The becoming of this note was one of those moments that can catch you in a very visceral way and linger with you afterwards.

When curating the notes and cards, the affective material moment reconfigured anew as Suvi, having been caught by it during the workshop, recognised the note by its colour, among the others, coincidentally finding out the experience written in it. Although the experience was not one that would have demanded acute attention or intervention at the time, this reconfiguring of the note, the experience disclosed in it, hands, chest, and the walk to the makeshift mailbox left Suvi with a sense of unease. What kept gnawing was the way the constellation of the workshop had enabled the experience to materialise in the flow of the research-activist process: how it had become remembered by the girl and shared in the mailbox to be made public as part of the campaign. However, the spaces, times, experiences, and desires in that note all remained unattainable to us, even though they were elicited by the crafty-activist workshops we had co-designed. The note travelled to our curated research materials, where it was carefully anonymised and stored. It also travelled to a public landscape when we published a collection of the notes anonymously online – as we had promised the children we would.

Although more than 200 notes were written and shared during the MeToo Postscriptum workshops, this note invited us to dwell with its significance. Particularly, it invited us to consider how our creative practice enabled children to explore and communicate, in minor ways, their experiences, no matter how private they might be with their peers – just as we can speculatively think about what happened with the girl at the moment described above. Yet, ‘something’ had also stuck to us: a gnawing. This affective moment stuck to us and reminded us of the limits of what we can really know of all the experiences and vulnerabilities swarming in the workshops, potential ‘risk’ children take when sharing and potentially going public with their experiences to transform unjust and unsafe peer cultures, and the significance and seriousness entailed in asking them to do so. This prompted us to even more relentlessly further the parameters of our practice to enable safe possibilities for children’s engagement.

Resonances: Moments of Truth

The ‘postscript-note-in-becoming’ of the MeToo workshop resonated in us across diverse research encounters, gaining affective momentum through which the enabling capacity of our crafty-activist workshops, the delicacy of safety, and the challenge of its sustainability started to take shape. Simultaneously, this was not any coincidental or exceptional occurrence but an integral part of the creative activist research with children we have aimed to compose in different times, for different purposes, and in different ways.

As part of her work on creative and arts-based methods, Tuija conducted a creative workshop with her collaborators and a group of 40 children, aged 10–11 years, from a suburban school located in northern Finnish city. The workshop included 80 hours of sessions on issues of gendered power in preteen peer relations involving an array of activities, varying from visual arts to sculpture and drama (Huuki et al., 2017a). During the workshop, a group of three girls began to explore their experiences of sexual harassment that pertained to their romantic relationships with boys (Huuki et al., 2021). As the workshop progressed, these experiences began to take shape in ways that enabled the children to articulate their experiences and resistance to dominant peer cultures. This materialised towards the end of the workshop as a vision to create a booklet consisting of statements about what they did or did not like and what they wished for in their relationships with boys.

At the end of the workshop, Tuija joined the girls when they compiled and finalised the booklet.

Isla²: We need to add a lot of them [experiences] here …. Let’s give it a final boost. Olivia: What if boys come? Isla: It doesn’t matter if they come, they [the boys] won’t see, and so what if they see.

The girls’ work continued calmly. They talked about things they would like to bring forward and work on the booklet’s pages. When Tuija mentioned that their names would not be published, Isla and Amanda responded, ‘It doesn’t matter if others know; everyone should know!’

Isla: Aah—then everyone might think that we are bullied. I have to write here that this is not about bullying. Hey, what will this book be called?

A few moments later, the girls came back to the title of the book when Tuija asked about it. Isla had a suggestion ready: Moments of Truth. Secrets out.

The moment above took place in a secluded space that Tuija had suggested for the girls. It was a place used for working in smaller groups and enabled the girls to work on their booklet in a calmer and more private setting. The moment above hinges on publicity – nothing is public yet, not for the boys or to the wider public, teachers, and parents, for example, – but it is nonetheless thickened with anticipation – ‘what if boys come’ – and a promise of publicity: ‘They should all know!’

