Reflecting on participation’s promises insights from collaborative research about unaccompanied child migrants, care, and the UK’s hostile immigration regime

Engaging with critiques of participatory research’s transformative claims, in this article, co-researchers from the Children Caring on the Move project critically reflect on experiences of doing research together. Our dialogue considers how the project’s motivating ethos of ‘nothing about us, without us’ permeated the research, to offer insights about the value, challenges, and practice of participatory research. Relations of care and building collective outlooks have helped to generate knowledge aimed at challenging hostile border regimes within and beyond spaces of research.