My PhD research explores how children aged seven to 14 in the United Kingdom respond to and engage with collective biographies of women published from 2016 onwards. In 2016 these types of books began to emerge with exciting vivacity, with Kate Pankhurst's Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World (2016) selling more than 52,000 copies by the summer of 2017 (Flood 2017: para. 2). I suggest that the publication of these books has coincided with an intensification of academic and public interest in young people's engagement with feminist ideas. The findings should thus be of interest to teachers, youth workers, education practitioners and parents/guardians looking to explore pedagogical tools for addressing gender-related topics with children.

I was in the first year of my PhD programme and finalizing my application for ethical approval when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United Kingdom. Like many qualitative educational studies, the project was predicated on face-to-face interactions in an educational setting. The distancing measures implemented to contain the spread of COVID-19 necessitated that I find a new way to explore children's engagement with the texts, remotely.

The pandemic prompted me to traverse different disciplinary fields in search of alternative methods that I could draw upon and repurpose. I consequently devised a ‘reader response toolkit’. Many ethical questions and issues have permeated this entire process, and grappling with them has been an essential aspect of the project's redesign. Here, I include those that have been most salient in the development of this new research method. The short interval between the project's redesign and the writing of this chapter means that the method has not yet been used in the field. Therefore, instead of analysing its efficacy I conclude by reflecting on some of the interesting questions that have evolved during the process of devising this method.

Disorientation and unfamiliar spaces

The project is grounded within an interpretivist paradigm that frames reader response (Rosenblatt, 1978) within broader queer, feminist and poststructuralist theories (Butler, 2004; Bond Stockton, 2009). Premised on notions of fluidity and crossing over, these theories seek to disrupt hierarchical binaries and assumptions regarding what counts as ‘knowledge’ and who counts as ‘knowers’.