What’s so good about participation? Politics, ethics and love in Learning Together

Abstract

This article tells the story of our movement towards using participatory approaches in an action research project aiming to understand the experiences and impacts of belonging to learning communities that span prison and university walls. We draw on our experiences over the past 5 years of building learning communities involving students from higher education and criminal justice organisations and describe some of our attempts to provide creative opportunities for participation and voice within research. We highlight some of the benefits that we have seen through adopting these approaches, as well as some of the discomforts that we, and our students, have experienced. We use these examples to question for whom we think participation ‘works’, whether participation is always good, or whether it can, rather, sometimes cause harm, and the extent to which participation addresses some of the ethical concerns levelled at more traditional approaches to social science research, including matters of power, purpose, positioning and personhood. Using the work of Cantillon and Lynch as an orienting framework, in the conclusions we return to their arguments to suggest that the benefits of participatory action research might not be in alleviating these ethical concerns, but rather in establishing affective links between people occupying different roles within research, thus imbuing the process with love. This has the potential to transform all of the actors, and the research itself.

A research note: Using ethics memoranda of understanding in community-based research

“…The sample MOUs below do not outline methods (like participant observation, survey, secondary data analysis, or semi-structured interviews), but they do reflect specific methodologies (here, critical, community-based theoretical approaches used to analyze and justify the theoretical models and specific methods chosen). I present them with the premise that we cannot ignore ethical tensions or wishfully hope that they do not come up; CBR collaborations are fraught with power inequalities (Armstrong and Ludlow, 2020). Talking about potential questions and tensions explicitly can help researchers to better address inevitable questions and engage in ecologies of mutual care, reciprocity, and accountability.…”

Learning and organising for social transformation: Lessons from WEB Du Bois and Jane Addams

“…As Torre and Fine (2011: 116) remind us, people who have been marginalised ‘carry sharp critique and knowledge about the architecture of social relations, and that revealing and legitimating this knowledge, significantly challenges existing forms of institutional and structural oppression that have been naturalised as inevitable’. Cooperation in the process of theory building with marginalised groups can help to mitigate against ‘the risks of abstraction and indifference’ (Armstrong and Ludlow, 2020: 8). Theories of social transformation that critically engage with resistant knowledges are more likely to be multidimensional and socially grounded, standing in contrast to the ‘singular stories’ that often dominate normative theories (Oldfield, 2015: 2083).…”

Being a ‘good woman’: Stigma, relationships and desistance

“…In this sense relationships and people matter, with any attempt at effecting change being rooted in relations and interpersonal networks (Crawford, 2020). Developing creative methodologies provides a space for different voices be heard, celebrated (Armstrong and Ludlow, 2020) and listened to.…”