The young child as connoisseur in research

Abstract

This article investigates the potential of recognising preschool children as connoisseurs within academic research. Drawing on a project in Early Childhood Education (ECE), it foregrounds the emergence of children's connoisseurship as situated, affective and relational knowledge. Informed by Stengers’s conceptualisation of the connoisseur, encompassing knowing, feeling, responding to and engaging with local matters, the article examines how children's locally situated connoisseurship emerges in relation to and with other actors, humans and the more-than-human, such as water. Using storytelling as method within an ethico-onto-epistemological framework, this research explored children's connoisseurship across intimate, local and global scales, reimagining children as knowledgeable research partners and analysing the methodological and ethical implications of this research approach.

Introduction

Water, in its diverse physical states permeates preschools in Sweden. Most often, water is either out of reach, out of sight, or present in a form other than tap water. What is water? How does it smell? How does it taste? These questions served as the starting point for the water project, ¹ an exploratory research initiative conducted in two Swedish preschools ² involving 46 children aged three to five, who collaborated with a researcher to investigate environmental issues related to water. Throughout the project, Elkin Postila noted that the children formulated questions and matters of concern regarding water that differed notably from those posed by researchers, such as singing and talking with water through manhole covers or repeatedly testing whether their bare fingers would get stuck when touching ice. This prompted her interest in the diverse ways in with preschool-aged children engage as knowledgeable participants – connoisseurs – with knowledge and experience in relation to water within a research context. The movement of water and how water itself manifests condition and mediate children's thinking and knowledge-making. This aligns with Jue's (2020) argument that thought forms are environmentally situated. These environments, in turn, play a crucial role in how we formulate questions about the world and imagine other, new ways of communicating within it.

Involving children in research by aligning with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) (UN, 1989) entails the participation of children on their own terms (Article 13), where they express themselves on matters that concern them (Article 12) and have access to information (Article 17) about matters concerning them. Accordingly, the adoption by the UNCRC has changed how children are perceived in research, which involves an array of vital aspects such as ethics, methodology, epistemology, ontology and methods (see Bodén, 2021; Elkin Postila, 2021; Eriksson, 2024; Lundy, 2007). This implies there is a need to understand the diversity of scales that inform projects, scenes, events or even stories told about and with children participating in research.

The above, based on Author 1's notes, captures early reflections and tensions from an Early Childhood Education (ECE) project on water-related environmental issues, hereafter referred to as ‘the water project’ or ‘the project’, in two preschools, which aimed to include both children and water as participants. This article, which seeks to draw attention to the diverse ways preschool-aged children may be understood as connoisseurs within research contexts, is guided by the following questions: How is children's connoisseurship manifested and made relevant within the context of research? How can this be considered a way for children to participate in research?

In this article, we draw on the work of philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers (2015, 2018, 2023) regarding the connoisseur as a local expert in their questions, methods, understandings, knowledges and inquiries. A connoisseur, in Stengers’s (2015, 2018, 2023) theorising, is consequently a participating actor rather than an actor who should master a researcher's tools and methods. The connoisseur is both a feeler and a knower (Stengers, 2018, 2023), kännande kännare in Swedish, whose particular, locally situated knowledge contrasts with rational and systematic modes of knowledge production typically associated with research. We understand connoisseurship, according to Stengers (2018, 2023), as emergent, local and specific in relation to and with something that engages, matters and generates questions, for example, in relation to water. Connoisseurship as emergent, is conditioned by the relations in which we engage to become knowledgeable. Hence, connoisseurship’s local and specific characteristics refer to knowledge always needing to be situated in and adapted to the specific context in and with which it emerges. We align our thinking with Stengers (2018, 2023) even though she does not describe young children as connoisseurs, since we see young children, often overlooked in research, as important producers of local knowledge. Hence, the connoisseur in research contexts presupposes ethical implications in relation to ontological underpinnings, epistemology and methods of inquiry. In our exploration of the preschool-aged child as connoisseur, we employ storytelling as a methodological approach, inspired by Haraway (2016) and Tsing (2015), to illuminate the potential and implications of paying attention to and unfolding the diversity of the child as connoisseur. This approach enables us to consider how children's situated knowledges and affective engagements emerge within complex assemblages of human and more-than-human actors (Elkin Postila, 2021). The aim of the article is thus to compose a story of children's connoisseurship and relationship to water in the water project. ³

The article is structured as follows: the upcoming section firstly conceptualises the child as a connoisseur through Stengers’s (2018, 2023) theorising. Then, previous research that informs our exploration of the child as connoisseur is accounted for. This is followed by a section presenting the empirical data, and the analytic method of storytelling to read and trace the data at different scales. The final two sections cover empirical examples, read with Haraway’s (1988, 2008, 2016), Stengers’s (2010, 2011, 2015, 2018, 2023) and Tsing's (2012, 2015) theorising, and conclude with a discussion on the child as a connoisseur in research.

