My cosmos, my opportunities, our spaces: Methodological reflections on photographic perspectives of young adopted children on their (new) environments.

• Visual methodology allows to invite children showing their lifeworld instead of seeing children in lifeworld. • Visual methodology demands researchers to present a well-founded methodology and to learn research skills for sensual understanding instead of intellectual explaining. • Non-directive and non-text based methods ensure inclusive and participative research. Relativisation of subject status as empowerment of all those involved in research. • The presented study divides "environment of growing up" in three dimensions; young children need to shift or oscillate between. • Safe environments need to offer young (adopted) children 3 dimension: 'My Cosmos' (exclusively accessibility), 'My Possibilities' (safe things and places), and 'Our Places' (commonly used or negotiated places and things). Despite much discourse on growing-up environment as a central dimension of "child-well-being", little is still known about why, how, and where meanings are created in it for children. For despite ongoing efforts in childhood research, children's perspectives remain methodologically poorly embedded. Therefore, the author of this paper asks about relevance settings in children's lifeworld - derived exemplarily from adopted preschool children's environments. For this purpose, the author sets the demanding methodological balancing act between trivialising and exaggerating childhood in the research process as a central challenge. He makes it possible by a visual immersion in photographs taken by young children. In doing so, the arguments sometimes push into the hybrid and transformative. As a result, not only possibilities to always switch between dimensions of 'My Cosmos', 'My Possibilities' and 'Our Places' become apparent as relevant to environment of growing up. The findings can also be read as an encouragement to research and argue more consistently and creatively. They show step by step why and how new paths can be taken and socio-scientific fears of the non-linguistic overcome to take research and thinking decisively further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]