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In the years 2016–2019, in collaboration with primary school students from Wrocław, Poland, the authors endeavoured to implement participatory methods in children’s literature studies. Their collaborations with these children resulted in the formation of an intergenerational research team and the publication of two peer-reviewed articles co-written with child researchers. As their thinking about child-led research has gravitated towards approaches accentuating the value of co-thinking, they have grown convinced of the potential of participatory research to counterbalance the adultism prevailing in children’s literature studies. Building on the authors’ two participatory projects: ‘Children’s Voices in the Polish Canon Wars: Participatory Research in Action’ (Chawar et al., 2018) and ‘Productive Remembering of Polish Childhoods: Child–Adult Memory-Work with the School Literary Canon’ (Deszcz-Tryhubczak et al., 2019), this chapter offers a meta-critical reflection on the practical and ethical challenges of working on a research paper co-authored by young collaborators. They focus on issues linked to child–adult co-authorship, such as anonymity concerns, the ethics of representations, time pressures, and institutional challenges. They propose that the key to reassessing the status of child-led research in academia lies in accepting the ‘messiness’ of participatory research, treating it as a constant work in progress rather than a final outcome or product, and shifting away from the more rigid format of academic writing towards a collectivistic and free-flowing narrative.

The United Nations (UN) actively incorporated new media as a tool for consultation and agenda setting during the Millennium Development Goal (MDG)–Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) transition. As global actors shifted their attention to the sustainable development goals, the UN and its partners scaled up their digital engagement with civil society, multinational agencies, and country-level stakeholders to inform the post-2015 agenda. This chapter explored how the UN integrated Twitter into the post-2015 consultation and how the UN Women and the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative used Twitter to construct and diffuse girls’ education policy discourse during the MDG–SDG transition.