The emergence of the conceptual connoisseur child

Stengers’s (2010, 2011, 2018, 2023) extensive philosophical work is the starting point for our explorations of children as connoisseurs in research. One of the main foci in Stengers’s writing is the creation of meetings and encounters, knowledge exchanges and collaborations to produce relational practices involving different elements of society, practices and disciplines. These relational practices, which Stengers (2010, 2011, 2018, 2023) calls the ecology of practices, demand a shift in thinking by those who participate in them, which calls for an acknowledgment of differing values and practices that come into play when actors seek to make themselves intelligible to one another; and the approach posits that those involved are partners rather than mere participants. This partnership presupposes that the partner is a connoisseur, an expert knower of specific situated knowledges within local specific fields and a kännande kännare of specific relationships, engagements and affects in relation to this specific local field. We read the concept of connoisseur in Swedish as kännande kännare, an actor who feels and knows, to capture Stengers’s (2018) theorising of the term (see also Elkin Postila, 2021). The conceptual journey of the term connoisseur, from its origins in French, translated to English texts and by us into Swedish, has been significant in deepening our understanding of the concept. In Swedish, a connoisseur is someone possessing deep and multifaceted knowledge within a typically local and specific field, a knower who both understands and feels in relation to something specific. Indeed, the connoisseur's knowledge stands in contrast to that of the researcher and the domain of scientific knowledge; if excluded, our understanding becomes limited to that which is acquired solely through scientific means (Stengers, 2015, 2018, 2023). Given that children's ways of knowing differ from those of scientists, it is important to recognise them as connoisseurs who can contribute to knowledge production, for example, in relation to environmental concerns such as water, as both knowers and feelers.

The latter, encompassing corporeal, sensory, and affective engagement, is, as Stengers (2015, 2018) argues, a powerful aspect of connoisseurship in terms of its potential for change, persistence and slowing down. This slowing down in research, or as Stengers (2018) writes, a slow science, involves a redoing and rethinking of what science is, how science is made, the role of the researcher and the role of those taking part in the research. Hence, slow science excludes research that systematically repeats methodologies, methods, ontologies and epistemological approaches as practised by scientists within specific disciplines (Stengers, 2018). In short, doing research with preschool children as connoisseurs, following Stengers’s (2018) theorising, presupposes that knowing, feeling, responding to and addressing different matters of concern involve both inquiries and methods of inquiry, and can be transformed and adapted to activate specific and situated questions (Elkin Postila, 2021). Furthermore, this locally situated connoisseurship emerges in relation to and with other actors: humans and the more-than-human, such as water. Water, as an actor, should be understood as a bearer of past, present and future knowledge, integral to its planetary cycle of temporalities through which it may manifest itself, for instance, as a dinosaur, a child or a lake (Elkin Postila, 2019, 2021, 2023). This line of reasoning has been developed by several critical feminist new materialist scholars (see Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016) who work within an ethico-onto-epistemological framework that recognises multiple forms of knowledge and realities as relationally produced by both human and more-than-human actors. Hence, water as a participatory connoisseur is an example of connoisseurship due to its omnipresence in the environment, and among humans and the more-than-human.

When educational research and social conversations involve children as connoisseurs – as individuals with knowledges and experiences of local practices, problems and matters of concern – the approach aligns closely with previous feminist methodologies where researchers and participants, notably adults, intervene in each other's practices to investigate differentiated common matters of concern. Hence, the complexity of the common matters of concern is investigated in more than one way and by more than one discipline, which always impacts on how the concern itself is understood (Stengers, 2023).

The research approach of children as connoisseurs emerged conceptually through close dialogue between Stengers’s (2010, 2011, 2015, 2018, 2023) theories and our own research (Elkin Postila, 2019, 2021, 2023; Elkin Postila and Eriksson, 2025; Palmer, 2016, 2022), and has involved a focus on the role of the research and that of the researcher. To quote Stengers and Despret (2014: 39), ‘a good scientist cannot be summed up as collecting good facts or better facts but requires learning how to address those that are being interrogated’. In this article, this involves considering the child-in-research as an actor, a connoisseur, when figuring out how to answer the research questions already posed in the Introduction: How is children's connoisseurship manifested and made relevant within the context of research? How can this be considered a way for children to participate in research?

