Chapter 9: Childcare Ethics: Is Ethics a Childcaring One?

A rights-based approach has been dominant when it comes to the ethics of engaging children in research. Increasingly, a child’s rights have been emphasised in advancing their voice and agency in postmodern literature and research approaches. Such rights are always conditioned and conditional with children’s perceived vulnerability. Rights are self-centred, and the ethics that uphold them are adult-orientated. It is in this context that care is enroled into the matter of concern of ethics. This chapter aims to reframe vulnerability as a relational effect that could not easily be pinned down with the normative subject of ethics. It will do so by exploring a care-based ethics approach through Bruno Latour’s relational philosophy. Latour’s notions of translation, delegation and composition are employed to invite careful ethical thinking. Care is oriented towards relations that reveal material conditions not easily exposed to ethical rights. A cared or caring subject is the self with others, involved in vulnerable relationships and entangled with responsibilities.

The liminality of care thinking in research ethics is evident in empirical studies where a matter of care comes into view in ethics-related considerations through the disclosure of the ‘exclusion’ of children due to perceived vulnerability. This chapter is inviting anew the doing of ethics as if it does (child)care about ways of rendering the world less harmful in how those involved in research understand risk and safety alongside their methods, tools and ways of questioning and framing their ethics-related documents.