This article explores ways of representing young children’s perspectives in an empathetic and empowering manner. Based on a poststructuralist reinterpretation of ethnographic field notes taken at a Danish day care institution, the article argues, first of all, that in order to represent young children’s perspectives in an ethically sound manner, it is necessary to combine the ‘voice approach’ with ethnomethodological insights and critical sociological analysis, which together enable ‘critical sociological empathy’. Second, that a methodological strategy that combines differentiated researcher participant roles with a ‘least adult role’ approach, enhances the possibilities of successfully achieving empathetic and empowering representation of young children’s perspectives.

This article examines the social work practices towards children in care in Denmark. For this purpose, it reworks Honneth’s theory of recognition, so it fits with the axiomatic propositions of the new social studies of childhood. The analysis shows how the life of these children unfolds as a continuous struggle over recognition with negative consequences for their well-being. It is argued that while these struggles take place in face-to-face interactions, the violence of recognition is based on wider social structures, such as the generational order, familization of children’s emotional needs and a problematizing, individualistic diagnostic approach to deviation.

During the past decades, awareness has grown concerning the need for more democratic and inclusive research methods. This is especially salient for marginalised, colonised and silenced groups, such as the elderly, children and young people. In this article, we present and discuss future workshops as an appropriate method to achieve such democratic and inclusive research, and we posit that it can fruitfully be used together with other approaches outside the field of action research in which it has mostly been used to date. The discussion is based on our research with children and young people on sensitive and conflictual issues. We show how future workshops offer particular advantages when conducting research with children and young people in vulnerable situations, and about silenced and sensitive topics. We argue that these advantages, as well as ethical and other insights, can be transferred to research with other groups of people.

This article explores the discursive formation of inclusion in early childhood education and after‐school (recreation) centres in a Danish municipality. While inclusion has been a central educational issue in research and practice for well over quarter of a century, with continuing emphasis worldwide on ‘initiatives by governments’, this interest has centred on the school environment and institutions of higher education. Thus, despite increasing recognition of the significance of preschool and after‐school‐care, inclusion in these environments remains peripheral to the main debate.

This article outlines a childhood prism research program with a view to encouraging unique childhood research contributions to the wider scholarly field. It is argued that such a program must embrace both classical and emergent lines of thinking, and be underpinned by a unique childhood studies identity. Besides the fact that childhood offers a unique case for exploring many issues, its potential for making unique contributions is rooted in the generational order perspective. Thus, the suggested research program offers a rethinking of the field that detaches the generational order perspective, and the concepts of ‘generational order’ and ‘generationing’, from their specific theoretical origins and replaces them with a relational ontology and a flat epistemology, making use of the fact that childhood can constitute an extreme or paradigmatic case and can therefore potentially offer a diffractive sociological microscope on certain issues.