It has also involved us as researchers refusing ‘to separate their [our] pursuit of knowledge from the question of who produces this knowledge and how it is produced’ (Stengers and Despret, 2014: 29). The main point in relation to research with children is to acknowledge children's situated knowledges, the children themselves, how they produce knowledge and that their questions, methods and knowledges have value, and they matter. In following Stengers and Despret (2014: 38), this implies doing research in unconventional ways and ‘learn[ing] “with it”, to understand its functioning in the most intimate sense of the term, to interrogate it while accepting its own exigent conditions’. In relation to the focus of the project reported here, this involves an adult researcher learning with the problem, the children and water.

Previous research

This article acknowledges an extensive and multifaceted body of research across various scientific disciplines involving children, a complexity recently outlined by Lenz Taguchi and Bodén (2025). They provide a comprehensive overview of how children may participate in research using the prepositions on, to, with, for and by, drawing on Bodén (2021), to illustrate diverse methodological approaches and their implications. Lenz Taguchi and Bodén (2025) emphasise the significance of the relationships between researchers and participants in shaping the research process. Within ECE research informed by feminist posthuman (Braidotti, 2022) and new materialist (Coole and Frost, 2010) theorising, these issues have also been explored across a range of contexts. For example, Eriksson (2020) has, together with toddlers, explored how toddlers’ preschool practices can be relocated within urban environments and places; Gustafsson (2021) investigated how she and preschool toddlers engaged in each other's dance practices; Hickey-Moody et al. (2021) considered children's citizenship in relation to climate change; Murris (2016) addressed the transformation of teaching and education; Somerville and Powell (2019) explored alternative understandings and knowing human and non-human entanglement in the Anthropocene; and Taylor (2013) focused on intertwined human and non-human relationships.

From a feminist posthuman (Braidotti, 2022) and new materialist (Coole and Frost, 2010) perspective, research is not a neutral or detached endeavour but a situated, relational and affective practice. Within this framework, ethical responsibility emerges through entangled encounters between human and more-than-human actors. Previous educational research has addressed the ethical implications of involving children as co-researchers. For instance, Bradbury-Jones and Taylor (2015) highlighted the ethical, methodological and practical complexities of such involvement, while Lundy et al. (2011) advocated for children's participation in shaping research questions, methods and dissemination. More recently, Reinertsen (2024) has elaborated on the political child; and Elkin Postila (2021) has problematised knowledge production as an exclusively academic pursuit by inviting preschool-aged children to activate knowledge in situ, within the relational and material conditions of their everyday worlds.

This article draws on the field of research involving children as both participants and co-researchers while also proposing a development of what participation in research entails, based on theoretical assumptions that position research as a situated, relational and affective practice. From this perspective, framing the child as connoisseur leads to a critical reassessment of research, challenging dominant epistemological assumptions about its purpose, the authority of the researcher and the interpretation of ethical norms (Elkin Postila, 2021; Elkin Postila and Eriksson, 2025). Accordingly, we draw attention to the child as connoisseur and their connoisseurship as emergent and reciprocal in the water project as a means of unfolding both the potentiality and consequences of this methodological approach to participation in research. We do this with the aim of showing how children's connoisseurship, at different scales, is expressed in a research project about water through a story of the connoisseur child in research.

Methodological and analytical approach to the child as connoisseur

In continuing to reflect on the child as connoisseur, it is important to address the project's situated context and empirical data, as well as the analytical method of storytelling as outlined in the following section.

Situating the empirical data

The water project was carried out as a posthumanist intervention study (see Alaimo, 1994; Braidotti, 2022; Lenz Taguchi, 2012) where Elkin Postila installed herself as a researcher in the ongoing practices of two preschools, which also included preschool children's practices of investigating, exploring and asking questions in relation to water. The methodological approach involved an openness to being affected by and subject to intervention by other human and more-than-human practices, and differentiated common matters of concern and engagement in the concerns of others (Elkin Postila, 2021; Elkin Postila and Eriksson, 2025).

