Vital Signs 2: Paper Session 4c
Positioning, participation and authentic knowledge
Wednesday 8 September, 2 - 3.30pm
'Participation, authenticity and rhetoric: Community-based Participatory Research with an Australian Indigenous community' - Julie Mooney-Somers (University of New South Wales & University of Sydney), Anna Olsen (University of New South Wales), Robert Scott (Townsville Aboriginal and Islanders Health Service), Angie Akee (Townsville Aboriginal and Islanders Health Service) and Lisa Maher (University of New South Wales)
The raison d’être of community-based participatory research (CBPR) is to involve real people in research on issues affecting their lives. Putting this into practice is messy and complicated as CBPR - where research meets community development - is a process full of good intentions and competing priorities.
The first aim of the Indigenous Resiliency Project focused on developing the research skill and knowledge of Indigenous health service staff and Indigenous young people. The second aim was to generate knowledge to inform the development of interventions designed to prevent sexually transmitted and blood-borne infections in Indigenous young people. Prioritising capacity building, participation and collaboration created tensions for the production of knowledge.
Our research was developed and conducted by community researchers (health workers and young people who received brief training in qualitative research) and university researchers. This model of community engagement in data collection means that interview data do not always contain the depth and breadth that may have been generated by experienced researchers and such data may not meet traditional scientific notions of quality and rigour. However, the cultural expertise and experience that community researchers bring to the process suggests that project development and conduct is more likely to be culturally safe and outcomes more likely to reflect locally informed cultural perspectives.
In this paper we explore some of CBPR’s inherent tensions and interrogate how they both bolster and undermine our claims that the resulting knowledge constitutes evidence of the ‘real lives’ of Indigenous young people.
'Instruments of knowing –intersubjectivity in the research process' - Heather Elliott (Open University)
In qualitative research, the researcher is how one comes to know the research subject: the ‘instrument of knowing’ in Jennifer Hunt’s evocative phrase. The metaphor of the instrument places the researcher’s experience at the heart of fieldwork and the interpretative process. It can, however, underplay how the researcher co-creates the research interview, through, for example, what she chooses to ask, what she avoids, when she intervenes and when she stays silent..
How can a researcher to use herself instrumentally, as a resource for analysis and for fieldwork? Given the limits of self-analysis, how can a researcher become aware of what of relevance she brings with her to fieldwork and how her subjectivity is engaged through interaction with the research subject? Further, ‘knowing’ has a particular quality when using methods which aim to go beyond what is articulated. How does one access what is taken for granted, embodied or unconscious for the research subject or the researcher? In this paper, I consider these questions, through analysis of a psychosocial study of first time motherhood. I explore in particular unexpected moments of connection or disconnection between myself and women I interviewed, which had the capacity to surprise me into knowing differently. I consider the usefulness of fieldnotes in (re)capturing the immediacy of fieldwork, of building a bridge between the ‘then’ of the research encounter and the ‘now’ of data analysis.
'Big Bodies Dancing: reflections on doing fat research' - Dr Rachel Colls (University of Durham)
Recent work in geography and beyond has begun develop critical accounts of obesity and obesity science which include challenging and providing alternatives to medical knowledges that link obesity to ill-health, identifying and legislating against forms of discrimination associated with body size and developing various activist strategies, including academic, artistic and online and real-life initiatives in order to counter dominant understandings of the fat body and to provide support for and to celebrate fat bodies. This paper is informed and inspired by this work and centres upon research carried out ‘with’ fat bodies in a ‘size accepting space’. This space was a nightclub event for Big Beautiful (BBW) and Big Beautiful Men (BBM) and their admirers (FA or fat admirers). The research involved periods of participant observation in the night club space, interviews and online questionnaires with participants and discussion boards on social networking site with attendees of the club. The paper will reflect upon particular methodological issues I experienced when conducting fieldwork concerned specifically with how to narrate, position and move my body within a ‘size accepting space’, how to capture fat and the relations between, within and upon fat bodies, beyond a purely visual register and how to ‘perform’ the identity and politics of the research across a range of social and professional settings. In carrying out the research, it has become important to think about how the fat subject and ‘fat’ researcher is constituted at different stages of the research process in ways which both facilitate the politics of size acceptance and yet which also question the capacity of the researcher and the research itself to adequately ‘re-present’ fatness back to fat bodies.