28/02/2024
Participatory research in social sciences opened up the definition of “the researcher”. This type of research aims to include all voices – not only those who are certified as researcher. Participatory research is at the heart of the ReIncluGen project. Our project includes civil society organisations (CSO) as partners in the consortium. We structurally include CSOs by remunerating them for their participation. Furthermore, our project uses participatory research techniques, such as photo-voicing techniques, to facilitate the co-design of the questions asked. Finally, CSOs are involved by co-evaluating practices aimed to stimulate gender empowerment and inclusion in the broadest sense and by co-creating a digital tool to share such practices and set up a European network focused on gender- and inclusion related issues.
There are plentiful objectives to establish “participation” in social sciences research. First, participation could enable to reach out for “difficult to reach groups” – for researchers at least. Second, it could challenge existing paradigms and discourses prevalent in academia and result in more innovative insights. Third, this could be done through the active involvement of all participants, but also by challenging existing power relations between participants and certified researchers or researchers part of research institutions, creating more equal status between all participants of a specific research practice. Finally, participatory research includes the promise of “empowerment”, which is key to our project as well (Van Praag, 2021).
At this stage of our project, all these objectives seem promising, however, some challenges are noted as well. First, related to reaching out to “difficult to reach groups”, we only focus on people that are associated or participate in civil society organisations (CSO) – meaning those who are already reached by these CSOs. Using observations in these CSOs to start the fieldwork seemed at first quite time-consuming for many researchers, especially since many CSOs do not necessarily meet on regular basis or organize a lot of activities during the timespan of our research. Nonetheless, this certainly helped to built up report, to gain trust and to explain the nature of the research to all participants slowly but steadily.
Second, the creation of innovative insights does not only center on research outputs, but also relates to research practices. For instance, during a consortium meeting, one of the CSO partners mentioned that the questionnaire and questions asked did not feel as comfortable for their CSO members, and asked to modify these questions. Another CSO partner was positively surprised that the organization of a focus group in the CSO forced all employees working on gender, inclusion and empowerment, to specify their attitudes and stances towards this topic and remarked that their everyday practices and limited time often does not allow such needed discussions.
Third, the creation of more equal relations, between CSOs and academic partners, but also between CSO participants and the academic partners remains tricky. Bringing in CSOs in a research project, creates an imbalance in terms of familiarity with these research projects, terminology used and practices. Time spent together in the project helped to stimulate all partners to equally have a say on “research-related” topics. Nevertheless, only CSOs – as institutions – are included as partners in the consortium, not their participants as such. This means that unequal relations remain between CSO/academic partners and those who are interviewed based on their participation in the CSO. The diversity between CSOs included in our project also reveals that this results in different relations between those who participate in CSOs and the CSO/academic partners, depending on the nature of the CSO, the geographical context and the target groups. Finally, due to financial constraints and the demand for the CSOs to actively participate in all aspects of the ReIncluGen project, we could not include all CSOs in our consortium, creating inequalities between those who are part of the consortium and those who are not. Compensations in kind, such as the participation and presentation of participants’ photos in an art exhibition and photo book could provide a tool to create more equality between – at least some – participants.
Finally, the desire to create more “empowerment” and inclusion through participatory research remains the most difficult one to evaluate or to discuss. The questions that emerge are the same for policy makers intending to create more empowerment and inclusion, but also for researchers that work on these topics. How do you define “empowerment” and “inclusion”? How do you measure “changes over time”? Who are the units of analysis in this case: the CSOs, the CSO participants or both? This highlights the difficulties of understanding container concepts such as “empowerment”, which we try to tackle in our research. We will keep you updated on the findings of our fieldwork that studies CSOs and their participants to define for themselves what this concept means for them and how it is understood and practiced in their everyday lives.
Readings : Van Praag, Lore (ed.) (2021). Co-creation in migration studies: the use of co-creative methods to study migrant integration across European societies, Leuven: University Press Leuven (CeMIS Series).