During the project, Elkin Postila and the preschool children explored and investigated local environmental issues concerning water. The research process was based on the children's situated, here-and-now knowledges, local water and environmental issues as well as multidisciplinary knowledges and methods from geoscience (cf. Inkpen and Wilson, 2013) and ECE, mostly inspired by the Reggio Emilia philosophy (Vecchi, 2010). Being capable of situating oneself and what one knows, and actively linking knowledges to questions that one poses and ways of working that respond to those questions, implies being connected to the existence of others who ask different questions, importing those questions into the situation differently and relating to the situation in a way that resist appropriation in the name of any kind of abstract ideal (Elkin Postila, 2021, 2023; Elkin Postila and Eriksson, 2025).

Methodologically, this article engages with two sets of empirical data. The first was generated by children during their walks and explorations of water, in collaboration with Elkin Postila and other more-than-human actors. These data include the preschool children and Elkin Postila's collaboratively created digital images and films, drawings and notes. The second set comprises Elkin Postila's own stories, reflections, notes and, at times, conceptual and theoretical annotations recorded in the project diary. However, the boundaries between these two sets of data are fluid, as the children's stories are embedded within Elkin Postila's narratives and vice versa. Together, these data sets have been composed and continually re/decomposed into a story that emerged through encounters among various human and more-than-human actors (Elkin Postila, 2021; Palmer and Elkin Postila, 2024). As such, the resulting story is a collaborative creation, always in the process of becoming, in what Haraway (2016) describes as ‘making-with’ and ‘telling-with’. Throughout the storytelling process, ethical considerations were made to acknowledge the children's connoisseurship and authorship while also acknowledging the connoisseurship of other actors, such as water. These considerations included, for example, collaborative revisions of the data sets by Author 1 and the preschool children during morning meetings at the preschools. During these sessions, participants engaged in dialogue, listened to one another's feedback and continuously adapted the stories, such as Noah's story below. In the following section, we present a composed story of the connoisseur child in research, explored across multiple scales within the context of the project about water.

Reading data at different scales: Storytelling as method

Storytelling, mostly inspired by Haraway (2016) and Tsing (2015), is used to re/decompose empirical material from the water project. Tsing (2015) emphasises storytelling as a scientific method foregrounding minor, local narratives often overlooked within dominant modes of knowledge production. We align with critical feminist scholars such as Osgood and Andersen (2019) and Taylor et al. (2012), who advocate for alternative approaches to scientific inquiry through co-constructed, situated narratives that challenge conventional assumptions about who is recognised as a knower or producer of knowledge. Alongside the theoretical framework and the project's emerging methodology, we use storytelling to weave together the situated knowledges of preschool children and ourselves into an empirical story. The study foregrounds children's questions, practices and methods, closely aligned with Swedish preschool pedagogy (cf. Williams et al., 2018), often inspired by the Reggio Emilia philosophy (Palmer, 2022), where storytelling engages with social, ethical and political concerns. Drawing on Tsing (2015), we conceptualise scales as a methodological tool for noticing and engaging with complexity, wherein overlapping scales bring diverse understandings into relation. As Tsing (2012: 508) notes, scales function as ‘an analytic apparatus that helps us notice nonscalable phenomena’, shaped by the relational dynamics within specific projects or events. We understand water as a nonscalable phenomenon, or actor, resisting standardisation, containment and linear categorisation across fixed spatial and temporal dimensions (see Chen et al., 2015). Drawing on Tsing's (2015) theorising on scales, water eludes uniform abstraction and instead demands attention to its situated, relational and contingent manifestations. Within preschool contexts, scales entangle different scientific disciplinary knowledges, fantasies and fabulations; methodological approaches; and epistemological and ontological considerations. Hence, scales in preschool contexts are relational and intertwined in ontological relationality (Lenz Taguchi, 2022; Lenz Taguchi and Elkin Postila, 2024). We propose that children's connoisseurship in research becomes perceptible across multiple scales – the intimate-particular, the face-to-face, the local and the global – as they act, think, question and engage through encounters with various actors, including the more-than-human water.

A composed story of the connoisseur child in research

The water project began during winter, with heavy snowfall and temperatures below zero degrees Celsius. The children brought water with them to the preschool: in solid form as icicles and as ‘dirty’ snow; they brought fish tank water; tap water; salty solutions mixtures; they brought water from a cove in the Baltic Sea not far away from the preschool; they brought water from ditches and lakes collected in jars and plastic bottles, in overall pockets, buckets, plastic bags and with their hands. We started to notice, inquire and think about the puddles under winter boots and winter overalls in the hallway, the water in the toilet, the mist on the inside of the windows and the drying cabinets, water which we had not noticed before. The anonymous water in jars, bottles, buckets, on the floor, on windows and in the toilet slowly turned into a method for further inquiries of different waters.

