Exploring the Potential of Worldviews in Researching Childhoods and Families: A Case of Sufism as a Research Framework

This paper seeks to explore an innovative use of Sufism as a research procedure in the context of childhood and family studies. As scholars continue to seek holistic and culturally sensitive approaches to understanding the heterogeneous experiences of children, young people and parents, Sufism may be revisited as a promising framework that offers a relational approach and a set of concepts that can coherently guide the research process. The study aims to investigate how Sufism's core principles can be harnessed as a research procedure to engage children and families in meaningful dialogue about their experiences, values and viewpoints. Drawing on a preliminary and exploratory review of literature, it examines how Sufi-inspired practices, such as storytelling, and exchange of reflections (sohbat), contemplation (tafakkur) can create inclusive spaces for children and parents to express themselves as agents and to navigate power hierarchies. It particularly raises the notion of tawhid to study interdependencies in human and non-human relationships, making use of Sufism’s approach to dualities and pluralities and developing an inclusive perspective towards generalisations and particularisations in the study of global childhoods. This paper aims to contribute to interbelief dialogues as a response to an anti-Islamic climate in Northern Europe, highlighting the transformative potential of Sufism as a research procedure/framework in interdisciplinary childhood and family studies. Moreover, it invites to think of further indigenous worldviews in terms of what we can learn from them in developing research with children and families, particularly in contemporary times of environmental crises and unprecedentedly swift social changes.