Child health researchers are increasingly aware of children’s rights to express their views and to be heard in all matters affecting them, as expressed in article 12 in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. This includes research, but it is unusual for young children to be involved as co-researchers in health research. Child-facing professionals and researchers sit on experience-based knowledge and practical skills, which could inform young children’s involvement in research. We investigated perspectives and conceptualisations on child participation, for the ages 3–5 years, among professionals and researchers outside of the health sciences, by interviewing fifteen informants. We present the findings on three levels; meta, meso and micro. The interviewees described child participation as something that forms the basis for the practices they performed, independent of their profession; we theorized this as understandings of child participation on an overarching meta level, where active child participation both becomes an ‘established ideology’, and something difficult to put into words and describe. What also united the interviewees was their description of foundations or prerequisites for participation to take place; we theorized this as understandings of child participation on a meso level, where descriptions of the need for building relations with the children, the importance of space and place, and the focus on child-centred activities were common themes. Finally, the interviewees described methods that they used in meetings with children; this is theorized as understandings of child participation on micro level, categorized as methods for understanding children’s worlds, methods for engaging children in conversations and methods to ensure children’s consent. We discuss these understandings of child participation to untangle if they represent a child perspective or children’s perspectives. In the longer term, this knowledge will serve as the conceptual basis for a guide to children’s meaningful involvement in health research.

This open access book directs its attention to a desire for inter- and transdisciplinary, reciprocal collaborations in studies concerning young children. It focuses on the possibilities and obstacles in collaborative forms of inquiry involving those stakeholders and actors whom the research concerns, specifically the participating children. The backdrop of the discussions and theoretical investigations is the inter- and transdisciplinary project Enhancing Children’s Attention. Within the framework of an evidence-based intervention, this project performed multiple qualitative forms of inquiry, including emergent forms of collaborations with children. The book provides a discussion on how young children’s development, learning, and lives are understood in the developmental sciences, and in the humanities and social sciences. It specifically addresses scholars interested in postdevelopmental, posthumanist, new materialist, and postqualitative approaches. The book proposes a displaced form of postdevelompentalism for future collaborative forms of inquiry with a focus on multiple forms of knowledge and knowing.

COVID-19 amplified the everyday sexisms that academics experience in higher education, including women’s submission of publications. This chapter shows how a creative and transdisciplinary intervention, #FEAS FAKE JOURNAL, made space for feminist academics whose scholarship was affected by the pandemic to take part in a project that privileged “unfinished business”. A creative methodology was used that moved beyond the traditional research narrative that relies on mastery and certainty. Seventeen feminist academics participated in the project by submitting an abstract to a fake journal about an unfinished work. Several creative components were used to solicit and support personal, political, and creative accounts to the pandemic. These accounts show how feminist academics were affected by lockdowns, how they managed, and in some cases how they connected with each other. Findings show how transdisciplinary feminist creative activism made space for participants to reflect on the effects of the pandemic and to consider what is worth finishing. This paper shares a rare glimpse into the behind the scenes of knowledge making and doing as unfinished business. It shows how transdisciplinary feminist art activism can be enacted with care and solidarity with others.

The performance of standardized tests is an ongoing matter of concern for childhood researchers.Standardized tests are often described as neglecting the ethical complexities of doing research withyoung children. However, this critique is primarily presented in general terms, and does not attendto the locality and specificity of particular test situations. With this as a starting point, the aim ofthis article is to challenge a narrow understanding of standardized tests as activities done ‘on’ chil-dren and examine the complexities of emerging relations in test situations performed in Swedishpreschools. Through analysing video recordings made as part of an intervention project, the articlefocuses on the practices that surface in test situations with four- to six-year-olds. Inspired byHaraway and Strathern, the article puts to work a relational approach to analysing the test situa-tions. This approach contributes with an understanding in which the contextual details are takeninto account, which in turn highlights how the atypical and the moving are often the standard instandardized testing. The insights from a relational analysis point to important aspects to considerin the performance of standardized tests: it matters to attune to and problematize a narrow under-standing of standardized tests; it matters to consider the local specificities; and it matters to scru-tinize in new ways the relations between children and researchers.