Involving the child as connoisseur entails engaging with a diverse range of questions and possibilities that emerge through relations with various human and more-than-human actors. These relational encounters occur across multiple scales, shaped by children's engagements with water. Drawing on Tsing's (2012, 2015) concept of scale, this approach traces relational encounters across intimate, local and global scales. These included the intimate-particular, as water was cupped in hands; the intimate face-to-face, evident in the close examination of puddles beneath winter boots; the local, as snow was noticed on pavements; and the global, as children contrasted the availability of clean tap water with the consequences of contaminated drinking water. Hence, children's connoisseurship is not only embodied and affective but at the same time situated and relationally intertwined with ecology and social and economic aspects. By tracing these scaled interactions, we begin to understand connoisseurship as a distributed, relational practice that challenges conventional, individualised notions of knowledge production in ECE research (Elkin Postila, 2021). Starting from water as a phenomenon across scales, further inquiries and methods emerged, connecting to diverse fields of knowledge such as engineering, biology and chemistry, as well as to social concerns including economics and global inequalities in access to clean water, particularly between the Global North and Global South.

There exists a multifocality with which the researcher must remain engaged; it is neither a singular inquiry nor a single method, there are many, and there is no ‘single right answer’ (Stengers, 2018: 3). As researchers, this implies adhering to a process of difficult choices involving attentiveness, hesitation and inquiry. The approach of including the partner as a connoisseur in research involves aspects of time. It will take time to find what matters and is important, at multiple scales simultaneously, within a group of partners. More so, the approach involves valuing one another's methods, knowledges and engagements (Stengers, 2010, 2011); hence, difference matters and is important to acknowledge and pay attention to. Over time, some matters of concern turned into common matters of concern (Stengers, 2010); for example, the pressing issue of contaminated drinking water, rooted in the lived experiences of some of the children, was explored through a range of diverse methods. However, addressing such matters involves a delicate balancing act, requiring the researcher to navigate complex ethical considerations. Whose matter of concern is being prioritised? Does it originate from adults or is it generated by the children themselves? If it is child-generated, whose concerns are being explored or questioned, and which issues emerge as urgent and significant?

Stengers (2010, 2011) argues that there must be some kind of evaluation to establish the quality of research, an evaluation that should be performed collectively among the individuals involved in the research. To add to the complexity, there is a multitude of actors to engage with – relational actors – all of whom are emergent in relation to matters of concern. In the project, the actors included other children, the researcher, water, amphibians, manhole covers, water pipes, day water tunnels, freshwater lakes, plants, the hydrological cycle, economics and the social context, all simultaneously acting in intricate relationships with other actors (Elkin Postila, 2021, 2023). These relational actors act simultaneously at different scales – the intimate-particular, the intimate-face-to-face, the local and the global – when the individual children pose their questions or use their methods to investigate matters of concern. This for example, involved two children's lived experiences of drought leading to other children's investigations of how to live in areas with drought as humans, plants and insects; and to investigations about groundwater, desertification, the formation of lakes, water filtration, sanitation and water infrastructure (Elkin Postila, 2021). Children's lived experiences can be understood through various scales, each revealing forms of connoisseurship that differ from those of adult researchers. At the intimate-particular scale, children's connoisseurship was articulated through their immediate, personal interactions and observations, encompassing sensory experiences, emotions and individual responses to their surroundings. The preschool children attended to details often overlooked by adults, such as the varied patterns on manhole covers, or raised ethical and moral concerns that were challenging for Elkin Postila to address, including issues related to disease and malnutrition caused by drought (Elkin Postila, 2021, 2022). By doing so, they drew attention to water-related concerns at both local and global scales. By recognising and valuing the different scales of children's lived experiences, researchers can more effectively include and support the distinctive connoisseurship that children contribute to the research process. This approach not only affirms children's knowledge and insights but also enriches the research with diverse and often underrepresented perspectives. The story continues:

Both the preschool children and the researcher documented what they found meaningful during their explorations of water. The available tools shaped the modes of documentation: digital tablets with cameras, shared or personal project diaries or loose paper with drawing materials. Documentation became situated practices of selection and doing and thinking with the project. These practices were personal and varied; some children imitated others, while some developed their own approaches. Noah, for example, experimented with the tablet's camera settings, slow motion, time-lapse, video, still images, zoom, filters and music, creating films from their photos. Documenting also involved deciding what to keep or delete, seeking consent from peers and drawing on existing knowledge of filming and photography as each child responded to what was documented and to those involved in the process, as acts of ethical response-ability.

