What is participatory about this project? A case of investigating everyday communicative practices, establishing rapport with interviewees, and rethinking how to take them into account

• Normative approaches to conducting participatory research, and empirical accounts of participatory research experiences, abound (see e.g. Cornwall, 2011; Burns, Howard & Ospina, 2021). Variously defined, they have been a staple of communication and media studies concerned with the dynamics of social change for decades (see e.g. Dervin & Huesca, 1997; Bordenave, 2006; Thomas & van de Fliert, 2014; Jiménez-Martínez, Tufte & Suzina, 2020). In this presentation I reconsider taken-for-granted ideas about ‘participatory communication research’ by reflecting on the differences between designing a research project that depends on the participation of human subjects and putting the design to the test of fieldwork and interaction with those human subjects. Based on qualitative data from, and on a process of doing reflexivity about, an ongoing research project that focuses on the everyday practices of communicative practices of women in Argentina (CORDIS, 2020), I deconstruct the notion of participation implicit in my research design and show how and why I reconstructed it based on lessons learnt by engaging indialogue with the women who volunteered to act as my interviewees. Importantly, I show that preventive ethical clearance granted prior to fieldwork by university research boards and/or national ethical review agencies does not suffice to ensure that willing participants will be fairly taken into account as such. Participation, I argue, depends on a combination of factors, including (but not limited to): a systematic disposition to listen to research participants and take notice of the everyday challenges they face (Bassel, 2017), a commitment to dedicating time and space to reflexivity while in the process of collecting fieldwork data and rapidly assessing initial findings (Dean, 2017), and the flexibility to revise one’s own ideas as a researcher of what participation might mean in a specific context (Phillips, Christensen-Strynø & Frølunde, 2021). All things considered, “well-meant” may equate “top-down” approaches if we think of ‘granting participation’. Acknowledging that participation starts the moment that the subjects of our investigation agree to volunteering their time to meet with us may help us reconsider what researching with care means in practice. Researching with care (Brannelly & Barnes, 2022) is crucial at a time of increasing precariousness (Lorey, 2015).

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

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