Solidarity has received recent scholarly attention both in the field of education and beyond. Sleeter & Soriani (2012) show that in education, while the concept of solidarity is conceptualized in conjunction with other related concepts such as social justice and equity, the tendency is to not clearly define it.  We see this as an advantage as it opens up perspectives to openly explore how participants make sense of and relate to this concept. Solidarity has been defined as building community among children or youth, especially in school settings, as empathy across differences or as civic virtue or identification with one’s own marginalized group (Sleeter & Soriani, 2012). One of the characteristics of the concept of solidarity is its relationality, its “amongness”. In this case, it is seen as a  relational process modeled by the context (Gaztambide-Fernández,  Brant & Desai, 2022). This means that solidarity always emerges as a phenomenon among people that relate to each other in one way or another. Another characteristic of the concept is the contextualization to the setting of the studies, meaning natural, geographical, cultural, intergenerational, socio-political layers of real life’ issues and experiences. 

Following Sleeter & Soriani (2012) we consider that investigating solidarity in educational settings can lead us to question “mainstream knowledge and interpretations” of  students, and place their perspective and meanings above conventional practices and ways of understanding. Another concept in relation to which solidarity is used is sustainability and future orientation (Torbjönsson & Molin, 2015), an association that leads us toward looking at  solidarity as a civic virtue for participatory citizenship. From this perspective, youth and children, as well as teachers can learn to see humanity as “sharing common concerns”. Based on this conceptualization Santora (2003) discusses how she teaches her students to become participatory citizens in a diverse community/society. She understands it as reciprocal understanding, based on trust that goes beyond individual interests that helps students experience “selfhood, diversity and community”.  Yet, solidarity can also co-exist tensely with notions of diversity as it is generally built on a common sense of belonging to a community (be it via citizenship or of other shared characteristics). Children have often been represented as passive recipients of solidarity, for example through humanitarian representations that show them as ‘speechless victims’ (Mallki, 1996) or as objects of teachers’ solidarity practices. However, the new sociology of childhood (James, Jenks & Prout, 1998;  Epstein et al, 2006) has problematized the representation of children as passive subjects, recentering children’s perspectives and agency as a way of overcoming adultist approaches to how children understand the world around them. Alanen’s (2014) intergenerational approach of childhood highlights children’s co-participation in the daily reproduction and/or transformation of intergenerational practices.

Creating a context for children to reflect on relational acts of solidarity can help overcome the adultist perspective on childhood and the distancing, hierarchical perspectives on solidarity so common in the contemporary European imaginary (Chouliaraki, 2013), and further our knowledge on children`s particular understandings.   In our project we ask: How do children understand and engage in practices of solidarity in the present situation in Europe? The present situation is marked by both the consequences of the inflation and price crises that risk rendering vulnerable large segments of the population, as well as the war on Ukraine and the broader context of looming environmental crises. That is why our case studies are situated in Romania, a country with historically high levels of economic inequality and of poverty in a European perspective (Gazibar & Giulgea, 2019), moreover Romania is a neighboring country to Ukraine that has since the onset of the war received high numbers of refugees.

Doing research with children in school settings as adults on the abstract topic of solidarity will bring about specific challenges for the research design: Firstly, the school relationship is a hierarchical relationship between children/students and adult/teachers. As we will be conducting research in schools, it is necessary to think about strategies to reinscribe the researcher - child relationship beyond a teacher - student relationship as part of building a rapport with participants. This is needed as the expectation of transfers of knowledge sanctioned by power from teachers/adults to students may result in children seeking the approval of adults and thus presenting perspectives they consider to be pleasing to adults or avoiding altogether to express themselves (James et al, 1998). In order to go beyond these dynamics, a pedagogy of solidarity (Gaztambide-Fernandez et al, 2022) and an investigation into the meaning-making processes of children needs to engage dialogically with questions of social and political change. However, as an abstract term that children may not have explicitly encountered before the participation in the research process, researching solidarity may require educating the participants about what solidarity can mean (for a similar approach see Dekort et al, 2022). This would involve both transferring knowledge to children and receiving knowledge transfer from them. We seek to create an interactive context with children (aged 11-13), students of lower secondary schools in different regions and socio-economic contexts in Romania. Groups of 12-15 participants will be formed. We will engage progressively with participants over several days: starting with open ended questions and interactions based on child-friendly methodologies and continue to progressively structure input. Complementarily, research with children has been known to depend on the ability of researchers to contextualize their questions in the everyday lives of children (Pyle, 2013). Special attention should be paid to starting with imaginaries put forward by students. Secondly, the language asymmetry between adults and children may inhibit children’s participation. Therefore we chose to use visual methods, both based on photography and drawing. Drawings may reveal both what is present and what is absent in children’s imaginaries and everyday lives (Frith, Riley, Archer, & Gleeson, 2005; Søndergaard & Reventlow 2019). While photo-elicitation (Harper 2002, Clark-Ibanez, 2004) and photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) may lead to channeling representations of solidarity towards concrete social and political change. Furthermore, interviews with children in groups and individually will help us understand how they make sense of solidarity.

As part of our research, we will produce both textual (transcripts of individual/ group interview, photovoice/photo-elicitation/ drawing discussion recordings, researchers of ethnographic diaries) and visual data (in terms of photographs and drawings) in three different research contexts (lower secondary schools in socio-economically marginalized and privileged communities, in rural/urban areas or closer to the Ukrainian borders/ with high percentage of displaced students). The data will be analyzed looking at tentative questions: 1) How is solidarity understood by children? 2) How do diversity and solidarity relate in the imaginaries of children? What is seen as a legitimate basis for solidarity? 3) How do children conceptualize social, ethnic and geographic distance? How do these imaginaries relate to solidarity? 4) How do children conceptualize the future? What solidarity imaginaries emerge in relation to the future? 5) How do children conceptualize social and political change? What role does solidarity play in these understandings? 6) How do children engage in practices of solidarity? How do they describe these engagements? How do they describe the engagements of others (children, adults, etc)? After a collaborative process of data-analysis through coding based on dialogue between the researchers that have collected the data, we plan to engage in member-checking to see whether our analysis appears plausible to the children participating in the process or to others in similar situations. Finally, we do not exclude developing alternative modes of dissemination of messages that will result from our inquiry together with the participants in each setting and beyond, but this will depend on their willingness to engage in such a process.

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