Introduction

In this chapter we reflexively consider the emotional labour involved in engaging young children in participatory research through feminist ideals, which embed the researcher within, rather than remove them from, the research. This discussion is drawn from our experiences in conducting a qualitative study that explored children’s perceptions of their playground space incorporating a graveyard, complete with gravestones, alter tombs, and coped stones. We explore the emotional labour of maintaining young children’s well-being as they navigate what constitutes a ‘sensitive’ topic in research with children. We borrow from feminist methodology, an ethic of care, positionality, and recognition of emotional labour, to strengthen our child-focused approach. Here we reflexively address the challenges of conducting sensitive research with young children and highlight the ways in which our ‘other’ selves, beyond the identity of researcher, were exposed. We highlight our anxiety about assuming our subjective positions and explore their potential conflict with contemporary discourses of childhood, whereby supporting the emotional well-being of young children through the researcher’s proximity or touch is constructed as taboo. Ultimately, we argue that just as the graveyard runs like a palimpsest in the playground so too do our other selves in this fieldwork.

Setting the context for children, play, and death

The association between children and play is surely one of the most cherished and natural perspectives on children and childhoods that exists in contemporary western society, with childhood being positioned as utterly distinguishable from adulthood through the child’s lack of responsibility and time to play (Wyness, 2018). One of the most appropriate contexts for this activity is the school playground, a familiar and friendly landscape of climbing frames and games marked out on the floor. In saying this we fully recognise the contested status of these assumptions and are aware of the school playground also as a potential site of rules, hierarchy, and bullying.

However, bearing this treasured evocation of childhood in mind, what happens when the school play area is a disused graveyard, with all the remaining accoutrements of death (gravestones and memorials), and therefore your playmates just happen to be the dead of long ago or supernatural creatures associated with the un-dead? This question was, to begin with, the main focus of our study.