The Tower Hamlets research team attended the 7th European Congress Qualitative Enquiry conference in Finland – here’s their report.

Authors:  Julia Kidd, Elaine Swan, Shazna Hussain, Sajna Miah and Julie Yip

Conference

In January 2024 the Food Lives Team – community researchers (CRs) from FoodSEquals’ Tower Hamlets partners, Wen, and Elaine Swan from the University of Sussex –  presented their research methods at the 7th European Congress Qualitative Enquiry (ECQE) in Helsinki, Finland. The conference theme was PARTICIPATION, COLLABORATION AND CO-CREATION: QUALITATIVE INQUIRY ACROSS AND BEYOND DIVIDES.

At the event, 450 international researchers came together to discuss, participatory methods, new ways of knowing, doing and feeling, power hierarchies in research and dynamics between academic/non-academic; science and art; human and non-human.

Lecture theatre for the keynotes

Key foci included

  • New ways of producing knowledge
  • Cross conventional boundaries
  • Transdisciplinary project nine depts
  • New paradigms for natural and social sciences work together
  • Inequality as lived experience not just structures – strange distinction
  • Violence and inequalities
  • The Politics of evidence

Aimed at fostering ‘dialogues across and in-between disciplinary and paradigmatic divides’ within the widening range of participatory approaches in qualitative inquiries, we decided to attend as the conference focuses on qualitative research and the theme of participatory was relevant and timely for our own research.  We had designed and undertaken different research methods for two years and had two years left of the FoodSEqual project. Hence, we had experiences to share and lots to learn, but time to implement our learning from the conference.

Learning and development opportunities

We in The Food Lives team are embedded in Tower Hamlets, our research site but also keen to participate in academic events. Some participatory action research (PAR) is sequestered away from universities, because of its potential alienating and exclusionary raced and classed practices. But Shazna, Sajna and Julie have attended online academic, policy and activist seminars and workshops and enjoyed participating. Moreover, giving papers at academic conferences is a central, and routinised, part of academic career and scholarly development.

The conference offered a valuable opportunity for the Food Lives team to learn more about PAR from other disciplinary and geo-political contexts. In our research ethics, we inform participants that we will use their quotations and ideas in our writing and in seminars and conferences. In attending the conference, the Food Lives team would be able to see how academics actually draw on participants’ accounts. Giving a presentation based on our research methods also offered the potential for skills development in presenting in an academic context, improving communication skills, listening to other presentations, engaging in scholarly discussions with fellow researchers and experts in the field, networking and building connections, and receiving new insights and improvements on our work. Moreover, giving papers at academic conferences is a central, and routinised, part of academic career and scholarly development: why not community researchers too if they feel comfortable in such an environment.

Presenting at the conference enabled us to extend the visibility of our work and that of the wider FoodSEqual project. The location of the conference in Helsinki in January offered the potential to remove ourselves from the daily grind and be emplaced bodily in a liminal reflective space. The fact that the whole team attended amplified the learning potential.

Food Lives Team brave the cold

Community researchers’ reflections

For CR Shazna Hussain, she gained the ‘experience of being in a university listening to all the keynote speakers, I never had the opportunity to attend university and wondered what it would be like.’ The CRs learned about ‘interesting methods of research being carried out about various topics around the globe’. What Shazna noticed was the similarities between geographically distant communities, recognising in one presentation something of the Bangladeshi community in the way people from the Netherlands support each other ‘we look out for each other and our elderly neighbours, cooking and sharing food’.

On day 3 of the conference CR Sajna Miah notes that ‘finally, the day had arrived to present our research method…we had a good turnout in our room which was a great feeling.’ Elaine, Julie and the CRs introduced the FoodSEquals project and spoke about their research methods including the Food Exhibition, Shopalongs and Cookalongs, and asked how such methodological practices expand what we understand by participatory research (see abstract below).

 

Sajna Miah presenting her experiences of doing a cookalong method

The CRs learnt to hone their presentation skills – anticipating questions, keeping answers succinct and keeping to the time limit. For Sajna it ‘taught us to face these challenges and take [them] as a positive learning experience’. Julie explained ‘it was great to hear people asking questions and engaging with the research in an academic setting, people were coming up to us afterwards too’.

