Commentary: participatory approaches, reflexivity and research artefacts

Abstract

All the chapters in this collection illustrate well how conducting collaborative and participatory research with young people, far from being a straightforward process, entails a set of challenges, dilemmas and decisions when dealing with the contingencies of fieldwork and the socio-economic conditions under which research is produced. As with any kind of qualitative research, conducting collaborative research needs to be underpinned by the questions on why we conduct this kind of research, under what circumstances, and with what consequences for the participants of that research, including ourselves, the researchers. Inspired by ideas of social justice and the awareness and negotiation of power relations between the researcher and the participants, conducting collective and participatory research raises questions on what counts as knowledge and how knowledge is (co)produced by all the agents involved. The discussion arose in sociolinguistics through Deborah Cameron and her colleagues in an intriguing article published in 1993 (Cameron, Frazer, Harvey, Rampton
and Richardson, 1993). There, they tried to make sense of the complex
relationship between the researcher and those being researched by looking into three ways of doing research in social sciences: working on, for, and with the participants. > refers to the positivist stance towards the study of human conduct, where the researcher observes and measures human behaviour from a distance (ethics). > makes reference to the kind of research where the researcher speaks on behalf of those researched, and > is the kind of research wherein an attempt is made to diminish power relationships between researchers and those researched and the participants are involved in the construction of the knowledge produced. This last form, labelled by them as advocacy, has been revisited and questioned by the authors in more recent works (Cameron, 1998). As Bucholtz, Casillas and Lee (2016) point out, her colleagues note the difficulties with this perspective, including such
fundamental questions as what counts as power, what counts as research, and what counts as knowledge>> (p. 26). Bucholtz and colleagues then include in the discussion the idea of >, borrowed from Freire’s critical pedagogy, as a way to indicate how to negotiate power relations and avoid speaking on the participants’ behalf or misrepresent the knowledge produced.

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ORCID for Adriana Patiño-Santos: orcid.org/0000-0003-1950-3954

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