Feminist geographies and participatory action research: co-producing narratives with people and place

Abstract

This review offers thoughts, queries and hesitations regarding articles drawing on participatory action research (PAR) published over 25 years of Gender, Place and Culture. It foregrounds the interconnections and overlaps between PAR and feminist geographies, and considers a continuum of participations-collaborations-actionsknowledges co-produced across a range of interrelated feminist methodologies. I emphasise epistemological commitment as central to PAR, pointing to work in GPC that evidences critical approaches to research process, embedded in feminist perspectives regarding how scholars reproduce the world and/as act/ing in the world, particularly in attending to shifting, situated and complex subjectivities and power inequalities. Working together with participants is vital, through an ethic that centres participants' voices, as actors in their own lives. Highlighting the emotional and embodied geographies that weave through such research and writing, this review suggests deepening and strengthening interdependences and a feminist ethos of care as researchers, to further foreground diverse stories and voices, work towards social and spatial justice, and co-produce progressive changes with people and place.

Forging volumetric methods

“…In thinking with feminist literatures, alongside decolonial agendas, an entry point is provided to further diversify accounts of volume, opening them to the “plural” and “contingent” nature of knowledge and the multitude of ways volume can be known and inhabited (Noxolo, 2017, p. 317). Collaboration with non‐state, everyday actors and communities is key here in challenging the ways “geographic knowledge is produced” (Askins, 2018; Basile et al, 2018; de Leeuw & Hunt, 2018, p. 6). Here the mobilisation of community‐based participatory action research, participatory and participant storytelling, and counter‐mapping methods to foreground different “ways of knowing and being” (de Leeuw & Hunt, 2018) invite methodological diversification.…”

Three participatory geographers: reflections on positionality and working with participants in researching religions, spiritualities, and faith

“…While participatory approaches have gained prominence within geographical research (for example Kindon, Pain & Kesby, 2009;Wynne-Jones, North & Routledge, 2015), the potential insights that could be gained by utilising this methodology within the study of (Askins, 2018) and engage groups beyond academia in the research process (Wynne-Jones et al, 2015). The few applications of participatory approaches to religious settings have demonstrated their value in this context.…”

Fuel for the fire: tradition and the gender controversy in Lerwick's Up Helly Aa

“…They (including the lead author) work collaboratively to rationalise an emotionally charged issue in a small, familiar community and encourage their friends, neighbours and fellow islanders to engage with the questions raised by the status quo (Johnson 2019). Together, Up Helly Aa for Aa use the resources produced by the Shetland Islands Council (SIC), Scottish and UK governments, the LUHA committee, and other organisations/institutions alongside the individual expertise of members to educate themselves and generate knowledge from their own experience -thus becoming active expert subjects resisting the local expression of patriarchy (Friere 1972; Ramazanoğlu and Holland 2002;Askins et al 2018).…”

“…As a Shetlander himself, the lead author is personally invested, and this requires an ongoing process of reflexively self-assessing his involvement. Quite organically, Up Helly Aa for Aa have begun undertaking forms of participatory action research in order to explore and bring attention to what they see as institutionally approved gender discrimination so that it may be challenged (Ramazanoğlu and Holland 2002;Askins et al 2018).…”