My cosmos, my opportunities, our spaces: Methodological reflections on photographic perspectives of young adopted children on their (new) environments

Despite much discourse on growing-up environment as a central dimension of “child-well-being”, little is still known about why, how, and where meanings are created in it for children. For despite ongoing efforts in childhood research, children's perspectives remain methodologically poorly embedded. Therefore, the author of this paper asks about relevance settings in children’s lifeworld - derived exemplarily from adopted preschool children’s environments. For this purpose, the author sets the demanding methodological balancing act between trivialising and exaggerating childhood in the research process as a central challenge. He makes it possible by a visual immersion in photographs taken by young children. In doing so, the arguments sometimes push into the hybrid and transformative.