In the workshop, the relationship between research and social change has been discussed. My question is related to the relations between different selfs of the researcher: being a researcher and being an activist to produce social change (in the area related to your research). What are the benefits and conflicts of such synergy based on your own experience? (to the moderators: please feel free to modify the title and the questions for discussion as you wish)
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Just to let you know Nina, we're closing the threads because we only want them open when they are being moderated; and as this is the end of the session we're wrapping up the moderation. If you're on twitter, feel free to continue this conversation over there with us: @EllietheElement and @EASprecher on that platform.
I love reading Dawn Mannay's work on this - a particular favourite is https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1077800411425151 - I'm sure there are others but my 8pm brain went to this as a starting point. I think Workshop 2 by Amanda also references some interesting stuff on this : )
Hi ladies, thank you for such profound replies - i need to reread them to ask more! In the meantime, I wonder if you have been guided by any particular scholarly works while contemplating about your own multiple selves while engaging in PAR?
Hi @nina.kruglikova, what a fascinating question! Lovely to 'meet' you here as well. From my experience - at the beginning of engaging in PAR i thought that there was a direct challenge between these two identities. I felt that working towards activist aims and following the needs for change in the participants I work with worked against the search for truth that I thought was my aim as a researcher. However, over time I started to challenge this by considering my epistemic position - what do i consider truth? It is what I think is 'objective' or are experiences and phenomenological research outputs equally valid? It also made me rethink my idea of what are valid ways to be a researcher - is it all about being set apart from the topic you are working on or is it integrated into the world you are researching? Reading about ethnographic approaches really moved me forwards on this too. Now i tend to think that these different roles are synergistic lend both motivation, external challenge and rigour.
Hi @nina.kruglikova Lovely to hear from you! - I think this is really interesting, engaging multiple selves in different aspects of our lives is always important. It's something I felt Josephine and Claire really worked on in their talk - thinking about the mutliple ways that you can at once be insider and outsider (as Josephine calls it "insider-outsider researcher") - I think Dawn Mannay also had some very exciting reflections about this idea - being research "near" and research "far"