Attending the conference was an opportunity to bring our project and methods to an international audience and as Shazna commented, ‘to make connections with people outside our project’.

 

Julie Yip, Shaza Hussain and Sajna Miah waiting for the conference to start

One of these connections was made with Amanda Vanggaard Wittwer, Citizen Science Advisor from Roskilde University who asked for a meeting after seeing the presentation to learn more about community research and the project.  She felt it would be relevant to her work with the citizen science and community science agenda at Roskilde University. Shazna and Elaine met up with Amanda and an academic colleague on zoom later in January to share experiences and ideas. Amanda has invited the team to have a return discussion later in the year.

Sajna summarises her experience at the conference as ‘the feeling of what we can achieve when working as part of a team.’

 

Our Food Lives Presentation

 Photographic Exposure: When Researchers Partake Of Their Own Methods

Abstract

In this paper, we examine our involvement in our research methods in Food Lives, a project in Tower Hamlets, London. Food Lives forms part of a wider multi-disciplinary, multi-university and multi-stakeholder UKRI funded project called FoodSEqual which aims to transform the food system in the UK. We partner with the Women’s Environment network (WEN), a 30-year-old UK feminist, environmental not-for-profit organisation which seeks to inform women about environmental issues. As a feminist organisation, WEN has been interested in multi-racial food knowledge production and sharing along feminist lines. Much of our research has been working with British Bangladeshi women and learning from their skills and expertise in food growing, domestic food work and food health. British Bangladeshi people make up over 30% of Tower Hamlets.  To date, such food knowledges are marginalised in food partnership policy making and food strategies.

In this paper, drawing on feminist methodology, we explore what it means for participation to refer to researchers taking part in their methods. Participation typically denotes how researchers involve people with lived experience in designing research aims, methods and analyses to improve knowledge production and democracy. Scholars explore the practical, political, ethical, gendered, racialised and classed processes and consequences of ‘non-researchers’ and participatory research. In particular, they – and activists- argue for the involvement of minoritised groups as a critical, radical recalibration of academic power and domination in research.

In contrast to this focus on ‘non-researchers’, we reflect on what it means for researchers to participate in research methods as research ‘subjects’. Although academics reflect on power and positionality, very few partake in the research methods themselves. We reflect on our experiences and feelings of surveillance, embarrassment and exposure when photographing and sharing our own meals, oil and fat consumption, and other food related activities which formed part of our Food Lives research. We ask how such methodological practices expand what we understand by participatory research.

The team reprised their paper at Bristol University in May as part of The Bristol Researchers’ Food Justice Network – Spring Seminar Series 2024.

 

Key sessions at the conference we attended

The conference offered many panels, keynotes and individual papers. We decided to attend each as a team so we could learn together. Below are the highlights:

MULTISPECIES SPECULATIVE DESIGN AND THE PECULIAR ETHICS OF A NATURECULTURE RESEARCH STATION DREAM TEAMS

Chairs: Rachel Sinquefield-Kangas, University of Helsinki, Finland Henrika Ylirisku, University of Helsinki, Finland Varpu Mehto, University of Helsinki, Finland Verneri Valasmo, University of Helsinki, Finland Riikka Hohti, University of Helsinki, Tampere University, Finland

Keywords: natureculture, multispecies, speculative design, research ethics, assemblage

