Participatory video with children and young people

The changing discipline of children’s geographies (Holloway, 2014) has entailed methodological proliferation and diversification (van Blerk and Kesby, 2008). Ways of conducting research have been informed and affected by a number of debates, including about children’s participation (Matthews, Limb and Taylor, 1999) and power (Holt, 2004), structural difference among children and young people (Hopkins, 2013) and between children and adults (Jones, 2008), emotional dimensions of research with children and of children’s lives themselves (Blazek and Windram-Geddes, 2013), the questioned primacy of the voice and the problematic legitimacy of other modes of knowledge (Kraftl, 2013), the increased recognition of childhoods outside the Minority Global North (Jeffrey, 2012), the importance of intergenerational relations (Punch and Tisdall, 2012), increased inter-disciplinary (Holloway, 2014) and collaborative praxis (Mills, 2013), demand for policy-focused research (Vanderbeck, 2008) and not least a range of technological advancements facilitating research (Mikkelsen and Christensen, 2009). The emergence of participatory video in geographical research with children and young people can be traced explicitly to most of these debates and it has been recognized as having a potential to shape further methodological but also epistemological and political agendas of geographies of children and young people. Yet, its use and especially published written accounts in geographical work with children and young people remain scarce. This chapter reviews participatory video as an emerging methodological approach to geographies of children and young people over the last decade. It discusses the place of participatory video in the sub-discipline in three steps. First, it examines the scope of participatory video in the wider field of social sciences and humanities, and it explores its emergence in geographical scholarship on children and young people at the interface of the induction of participatory video to geography in general, the shaping of the discipline of children’s geographies, and the emerging work with participatory video and young people in other social scientific disciplines. Second, the chapter presents current achievements and dilemmas of participatory video in the production of knowledge in the work with children and young people and suggests possible routes through which participatory video could play an even more important epistemological role in the sub-discipline. Finally, the chapter explores ethical and political issues related to participatory video work with children and young people and relates them to wider questions of geographical research.