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.

Building on critical childhood studies and childism, this paper analyses children’s participation in family law cases in Denmark. Spurred particularly by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, together with a general shift in the view on children, several jurisdictions, including Denmark, have implemented legislative reform in the last decades to accommodate children’s participation rights. Even though such legal participation rights have increased, research in the family law field indicates that children’s perspectives are often undermined or excluded. An analysis of qualitative data (workshops, observations, and interviews) establishes how the positioning of children and children’s perspectives (as well as how “listening to children” is enacted) can be crucial to understanding the mechanisms that either subsidize or undermine children’s perspectives in family law cases. The paper argues further that “listening emergent” to children can offer a path to deconstructing the norms and structures that undermine and exclude children’s views—and thus offer a childist contribution to childhood research.

All bodies—child, animal, plant—are bodies sustained by life processes. Human as well as animal and plant bodies coexist with a multiplicity of microbial life. As symbiotic partners, human bodies are ecosystems of microbial life in a microbial world. In this way, microbes cannot simply be seen as disease-causing and human bodies as hosts of human-only life. Simplistic notions of the child as a unitary and social subject and the image of the agentic child are both questioned by this view. What if we considered for childhood studies the body’s microbial constitution in a bacterial world? How would everyday life unfold as a more-than-human sociality in which children act, think, and feel on a daily basis? In this conversation article, seven multidisciplinary scholars address the following questions by grounding their responses in their respective fields, in childhood, and in their research interests: How do microbes and childhood matter in your research? Consider how the understanding of microbes as foundational for life influences your field of research. How does your research seek to engage the biosocial imagination and the challenge of integrating biological and social understandings of the child in fruitful and robust ways? How do considerations of microbes and childhood bring together multidisciplinary engagements?

This article presents an analysis from a project that focuses on the entanglements that emerge between practices within the family law system and the everyday lives of children in conflictual family law cases. We position our analysis in critical childhood studies and zoom in on the social–spatial dimensions of children's everyday lives by exploring their lived spaces. We focus on what emerges as important for the children and explore how this is (not) reflected in either the family law case or the ultimate decisions. Inspired by the concept of foodscapes, we introduce a new concept, ‘divorcescapes’, to address the mundane spatial contexts of children's lives with separated parents. We also draw on Barad's agential realism and Ahmed's concepts of sticky and circulating emotions. Empirically, the research is based on 100 anonymous documents from child conversations, interviews, observations and documents from 32 family law cases. We find that the professionals and parents fail to acknowledge some of the spaces and relations that are essential to the child. Furthermore, we find that the image of what it means to be competent to participate—as well as discourses regarding divorce—results in the othering of the child together with sticky emotions of shame and powerlessness.

This article expands Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model by integrating biological and ecological processes—particularly microbial life—into its core concept of proximal processes. Drawing on host–microbiome research and the concept of the child-as-ecosystem, we reconceptualize the developing person as a multispecies being embedded within nested ecological systems. Through four interdisciplinary encounters—spanning social stratification, family separation, socialisation, and environmental health—we demonstrate how microbial diversity and ecological entanglements shape children’s development, well-being, and learning. We argue that BEM’s human-centered framework must evolve to reflect multispecies interdependencies and ecological realities, especially in the context of biodiversity loss and climate change. This rethinking has direct implications for early childhood education, research, and policy, offering a more ecologically attuned model of development.

Children’s rights and wellbeing have increasingly attracted attention both politically and in the scholarly field