Transforming Participatory Research and Researcher Identities Under COVID-19
Dr Susanne Börner, University of Birmingham & University of Sao Paulo
Contact details: s.borner@bham.ac.uk; Twitter: @BornerSusanne
That covid-19 has transformed the research landscape is not new to anyone. As researchers we have all struggled to find ways to cope and to reinvent ourselves with the sudden shift to the digital world and online interaction, especially those of us working with participatory or other forms of qualitative research. Some of us might have felt more prepared than others, whereas other may have felt quite overwhelmed. And many may have wondered to what extent our academic careers have prepared us for the challenges of this new reality of “e-research”. Yet, little has been written about how (early career) researchers have coped with the changes and transformations to the original design of their projects during these unprecedented and uncertain times.
Who I am or at least thought I was?
In 2019, I was awarded a postdoctoral Individual Marie Curie Global Fellowship for a three-year postdoctoral research project between the University of Birmingham in the UK and the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. When I relocated to Brazil in October 2019, shortly before the pandemics, I was excited about the prospect of conducting youth participatory action research (YPAR) with young people aged 12 to 18 about their experiences of living with and adapting to resource scarcity and disaster risk in Sao Paulo’s urban periphery (Börner et al., 2020; Börner et al., 2019; Science Magazine, 2021). Inherent to participatory action research (PAR), my project was designed around face-to-face interactions in the form of workshops and activities such as youth-led community walks involving youth as co-producers of knowledge. It also required high levels of interaction with community gatekeepers such as the civil defence and community social centres as key entry points to the community. As a YPAR researcher, I had decided to engage with the unpredictability of research dynamics already when deciding on my research method, since it meant leaving the design of my project partly in the hands of young people that I work with. Conducting research with in hard-to-reach communities is already a challenge in itself; access to the community, trust-building, and building the self-confidence of the participants to co-shape research are only some of the initial hurdles to be overcome.
Image: Municipality of Franco da Rocha in the urban periphery of Sao Paulo (source: Susanne Börner)
The digital shift: shifting challenges in researcher-participant relations
Under covid-19 and the “digital shift”, the challenges of PAR research changed, and were differently but equally overwhelming for me as a PAR researcher but also for the community gatekeepers who struggled with the lack of equipment such as laptops and phones. At the same time, many of the youth involved in the project were also facing a reality of digital exclusion. I eventually discovered WhatsApp as the main means of digital communication. Brazilian phone providers generally provide data packages that come with unlimited WhatsApp data.
From a researcher perspective, the shift to e-YPAR took courage to imperfection to try out new formats and to go out of my comfort zone. And it raised many questions: initially, I wondered how prepared I felt for this digital world in terms of digital literacy. Being a German researcher in Brazil, I wondered whether there were any relevant cultural differences in how Brazilian youth communicate online? What does this mean for my communication with them? How can I engage young people online in a dialogical and participatory way while take account of the digital limitations they are facing? Which are new skills that I suddenly need and how can I acquire these? And what does this imply for my identity as a researcher?
After one year and different states of mind around my state of participatory field research such as “What now?” “Wait and see”. “Something must be possible”. “Anything is better than nothing”. “And hey, this is actually (somehow) working.”, I have become more accepting of the fact that there is only as much as I can control. It meant down-tuning expectations, and being less perfectionist and more experimental, and exploring new ways of communication. Moving to e-YPAR has helped me learn about new forms of engaging with youth from Sao Paulo’s urban periphery in terms of language, format and dynamics. For instance, informal and “real time” conversations worked better than sending weekly assignments, however creative and innovative I thought them to be. The experience of conducting e-YPAR with Brazilian youth also showed me how becoming more vulnerable and opening up as person behind my researcher identity allowed me to build deeper and stronger connections with the research participants. This meant exploring the opportunities of bonding with the youth in ways that may blur the boundaries of researcher-participant relations by not asking the participants to share about they everyday lives but by sharing more about my own everyday reality. Reciprocity acquired meaning as giving and taking not only in terms of knowledge but also in terms of insights into everyday lives and different realities. This has become even more important in times of where opportunities and mobility for youth in the periphery are ever more limited by the pandemics. I also questioned myself about how to make activities more “fun”, especially during a humanitarian crisis with Brazil hitting the mark of 3,800 covid-19 related death per day. Hence, I started wondering how engage with young people’s everyday lives and their relations to the environment in ways that spark hope instead of focusing on scarcities and vulnerabilities.
An invitation to reflect
I would like to end with an invitation for reflection, rather than with answers. This is an invitation to rethink (online) participatory research and to reflect on changing researcher identities during these very uncertain and unpredictable times. Where do we need to reinvent roles, responsibilities, and power dynamics? How can we bridge the researcher-participant divide and bond without losing our objectivity? How can we define scientific rigour under constantly changing and unpredictable circumstances? And how can we become less perfectionist and more humane in our role as researchers? Which skills may help us to reinvent ourselves? And which have been the main challenges but also the opportunities that we have identified during online research so far?
For anyone interested in sharing short case studies related to their experiences and ethics of participatory research under covid-19, I am currently co-hosting a call for contributions through the International Collaboration on Participatory Health Research (ICPHR) http://www.icphr.org/ethics-in-participatory-health-research.html You can also send an e-mail to s.borner@bham.ac.uk for further information.
Acknowledgements
Research funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research & Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 833401. My thanks also go to the Centro de Referência de Assistência Social (CRAS) Vila Bazú and the CRAS Lago Azul in Franco da Rocha as well as to the young people involved in my research.