We Can Tell More Than One Story: Comic Making Locates Researcher and Children’s Voices in Co-Representing Childhoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Childhood studies’ long concern with elevating children’s perspectives has focused attention on “voice” rather than researcher-participant dialogue, precluding critical attention to the normative adult researcher voice. This article investigates how cocreating comics with children about the COVID-19 pandemic engaged a different researcher voice and produced different representations of pandemic childhoods. Making comics with children aged 7–11, I asked: What does it mean for researchers to speak in speech? I suggest that shifting researcher voices can help researchers recognize the conventions that allow adults to colonize spoken conversation with children, denaturalizing adult voice and allowing us to tell more than one story.