In writing this paper, the ‘what if’ preceding the declaration and the subtle anxiousness related to the uninvited others – the boys – began to resonate with the previously described sheltering of the MeToo Postscriptum note. In this case, the question of whether boys would find out bears particular relevance: the writings, stories, and experiences depicted and re-storied their existing relationships. In contrast to the MeToo workshops, here the artefact, the booklet, would not be published as part of a collage of other artworks, which thus made it potentially recognisable within the local community, despite meticulous anonymising. Furthermore, it was perhaps particularly in the girls’ interests to go public with their booklet. Indeed, there is an activist tone to the girls’ thinking-making – ‘Everyone should know!’ As had become apparent in talking with the girls, the room for resisting sometimes drastic yet almost entirely normalised harassment seemed to be felt by the girls initially as very limited. In this sense, when the constellation of the workshop enabled them to write a statement that boys should not embarrass or hit them,³ it was a targeted plea with recipients in mind. The response, reinterpretation, and new reconfigurations of those experiences cannot be known in advance, which makes the girls’ hesitation justified.

The booklet was made public with the consent of the children and their legal guardians. Later on, at the time of the MeToo movement, the girls helped edit the booklet into a multimedia format so that it could be shared on YouTube (Huuki et al., 2017b)⁴ as a timely reminder of how gender and sexual abuses of power also matter in children’s lives and peer cultures. Sharing the video in which the girls read the pages of the booklet out loud mattered for the children. In an encounter with Tuija later on, the girls said that the process of making and sharing Moments of Truth – a process elaborated more elsewhere by the authors (Huuki et al., 2021) – had helped them redefine their relationship with boys in positive ways.

Microflows of safe and enabling crafty-activism

The Moments of Truth and the MeToo workshop offer a unique glimpse into two ‘intra-activist assemblages’ (Renold & Ringrose, 2016) and what can happen when the care-full composition of creative practice enables unjust and unsafe gendered and sexual preteen peer cultures to be explored, addressed, and communicated.

The capacity of these assemblages to enable change – even if minor – was composed carefully. The MeToo workshops brought elements of change-making, the MeToo hashtag, the prompt of the postscript, and a collection of children’s experiences from previous workshops, laid out as a pile of notes on one of the tables, to the workshops for the children to view and think with. The idea was that by approaching the phenomenon of sexual harassment from diverse angles of what might feel hurtful or painful in gendered friendship and relationship cultures, the workshops would enable room to explore these issues without strict adult-led understandings. By including notes and creative outputs conveying experiences from peer cultures also allowed the children to make connections to diverse everyday experiences shared by other children.

In the case of Moments of Truth, exploring the phenomena of gender and sexual abuses of power was similarly paved with multiple shifting and subtle entry points. However, here, the workshops included several stretches over a timespan of two months, were preceded by similar activities during the previous school year and were informed by Tuija’s multi-year ethnographic engagement with the children (Huuki et al., 2021). Furthermore, for these workshops, the space was constructed to cultivate safety and creativity outside of the immediacy of the routines of school. Taking inspiration from the characteristics of the local environment, the workshop space was built around the symbols of water and earth and composed of diverse, carefully selected materials, lighting, colour, snacks, and tactile elements, such as pillows and rugs, and the overall design had secluded corners and private enclosures. The space also evolved with the children’s artworks, which were shared with the children’s permission for others to see.

We maintain that the co-designing and composing of methods, materials, space, and activities to orient towards a particular concern, and the freedom to move between in-depth consideration, playful light-heartedness, and opting out created a kind of container that allowed for a sense of being held together. In ‘holding together’, a sense of safety emerges that also enables movement towards the unexpected, unarticulated, and emergent (Renold et al., 2020) – in our case, for the children to explore and communicate their experiences related to gendered and sexual power in peer relations. In the workshops, we saw this play out in subtle ways in the microflows of the events. In the MeToo workshop, the girl who wrote her note did not initially seem to think of anything to write, and it was not until later, after wandering around the room, re-engaging with the materials and writings from previous workshops, that she came to write something. Perhaps she was hesitant to share and felt safe to do so only when the constellation of public and private was amplified in ways that enabled experiences to connect to the wider field and expressions of oppressive gendered and sexual cultures, consequently enabling the girl’s writing and sharing. In Moments of Truth, the girls’ engagement with the booklet could be understood as intra-activated within the workshop that enabled experiences to emerge and for them to be explored. The repetitions and reiterations of gathering around a concern, thinking-making, talking, recursive re-turns to the continued unease and distress related to the gendered and sexual abuses of power in their relationship with boys, and the composition of activities – talking, approaching the phenomena from different angles, through different modalities, and at different times – enabled the experiences to take new forms (Huuki, 2019; Huuki et al., 2021).

