Volume 50, numéro 1, septembre 2025

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This article reflects on the process of constructing and conducting interviews with children, emphasizing the microethical moments that arise, explored through two theoretical-methodological “clues.” It examines the ethical challenges and tensions inherent in research shaped by adult-centric and developmentalist logics. We present strategies to address these limitations, including recognizing children as active subjects, using a registry of informed agreement in video format, engaging in joint negotiation, employing chat-interviews, and encouraging the use of drawing. Through an “epistemological vigilance,” the study advocates for a balance between protecting children and ensuring their meaningful participation, contributing to ethical practices in research involving children.

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All bodies—child, animal, plant—are bodies sustained by life processes. Human as well as animal and plant bodies coexist with a multiplicity of microbial life. As symbiotic partners, human bodies are ecosystems of microbial life in a microbial world. In this way, microbes cannot simply be seen as disease-causing and human bodies as hosts of human-only life. Simplistic notions of the child as a unitary and social subject and the image of the agentic child are both questioned by this view. What if we considered for childhood studies the body’s microbial constitution in a bacterial world? How would everyday life unfold as a more-than-human sociality in which children act, think, and feel on a daily basis? In this conversation article, seven multidisciplinary scholars address the following questions by grounding their responses in their respective fields, in childhood, and in their research interests: How do microbes and childhood matter in your research? Consider how the understanding of microbes as foundational for life influences your field of research. How does your research seek to engage the biosocial imagination and the challenge of integrating biological and social understandings of the child in fruitful and robust ways? How do considerations of microbes and childhood bring together multidisciplinary engagements?

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There is a pervasive false belief that young children are colour-blind and “racially innocent” and exist in “race neutral” spaces. A long-held belief in a universal model of child development underestimates children’s ability to engage with complex topics, and racialized students’ lived experiences are dismissed. Failing to engage in these discussions, educators could unknowingly neglect the needs of their students and fail to help children develop their cultural competencies. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the ways in which critical race theory can offer a lens through which to challenge the dominant ideology and sustained inequity in early childhood education and educational systems.

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In its attention to numerous small explorations with children and place, we reflect on how Edvard Munch’s painting “The Researchers” could almost be a scene from our ethnographic fieldwork with children. Prompted by our engagement with Munch’s painting, we explore three shifts in our own research practice over time. First, a shift from a sole focus on human relationships to the more-than-human nature of long-term research relations with place points to the bodily, relational nature of knowing that is not easily articulable in words. Second, we grapple with the shifting meaning and purpose of the “data set” within our research. By viewing data as part of a gift-giving logic, interconnection and shifting time scales are emphasized. Third, drawing on the Sámi concept of meahcci, we discuss how fieldwork became “unbounded” spatially and temporally, allowing new ways of knowing to emerge.

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The author describes how her documentation of children’s play experiences and the stories that preschool children have told her continue to be useful and are reinterpreted in her current work with postsecondary teacher education programs. She explains the documentation as a resource for sparking fictional story writing, play, and critical dialogue about teaching and learning in early childhood education settings. Salvador Dali’s artistic representations of time and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical concepts of temporal distance and the movement of play provide a framework for understanding the long-lasting value and timelessness of pedagogical documentation in supporting inquiry-based learning and play (pre-K to postsecondary levels).

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Childhood and the Law in Canada: The Family/State Relationship provides comprehensive case reviews of six leading Canadian decisions regarding the relationships among children, their parents, and the state. Each chapter provides the facts of the case, places these facts in historical context, and closes with a discussion of the social implications of the law, subsequent statutory reform, and ongoing public debates. The book is intended for use in courses on childhood and the law in the Canadian context and provides exceptionally complete materials for briefing and/or mooting the cases presented. It will be welcomed by instructors, researchers, students, and a wider audience of those interested in children’s legal rights and status.