A ‘sense of failure’? Everydayness and research ethics

A key legacy of much recent theorising in Anglo-American Human Geography has been the realisation that the ‘excess’ and ‘messiness’ of (too-easily and too-often overlooked) everyday events, geographies and experiences ought to have far-reaching conceptual and methodological implications. The aim of this paper is to elaborate some (as yet relatively implicit) ethical dimensions of this challenge, via a consideration of one particular notion and domain of ethics (research ethics in Human Geography) and, then, via one specific case study (re-presenting moments from my experiences of – and small ‘failures’ in – conducting qualitative research with children, as an adult male, in the UK, in 2000–2002).