The young child as connoisseur in research

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.