Abstract

Speculative design belongs to our everyday lives and unfolds as a mode of storytelling. When speculating, we engage in activities of imagining as a process of relating with the world around us. Inciting conjectures, speculative design opens-up perceptions, inviting new or alternative assemblages to emerge in the ‘here and now’. Speculative design sparks curiosity, bringing one to question what accounts for the present circumstance. In this session, we ask the question what kind of encounters might the open-ended and speculative design of a natureculture research station enable? And, how does this design of our research station begin to design our empirical engagements and enable a different kind of ethics? Theoretical inspiration for the station’s speculative design comes from Anna Tsing (2015), particularly her concept of open-ended assemblages and new emergent forms of multispecies collaboration on the edges or outskirts of existing practices. Fostering practices of attentiveness towards multispecies relations, atmospheres of environmental crises, and ontological renewal forms an important part for researching diverse multispecies encounters. Built on a chart that can be attached to an electronically assisted bike and moved flexibly from one research context to another, the purpose of the research station is to allow for mobility and “unintentional design” to emerge during the fieldwork of our research project. In our Dream Team session, we aim to share selected empirical materials while forwarding thinking regarding how posthuman and multispecies theory, not only informed the speculative design of an experimental playful Natureculture research station but also how utilizing the station ‘troubles’ institutional ethical guidelines. Doing so by design, our more-than-human research station complicates existing individualistic research ethics while enabling open-ended methodological approaches towards sensing and feeling, multispecies storytelling, and art-making. This kind of design begins to design worlds encouraging encounters with the station, that consequently also re-designing us as researchers. 56 DREAM TEAMS #ECQI2024 In our Dream Team session, we will articulate further how Tsing’s ideas came to shape the design, building, and utilization of the mobile research station through collaboration with undergraduate creative sustainability students from Aalto University. We will also share recountings of our own engagements with the station during fieldwork, paying attention to the unprecedented nature of the process in which a speculative design becomes material and embodied practice. By drawing attention to moments while using the station when/where we have experienced awkwardness and frictions, we aim to illuminate what types of deviant ethical issues have arisen. For the second part of our Dream Team session, we invite participants to join us in experimentally engaging with the research station. We will gather around the research station while speculating what possible openings, constraints and conflicts it affords, and what ethicalities arise from these. Participants will be offered opportunities to try out the various artistic practices and multispecies storytelling exercises. Through interacting with the station we invite session attendees to engage critically with it as an exercise towards touching upon what ethical tensions they perceive as arising from such encounters with the research station. Concluding our session will be a round-table discussion relating to the topics of speculative design, open-endedness, and mobility in research, as well as the tensions these aspects form with institutional ethics protocols.

 

Key points:

Designed a Cargobike and Research station in public spaces

To see what gathers around the station

Linking conceptual and material

Not a controlled environments! Unintentionality key

Research ethics is about predicting and individual rights vs open-mindedness, multispecies relationally,

Giving up control

Tensions with time affected by Multispecies

Slowness, staying

Become part of landscape, what gathers around, and ethics.

How researcher body settle down

 

 

THE WILL AND WAY TO POWER-WITH: CHALLENGES Chair: Marjukka Laiho, University of Eastern Finland The Finnish Co-Research Network Keywords: collaborative research, knowledge production, power, power-with, agency

Abstract

For some decades now, collaborative research has transformed the aims and ways of qualitative research in academia and beyond. The key insight has been to do research not ‘of’ but ‘with’ the people and phenomena at hand (cf. Lieberman 1986; also Jackson & Mazzei 2022). Thus, collaborative research has incorporated a strong will to democratize cultures of knowledge production, but the ways have manifold – and not always without challenges. In this Game Changer ‘think tank’, we will explore both possibilities and challenges of the democratic aims of collaborative research particularly with regards to transformations in power and agency across all stages of research (cf. Gillies & Aldred 2012). Collaborative research, as understood here, incorporates a will and understanding of power as a communicative act enabling collaboration (cf. Arendt 1990 [1963]. This also paves the way to novel epistemological cultures and practices embracing and enhancing the idea of power-with highlighting our shared potential to act together (e.g. Allen 1998; Allen, Forst & Haugaard 2014; Farr 2018). In this think thank we will explore both the will and way to power-with with critical and selfreflexive eyes. Key questions in this think thank include, for example: How do professional researchers – often coming from relatively privileged backgrounds – sensitize themselves to and understand varying knowledge cultures and their perceived hierarchies? What are the opportunities, challenges, and constraints embedded in the powertransforming category of co-researchers? How can all stakeholders view and reflect critically on their positionings and agency in collaborative research? How do experiences of authority operate and change in academic research processes? What should we as academic researchers do – or not to do – to support stronger and better democratization processes of epistemological cultures? And, in the end, what is the will and is there a way towards power-with?

 

Key points:

What is the game and how do we want to change it?