The approaches to constructing and producing data together were productive as they inspired others to do, explore and pose questions, drawing on what had previously been made. The different modes of documentation, including the different camera and time settings, or temporal scales, can be understood as different ways through which children can articulate and express their connoisseurship. Hence, the children's documentation practices were not merely technical but situated, relational and affective within their own engagement. In line with Stengers’s (2018, 2023) theorising of the connoisseur, children's documentation practices can be seen as forms of connoisseurship: embodied, situated and responsive to the more-than-human-world. Contrasting documentation and data production as acts of recording, they emerged as relational, aligning with Tsing's (2015) notion of ‘arts of noticing’ – attuning to specific encounters. However, during the-doing-together-and-same, both the children and Elkin Postila had to take turns while taking photos, making films and deleting them if they did not turn out as the children and Elkin Postila felt they should. Consequently, this meant that the child-produced data were at times deleted even though Elkin Postila found them to be important and valuable to the research project. Moreover, the process of deciding what to keep or delete, seeking consent from peers and drawing on prior knowledge of filming and photography constituted acts of ethical response-ability (Haraway, 2016), where children responded not only to what was documented but also to those entangled in the process. These practices reflect a posthuman ethics (Braidotti, 2022) grounded in attentiveness, care and situated accountability. In this way, documentation became a timeplace (see Haraway, 2016), a hub, of both epistemic and ethical engagement, where knowledge was not extracted but co-composed through intra-actions among children, technologies, materials and environments.

It therefore became important to ponder ‘who produces this knowledge and how it is produced’ (Stengers and Despret, 2014: 29, original emphasis). These questions transgress more than the scale of producing data in a research project as a partaking child, they transgress the different legal documents that address research involving humans, specifically preschool-aged children, and methods of inquiry and data production. The involvement of the child-as-data-producer includes taking time to ponder not only the hauntedness of ‘missing’ data, data which Elkin Postila considered important, but also the data children produced and which they and Elkin Postila considered to be badly executed or not showing what the data were intended to show (Elkin Postila, 2021). Moreover, undertaking documentation is a necessary condition for children to be able to express their connoisseurship when participating in research, but this meant, of course, dealing with the ethical framework guiding research involving humans and children (Swedish Research Council, 2024). The following part ends the story:

As part of the project, Elkin Postila installed herself in the two preschools’ ongoing and present outdoor activities and practices, such as explorations of the preschool yard, walkways and woodlands as well as explorative pedagogical working methods and pedagogical documentation practices as a means of establishing opportunities for meetings between herself and children; and their different research and preschool practices as a means of doing and thinking together. The project also involved meetings with water specialists, water engineers and water technicians - experts on water's infrastructure. Thus, in the meetings with the preschoolers, the researcher and the water specialists who supervise the intricate out-of-sight infrastructure of drinking water and sanitary methods, inquiries emerged, changed and produced new and other inquiries and methods.

