Drawing Perspectives Together: What Happens When Researchers Draw with Children?

Reflecting on drawing together, a methodological intervention I developed through two child-centered ethnographic projects, I explore what happens when researchers draw together with children. While anthropologists of childhood have called for critical attention to the use of child-friendly participatory methods such as drawing, few have considered how researchers participate in these methods. Yet drawing is embedded with value-laden cultural notions of age and social status. Soliciting children’s drawings for research is therefore a social act that produces identities and relationalities. I argue that researchers must make the nature of their participation a methodological choice rather than an unexamined default.