Amplifying voices, dismantling silences: Ethical praxis in multimodal child-centered research

Research involving children and youth, particularly those from culturally sensitive and vulnerable backgrounds, presents intricate ethical, methodological, and epistemological challenges. While acknowledging parents’ legitimate protective role, unjustified parental gatekeeping often regulates access to minors’ participation and can create tensions between adult-centric authority and minors’ evolving capacity for agency. These ambiguities get further obscured when minors’ self-identified experiences and fluid identities—especially in multilingual and culturally diverse contexts—diverge from parental assumptions or hegemonic discourses surrounding identity and autonomy. In this paper, I critically interrogate these tensions, foreground the limitations of procedural ethics when faced with emergent obstacles, and advocate for adaptive, participant-centered frameworks rooted in dialogic engagement. Drawing on three research projects that I conducted in Canada, I demonstrate how child-engaging, multimodal methodologies can facilitate semiosis and empower minors to articulate their lived realities while safeguarding their emotional safety and agency. In this regard, intersectional reflexivity emerges as a constitutive and vital framework, allowing me to address power asymmetries and ethical dilemmas with situational responsivity. This paper reconceptualizes consent as an iterative and relational process rather than a static obligation by foregrounding minors’ narratives and respecting their welfare. Ultimately, the study contributes to advancing ethically robust and transformative research practices that amplify marginalized voices, dismantle systemic inequities, foster nuanced, inclusive engagements with vulnerable participants, and challenge dominant epistemological hierarchies and centering minors’ perspectives as constitutive of broader social discourse.