Cisgender concerns the coherence of gender, over time, in perception, and through actions and identities. This article explores cisgender through the concept of cisnormativity - the normalisation of cisgendering - and its operation in spoken and multimodal interactions. Cisnormativity, like other normativities, is often conveyed implicitly and as such goes unnoticed in interaction. Through analysis of interaction at the micro level, this article shows how cisnormativity is produced and reproduced by speakers. The data comes from recordings of 23 children, mainly aged 5-8, in conversations with their parents and using an interactive app, on topics concerning families and relationships. The results show how cisnormativity is produced by the participants using various linguistic and communicative resources, such as smiles and laughter, evaluations, accounts, and the sequential organisation of interaction. Cisnormativity also interacts with other normativities, notably heteronormativity, in the data. Challenges to cisnormativity are shown to be temporary and situated.

Contemporary considerations of childhood research ethics recognize children’s competence and agency, their rights to be informed about research, and their capabilities to negotiate participation. There is also a recognition of children’s assent as on-going and formed in the relationship with the researcher. Drawing on two different data sets, we investigate information and assent as they appear in child-researcher, child-child and child-parent interactions. We argue for the need to pay attention to participants’ own meaning-making with regard to informed assent, and show how the presence or non-presence of the researcher in data collection may affect information and assent.

Starting from the assumption that research design is itself productive, in that it helps to create social realities and thereby the research results that it aims to investigate, the paper discusses a number of dilemmas of ethics and design in the research process. The discussion is illustrated by examples from a research project on child-parent conversations about families and relationships, which involved the development of a tablet app for data collection and that took a norm-critical approach to design. The discussion focuses specifically on dilemmas of rights and risks. The paper argues for reflexive research processes and active decision making in research design, as ways of tackling dilemmas of ethics and design that may not always be foreseeable or easily solvable.

The aim of the project LekBot (Ljunglöf, P. et al. 2011) was to develop a robot to support children with severe disabilities (communicative, cognitive, physical) in play with peers that follow a typical pattern of development. Since children with disabilities have few opportunities to play independently of an adult assistant and on equal terms with other children, and more often take a passive role in interaction with more advanced children (Siperstein et al. 1997; Hestenes & Carroll 2000), we developed a speaking robot, the LekBot.

Two groups of children, at two different pre-schools were video recorded during play, in all 2x12 play sessions. In each group there was one child with cerebral palsy and one peer, as well as a teacher assistant. A previous study (Ferm et al. 2015) focused on the children’s experience of play in this situation. The children with disabilities took an active role in some cases and there was collaboration between the children as well as enjoyment of play. But there were also times when one of the children lost interest in the play.

The present study focuses on the adult’s actions during the play sessions. We will discuss the impact of the actions of the teacher assistant and the researchers during children’s play with the robot. In our talk we will present two examples. The first shows how the researcher intervenes when the children don’t take equal turns in commanding the robot. In the second, where the peer obviously lost interest in the play, we discuss how the assistant works hard in trying to involve the child in active play again. The analytic method is CA-inspired sequential analysis of transcribed video recordings.

The researchers and assistants in the recorded play situations seemed all to be aware of the goal of the project, i.e. to help a child with disabilities to play more actively together with peers. The idea of taking turns was also emphasized by the adults during the children's play. The results show how different linguistic channels are used (speech, signs, gesture and gaze, as well as symbol charts) when adults target the children’s turn-taking, request that they should talk and listen to each other and cooperate in playing together. 

Research regarding the family and children and research on language and sexuality are two areas where research ethics poses specific challenges which currently attract researchers’ attention. As Eldén (2013) argues, research on and with children makes apparent a possible contradiction between an interest to give the child a voice and ethical considerations of protecting the child, a contradiction that has consequences for the research carried out. That ethics and access to participants are generally problematic in language and sexuality research is witnessed by Mortensen (2015), who argues for creative solutions regarding informed consent together with a ‘principle of care’ in her study of adults. Recognising that research methods are themselves productive, Sparrman (2014) investigates how children and sexuality is produced as a sensitive issue in a research project.

In this talk we contribute to this body of research by addressing issues of ethics and children’s access in language and sexuality research, based on data collection that both takes place in and concerns the family. In the “Daddy, daddy, child” project, talk between children and their parents concerning families and relationships, marriage and weddings, living together, and love, was elicited and recorded using a tablet computer app. In accordance with the Ethical Review Act of Sweden, informed consent was asked of the parents, whereas it was left to the parents to inform and get consent from their children in ways that they themselves chose. Using detailed analysis informed by Conversation Analysis, we investigate how children negotiate access in the sense of how they opt in to and out of research locally throughout the conversations. We include examples of ways in which they orient to being recorded, treat features of interaction as sensitive, and show their unwillingness to participate. We also include analyses of how recording sessions are ended.