Social change, political change, how research is funded

Academia as a game

Funding game

Game of academic careers

Game of activism

What do we try reach through our research

Who are you and how do you relate to collaborate research

POWER re-distribution network

Power of with in collaborative research

How much of collaboration has to be present  – what is enough for people to be collaborative

Collaborative moments and practices

Do something with – “withness”

When does power sharing happen

How to get rid of authority?

Hot moments – how change hierarchical flow distribution

When is there a redistribution of power?

Flinga.fi/s/FUKAPNP

 

Keynote 4 and Film Screening Session Leonardo da Costa Custodio, Åbo Academi University followed by screening of coproduced film “Complexos” (Finland/Brazil, 2020). FROM RESEARCH TO FILMMAKING: THE COLLABORATIVE MAKING OF THE DOCUMENTARY “COMPLEXOS”

The making and streaming of “Complexos” have resulted from an ongoing process of dialogue and collaboration with the favela-based filmmaking collective Cafuné na Laje and Bombozila, the largest online platform for documentaries in Brazil. This process started during Custódio’s critical ethnographic research for his doctoral studies (2009–2016). In his talk, Custódio (a) discusses the Latin American tradition of collaboration and participatory communication between academia and social movements, (b) analyses the potential of “dialogue” to overcome challenges in power relations between “the researcher” and “the researched”, and (c) reflects about the longitudinal character of collaboration in contexts of historical struggles against inequalities. The presentation ends with the screening of “Complexos”.

Leonardo Custódio is the author of Favela media activism: Counterpublics for human rights in Brazil (Lexington Books, 2017). He asked us to reflect on these questions:

  • How viable in terms of securing jobs do you consider PAR to be for PHDs and ECR?
  • In your experience how can we guarantee the presence of collaborators in presentations about PAR
  • What publications on PAR do you know which raise conflict and unplanned events
  • How common is it for researchers who conduct PAR to publicly problematise their own methodological decisions
  • How have you found a balance between individual career building and collective demands of co-creation and collaboration
  • How often do you discuss role of the money or income in PAR between researchers and underprivileged, under salaried people
  • How often have you seen the leadership of PAR shift from the researcher to the researched?

 

WHITE AND NON-WHITE RESEARCHERS’ POSITIONALITY IN ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH ON (ANTI)RACISM

Saara Loukola, University of Helsinki, Finland Keywords: school ethnography, positionality, racialized researcher, whiteness, racism

Abstract

In the context of Nordic education, where the illusion of colour-blindness and Nordic exceptionalism persists, hegemonic whiteness and its impacts on participatory studies conducted in the field have been scarcely researched. Especially the positionality of researchers racialized as non-white (henceforth ‘non-white’) in predominantly white settings is an overlooked area. Thus, the focus of this paper is how a non-white researcher and researchers racialized as white (henceforth ‘white’) are positioned as insider or outsider by the research participants in a study on racism and antiracism in school. We also study how the researcher’s racial position affects the trust and relation building with the participants, as well as problematize the question of safe space. Our analysis concentrates on the strongest contrasts in positioning, experienced by white researchers with non-white participants and nonwhite researcher with white participants. This study is part of a research project on racism and antiracism in lower secondary education where short-term ethnography was conducted by three white researchers and one non-white researcher in 8th grade classes in seven Finnish schools. The data consists of participant observations and open-ended semi-structured interviews with pupils and staff. The pupils moreover contributed with photographs illustrating their understanding of racism and antiracism in school. The theoretical framework is critical theories on whiteness and race, and decolonial studies. Our findings discus the concepts of white confessions vs. racist provocations. We problematize the researcher’s “neutral” position when it comes to gaining participants’ trust as antiracist allies vs. navigating white resistance as a non-white researcher. Our paper also highlights the need to reflect on the ethical and methodological implications of gaining authentic data on racist practices, and how this simultaneously might allow racism to remain unchallenged and jeopardize the researcher’s safety and well-being.

Key points:

How can racialised positionally affect ethnographic research

Colourblind tendency hinders anti- racism

Colourblindness gaslights

Whiteness and knowledge production

“White confessions”

White gatekeepers also subjects

Racism for BAME can affect well-being and safety whereas for white researchers just lose ally status

Anti-racist network v important