The hold of the material, discursive, spatial, and affective composition of the constellation mattered, working as an ethical practice where safety and the capacity to enable minor gestures worked in close contiguity, inseparable from one another and emergent within the microflows of the events. This was made particularly visible when the container and its capacity to enable the thinking-making leaked – not as a dramatic rupture but as a subtle shift or ‘affective spilling out’ (Walkerdine, 2010). Walking to a makeshift mailbox as an enactment of disclosing becomes toned with anxiety, worry, discomfort, or concern, amplifying the sensitivity, unsafety, and vulnerability immanent to events where experiences surface, are re-mattered, and shared. Even in the affirmed event from Moments of Truth, we pause on glimpses of safety becoming unsettled; ‘What if boys come’ becomes a subtle reminder of the significance of making and the fragility of the capacity of the constellation to enable that making.

Considering these events reminds us how, to enable explorations of the not yet and what else, or minor gestures, as Manning (2016) theorises, the workshops need to afford a sense of safety or hold, as discussed above. Yet, the very gestures towards the speculative open vulnerabilities and potentially sway the event towards unsafety. This draws on Manning (2016), who maintains that in moving ‘the nonconscious toward the conscious, mak[ing] felt the unsayable in the said’ (p. 7), there is always ‘[t]he potential for the event to sway towards destruction’ (p. 230). In this sense, safety as a desired, aspired, or prescribed quality does not pre-exist its relatings (Barad, 2007). It does not pre-exist the gestures that are enabled or the movements that are activated. It does not precede all that the process calls forth might demand. There is, perhaps, a strand of ontological unsafety in arts-based approaches that is further heightened in research settings where unaddressed, normalised, and pathologised questions of gender and sexual abuses of power become intra-activated. However, unsafety – or rather un/safety (to take seriously immanence and indeterminacy; see, Pihkala et al., 2018) – works here in an affirmative register (Braidotti, 2013; Manning, 2016). That is, un/safety, vulnerability, and the potential for destruction are ontological parts of these compositions, not because our apparatuses fail but because they are parts of the minor gestures’ capacity to work against the ‘major’ (Manning, 2016), in this case, minor gestures’ tendency towards freedom to explore embodied experiences of abusive power relations, to resist oppressive peer cultures by communicating experiences of hurt, and to envision alternative, ethical ways of relating.

This potential to resist the pull of the major is a crucial element in the crafty-activist workshops that we compose to enable more expansive ethical relationality and to ignite microprocesses of change, making them valuable for their transformative capacity. However, thinking with the microflows of these affective material moments shows ‘the emotional, personal, and social significance of the acts of making’ that we ask children to undertake (Hickey-Moody, 2020, p. 727) as well as the seriousness of doing so. By enabling experiences of harassment and gender and sexual abuses of power to surface, both the MeToo workshop and the making of Moments of Truth made visible not only the unsafety embedded in children’s peer cultures and the sensitivity and vulnerability entailed in exploring those peer cultures but also the surfacing visions and yearning for alternative ways of relating.

Composing ethically sustainable encounters with children on gender and sexual abuses of power

Within the crafty-activist workshops, the commitment to protect from harm on the one hand and the desire to enable (micro)processes of change on the other came together in a manner that challenged us to consider how safety and unsafety always co-exist in such research encounters and how, when aiming to enable change, we need to both stay with the trouble of that ambiguity and make trouble – that is, cultivate enabling conditions for curiosity and creativity for flourishing to happen (Bozalek, 2020). In our work, ethically sustainable encounters are understood as careful compositions – ethical apparatuses involving human and other than human elements that cultivate connections, capacitate response, and expand the spatiotemporal scope of ethical praxis to enable flourishing in young peer cultures. Four elements co-constitutive of such ethical sustainability are elaborated on below.

