Moving Forward: Contributions to methodological innovation

In this concluding chapter of ‘Doing’ Children’s Geographies, we aim to draw together some commonalities emerging from many of the contributions throughout the book and highlight issues for moving forward methodologically. Through the challenges and innovations that are contained in the preceding chapters, this book highlights that children’s geographers are both at the cutting edge of methodological thinking in research with children and have much to offer for our understanding of undertaking social research in general. In the following sections, and by way of conclusion, we present some thoughts emerging from the preceding chapters that attempt to summarise and augment the contribution they make to methodological innovations in children’s geographies and the discipline more generally. We have split the remainder of this chapter into four sections, which we feel, present important issues for those currently engaging in, and those embarking upon, research with children. Each of these sections, however, also has importance for geographers more broadly. They are: methods and ethics; capturing ontological complexity; flexible, child-centred and participatory research; and queering adulthood, exploring ‘childishness’, and developing research methods that are resources for agency.