Love and agency in ethnographic fieldwork with children

Analysing emotions such as love can enable new ways of understanding human relationships and deepen reflexive ethnographic practice. Love in research with children, however, carries a unique set of implications due to children’s structural vulnerability, the power imbalances and abuses that manifest in many adult-child relationships, and cultural taboos on love expressed between adults and children. Yet, the ability to elicit love and affective care from adults is an essential component of children’s survival, and children actively coproduce relationships, making researchers into whom they need them to be. How, then, can we approach love in fieldwork with children? Drawing from fieldwork experiences at a New Zealand primary school with participants aged 8-12, I analyse how children recruited me into their survival systems by cultivating love and associated processes of empathy, care, and attachment. I suggest that ethical fieldwork with children means attending to how we feel and respond to love.