First, as discussed extensively in the context of sensitive topics and vulnerable groups, research on experiences of gender and sexual abuses of power with children demands careful ethical scrutiny, such as ongoing attention to consent, confidentiality, and protection from harm (Graham et al., 2015). These practices central to normative research ethics are also crucial elements of the ethical apparatus of our research, effectually preconditions for it. As such, we understand the concerns and codes of conduct of normative research ethics as more-than-human players inseparably entangled in our encounters with children.

Second, as elaborated in the previous section, the ethical sustainability of our practice has been based on the care-full co-composition of the workshops. To strengthen the hold of our ethical practices, we drew on years of research experience in similar settings and based our work on multiprofessional collaboration through which the workshops were co-designed. We attended to the materiality, activities, and rhythm of the workshops, as well as the particular conditions of each workshop, such as the length of the intervention and our familiarity with the children and their peer cultures. In this sense, the ethical apparatus of our workshops does not rely solely on the plans we put in place to mitigate risks, the capacity of our ethical apparatus to ‘tick the boxes’ of ethical review (Davies, 2018) or the reflexivity we engage. Instead, it also relies on the affective materiality of the care-fully and purposefully co-composed workshops.

Third, to strengthen the sustainability of the ethics of encounter, we developed a practice of collaging to take seriously the sensitive nature of our subject matter, data, and children’s artworks, as well as the (micro)politics of these kind of creative, experimental, and activist research settings. Collaging aims to work as a response-able way of engaging with the materials children produce and the experiences they share. In the practice of collaging, anonymous experiences from our prior work with children – such as the MeToo postscriptum note written and shared by the girl – and artworks are allowed to ‘travel’ to new workshops, where they merge with wider collections of experience for other children to explore. This is also what happened in the MeToo workshop: the pile of notes on the table resonated with the girl, her experiences, and the change-making desires of the workshop, enabling experience to surface and be explored in new ways. Then that note and experience eventually itself became part of ever-reconfiguring collage as part of the activism and our ongoing creative practice (see, https://www.fire-collective.com), in which children’s experiences, visions, and statements are pieced together in digital ‘glitches’ or craftworks and communicated to other children, adults and audiences. As an ethico-methodological practice, collaging becomes a way of working with data, artworks, and children’s experiences, not as individual entities but as continually reconfigured constellations. This paves the way to explore the issues at hand, not from the perspective of what is private or hurtful but from what might be shared, what one might connect to or contest, or what one might want to wonder and work with. As creative and new materialist activist methodologies prompt us to shift from collecting experiences to making experience matter (e.g. Renold, 2018) in wider public landscapes (Pihkala & Huuki, 2019; see also, Pickering & Kara, 2017), collaging allows us to do so in a manner accountable for the privacy and confidentiality of experience.

Fourth, we suggest keeping connections alive to enact the ethical apparatuses of our research in more expansive ways. This means widening the spatiotemporal scope of ethics by accounting for how children’s experiences, voices, and desires might matter in the different spacetimes of children’s lives, such as school and free time. The cases analysed here offer us glimpses into the unsafety children experience (‘What if boys find out’) in seeking to communicate and effect change in peer cultures – there is always the risk of a pushback or a backlash (see, e.g. Renold et al., 2020). This requires that we seek ethical ways of amplifying and relaying what matters to children and making space for experiences to be re-mattered through safe and enabling conditions so that the visions for ethically sustainable peer relations can sprout out from within the workshops to children’s lives. This, we argue, demands connections and composition of ‘more-than-human multiagency assemblages’ of teachers, pedagogical resources, material-discursive environments, children’s artworks, schools and student teachers, parents, or NGOs that can help hold, relay, and carry the processes that may (have) be(en) (intra-)activated during the research encounters also after the intra-activist workshops. Which connections and commitments work is an ongoing endeavour. However, taking connections as a starting point might lead us to response-abilities that we might otherwise miss. We argue that this kind of curious and committed thinking can help us accumulate alternative visions for strengthening the sustainability of ethical encounters.