Situated engagement served as opportunities for encounters between the researcher, preschool children, water specialists and the more-than-human waters, and between different ways of doing and knowing. As Stengers (2010, 2011) writes, meetings and encounters are about making each other intelligible and understandable. In relation to the above, this meant negotiating what is urgent and important to investigate together (among preschool children, researcher, water specialists and the more-than-human) and separately, with which methods and in what way (Elkin Postila, 2021). These encounters brought together water, preschool children, the researcher and technical experts in ways that disrupted conventional hierarchies of expertise. In Tsing's (2015: 27) terms, these were ‘contamination as collaboration’, assemblages of diverse actors whose interactions produced unexpected lines of inquiry. Questions did not follow a linear trajectory but shifted and multiplied through the relational dynamics of each encounter. For instance, children's curiosity about puddles and pipes led to discussions about underground water systems, which in turn prompted new methods of documentation and experimentation. Hence, for children to express their connoisseurship within research contexts, researcher-child-timeplace encounters are essential for negotiation through face-to-face relationships that be both intimate and particular. Rather than imposing a fixed research agenda, the project unfolded through what Stengers (2018) might describe as an ecology of practices, a space where different practices (scientific, pedagogical and experiential) coexisted without being reduced to a single logic. In this way, the water project became a space, or hub, of situated knowledge production where inquiry was shaped by the entanglements of human and more-than-human actors, and where the boundaries between researcher, participant and environment were continually reconfigured. Negotiations or encounters with academic hierarchies, such as those between the natural sciences and educational sciences, as well as age-related hierarchies, such as adult–child relations, necessitate critical discussions about which forms of knowledge are deemed more valid, and the criteria by which the validity of different knowledges is assessed. Stengers (2010, 2011) argues that meetings are about valuing the doings and thinking of others, and allowing one's own thoughts and doings to be valued to create credible meaning-making and reality-making that can be jointly evaluated; thus, paying attention to and noticing differences as productive forces of inquiry and doing otherwise, for example, in research. In addition, when including children as connoisseurs in the research group, they become actors of resistance against taken-for-granted scientific knowledges, and partake in the production of what Haraway (1988) reasons are ‘situated knowledges’. Hence, knowledge is always partial and embodied, as we know and perceive the world from where we are, culturally, historically and physically.

The child as connoisseur in research: Multiscalar perspectives

This article has engaged with the extensive and evolving body of research involving children, particularly within the field of ECE and through the lens of feminist posthuman and new materialist theorising. Building on this foundation, the water project became a situated and relational proposition, attuned to the child as a kännande kännare, a connoisseur; hence a sensing and knowing participant within a research context. The children involved did not merely participate, they shaped the inquiry through their own situated methods, concerns and local knowledges of water. Their engagement extended beyond fixed scientific disciplinary boundaries and age-based hierarchies, operating instead through multiscalar and ontological relationalities (Lenz Taguchi, 2022; Lenz Taguchi and Elkin Postila, 2024). In doing so, they challenged dominant epistemological assumptions about the nature of research, the authority of the researcher and the scope of ethical responsibility (Elkin Postila, 2021; Elkin Postila and Eriksson, 2025).

The concept of the connoisseur, as developed here, positions children as experts in their own practices formulating questions, sustaining inquiry and collaborating with researchers, educators, peers and more-than-human actors. While not researchers in the traditional sense, these children were knowledgeable partners and actors in dialogue. As Stengers (2018) argues, research requires connoisseurs, those who are intimately familiar with the practices and contexts under investigation. In the project, the children emerged as the significant connoisseurs, together with water, shaping the project's emerging ethico-onto-epistemological methods through their encounters with water specialists, Author 1, peers, educators and the more-than-human. However, this approach to research is not without its ethical complexities. It requires attentiveness to children's specific knowledges and a commitment to reciprocal, situated relationships in which expertise is understood as fluid and contingent, shifting according to the relevance of knowledge to the task at hand. Ethical response-ability (Haraway, 2016), therefore, must be ongoing and inclusive, extending beyond researchers and children to encompass the more-than-human world.

In returning to the questions that have guided this article – How is children's connoisseurship manifested and made relevant within the context of research? How can this be considered a way for children to participate in research? – the project has illuminated children's attentiveness to often-overlooked phenomena, such as manhole cover patterns and window condensation, as well as the ethical dimensions of waterborne diseases. Recognising and valuing these engagements and concerns enable researchers to support the distinctive epistemological contributions children offer, best encouraged through close, relational encounters where knowledge is co-constructed and children's experiences are treated as meaningful and consequential. The involvement of children as data producers calls for sustained ethical considerations, not only regarding the absence of certain data important to an adult researcher but also the unpredictability and richness of children's contributions. Within this framework, documentation emerges as a relational, ethical and affective practice, far from a neutral or technical act, through which children express their connoisseurship and render their concerns visible. This challenges extractive models of data collection, advocating instead for co-compositional approaches that honour children's temporal, situated and evolving knowledge-making. Drawing on Stengers’s notion of mutual recognition, the project affirms the value of diverse epistemologies and the importance of reciprocal engagements in research. By embracing difference as a generative force, the project not only contests dominant research paradigms but also foregrounds children's situated knowledge, methods and ethical engagements. Ultimately, this evolving and sensitive form of connoisseurship, shaped through ongoing, entangled relations among children, educators, researchers and the more-than-human world, reimagines research with young children as a collaborative, ethical and situated practice of becoming-with, rather than a process of knowledge extraction.