Conclusions

In this paper, we have fleshed out the ways in which new materialisms have informed the ethical considerations of our creative research-activism with children and on gender and sexual abuses of power. We maintain that nowhere is theory put as much to the test as it is done in research in which children, gender, sexuality, violence, and research-activism coalesce, and nowhere is putting theory to work needed more than when they do. Over the years of working on issues related to violence, we know that nurturing change in young peer cultures is crucial for reasons ranging from individual and communal to local and global. It has also been no surprise to see the children enthusiastically engaging with us, sharing their experiences, and co-composing visions for alternative ways of being.

By providing an analysis from our creative practice, we have shown how ontological un/safety and the capacity to enable microprocesses of change work in close contiguity when children engage with things that matter to them. Thus, in addition to protective approaches to safety, ethics is also about designing for enabling intra-action where the unsafety in children’s peer cultures can be explored, addressed, and communicated to effect change toward social justice. For the practices of making, this requires that we committedly address the requirements of normative research ethics, design careful more-than-human co-compositions for children’s engagement, seek creative ethico-methodological practices, such as collaging, and expand the spatiotemporal scope of ethics so that we can better account for the need to carry, hold, and sustain the minor gestures that are activated.

We suggest that the new materialist ethical practice, which is inspired by the ethics of response-ability, entails care-full attention to co-composing conditions for children to explore and communicate things that matter to them. Attending to safe and enabling intra-action extends normative research ethics by shifting from a risk-based approach to one invested in change and by engaging matters of ethical concern not only as a scale-based issue of good or bad but also as a matter of staying with the trouble. It thus prompts us to grapple with the ethical vectors of our practice to address the unpredictability and potential unsafety but also the significance of movement, gestures, and intra-activations. This, we maintain, is a crucial matter of sustainability for ethical praxis that seems to be missing far too often from the normative frameworks of research ethics.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Suvi Pihkala

Dr. Suvi Pihkala is postdoctoral researcher at Gender Studies at the University of Oulu, Finland. Her interdisciplinary research is inspired by feminist new materialist and posthuman theories and approaches to ethics. In her research, she is interested in exploring response-ability and (micro)politics of change in diverse practices of research. Currently she is exploring these issues in the contexts of creative-activism with children and gender and sexual abuses of power.

Tuija Huuki

Dr. docent Tuija Huuki works as Academy of Finland research fellow. Applying insights from new feminist materialist, posthuman and affect theories as well as co-productive arts-based methods, her research explores how gender-based and sexual (inequalities of) power emerge through social, material, historical and affective force relations that impact children and young people’s lives. The research also investigates how arts-based methods enable children and young people to safely communicate and address power and other sensitive issues in their peer and relationship cultures.

Notes

1. Gender-based violence in pre-teen relationship cultures: How history, place, affect and arts interventions matter, a research project funded by Academy of Finland which examined how arts-based methods enabled children from 10 to 12 years of age to safely explore and express their entanglements in assemblages of gendered power in their peer and relationship cultures.

2. Names are pseudonyms.

3. ‘If you think I’m nice, then don’t embarrass me’, ‘If you like me, then why do you hit me’.

4. The decision to continue to share the YouTube video was based on careful consideration of the girls’ process of making the booklet and video and negotiations of consent during the research, at the time of publishing the video and after it was published. The MeToo Postscriptum note referred to in the first analytical moment, on the other hand, was published only as part of the campaign’s wider collection of notes and not in, for example, other academic publications (Pihkala et al., 2019). Here we maintain that, despite consent and care-full processes of anonymizing the materials underwent in both cases, the ethical sustainability of sharing and relaying needs to be based on responsiveness with the particularities in each case, careful consideration of the ongoingness of consent, and not reliant solely on compliancy with ethical principles (see also, e.g. Pickering & Kara, 2017).