scholarly journals Zining as artful method: Facilitating zines as participatory action research within art museums

2021 ◽  
pp. 147675032110371
Author(s):  
Jade French ◽  
Emma Curd

‘DIY’ publications called zines have long been a way for marginalized communities to record their stories, spread information and organize. However, this article presents zines as a potential research tool for action researchers who are working within organisational contexts. The authors, both museum professionals, action researchers and zinesters, use examples from their research within art museums to examine the value of zines as a methodology. Though the research projects take place within art organisations, using the four themes of aesthetics, communities of practice, counter-narratives and plurality it considers how zines could be used more broadly as a research tool in other knowledge-based settings. The authors provide a recommendation for practitioners to explore zining to engender dialogic cultures in their organisations as well as their potential in shaping ‘major’ and ‘minor’ organisational change.

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 160940692110471
Author(s):  
Matthew Maycock

The Covid-19 pandemic and lockdown represents a significant challenge for qualitative researchers due to social distancing measures restricting face-to-face data collection. At the time of ethical approval (early April 2020), all face-to-face research projects facilitated by the Scottish Prison Service and most prison jurisdictions were paused. In response to these methodological challenges, a participatory action correspondence methodology was designed in order for people in custody to influence the direction of this project by suggesting research questions and themes. This article analyses the potential of this approach, what this illuminated and critically engages with the challenges of implementing this qualitative methodology. Eight participants were selected due to previous participation in a Participatory Action Research project at one Scottish prison. After consent was given via post, eight letters were sent to the participants. This paper analyses the questions relating to, and aspects of Covid-19 that were important to the participants, in the hope that these insights will influence other qualitative research on the impacts of Covid-19 within prison settings. Methodologically and theoretically, this paper illustrates the potential and challenges relating to using a qualitative correspondence method to facilitate unique insights into life in custody during what emerges as a particularly challenging time in prison settings. More widely the paper reiterates and restates the importance of qualitative research methods as methods that provide unique and rich insights into the Covid-19 pandemic.


Author(s):  
Colin Bryson

This case study evaluates a new initiative to establish a cross-disciplinary forum focusing on enhancing learning, teaching and the student experience. All staff and students are welcome to participate and participants set the agenda themselves. The intention is to have open and informal dialogue and to work in partnership towards setting up collective participatory action-research projects. This is modelled on the Teaching and Learning Academy at Western Washington University (Werder and Otis, 2010). An important aim was to create a space to give voice for those - the so-called ‘hard to reach’- who do not get such opportunities in traditional structures. There have been many challenges to creating a sustainable and successful working model, not least such barriers as communications, creating time and opportunity and working against current dominant cultures. Nonetheless, staff and students, including many international students, have participated and found legitimacy to discuss their own priorities. 


2016 ◽  
pp. 1921-1934
Author(s):  
Ahmad Vazehi Ashtiani ◽  
Sharmila Jayasingam

This conceptual paper proposes social capital as a possible moderator of the relationship between commonly identified knowledge sharing enablers in the literature and knowledge sharing (KS). A literature review was carried out to determine the contextual influence of the level of social capital within communities of practice (CoPs). Propositions were developed based on a review of past studies addressing KS enablers and KS. The literature review revealed that prior studies built on resource-based theory (RBT) and knowledge-based view of the firm (KBV) focused on organizational enablers of KS without any concern for the contextual influence such as the level of social capital of CoPs. Further analysis indicated that social capital could possibly moderate the impact of commonly identified KS enablers. These insights are presented as propositions in this conceptual paper. This paper addresses a gap in the area of KS. It questions the results of past studies and proposes the needs to consider the level of social capital when identifying appropriate KS enablers.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Candy Khan ◽  
Donna Chovanec

Participatory Action Research (PAR), with its emphasis on grassroots empowerment and local control, has a long history as the research method of choice for marginalized communities. However, unsettling questions remain about the nature of power and the promise of PAR as a truly participatory and empowering methodology. In this paper, we summarize the key theorists, principles, methodology, researcher’s role, strengths and limitations of traditional PAR. In the subsequent section, we review current critiques and revisions of PAR. Finally, Khan proposes an adjustment to PAR that reflects the strengths and limitations of PAR and the implications of applying PAR within the bounds of a capitalist social-economic structure.


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 160940691984675 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Bailey ◽  
Valerie Steeves ◽  
Jacquelyn Burkell ◽  
Leslie Regan Shade ◽  
Rakhi Ruparelia ◽  
...  

This article evaluates a Participatory Action Research (PAR) approach with mixed methods including concept mapping, q-sorting and deliberative dialogue in the context of a research project on young people’s experiences with digital communications technologies, and addresses some of the central insights of intersectionality theory and praxis. Our approach seeks to ensure that, insofar as possible, the gathered data provide a rich and layered window into the experiences of young people from a range of marginalized communities served by our project partners. The article revisits some key insights and contestations relating to intersectionality and addresses their relationship to our approach. We evaluate whether these methods enhance understandings of the interactions of structures of subordination with other factors identified in intersectionality scholarship, as well as the extent to which they centre the knowledge and expertise of those subordinated by matrices of domination as discussed by authors such as Crenshaw and Hill Collins. Our approach is just one of many that social science researchers interested in advancing intersectionality’s key insights could deploy. While it falls short of full consistency with these insights, its mixed methods work toward our partners’ social justice objectives while facilitating exploration of intersecting axes of subordination. Our approach can also help our project recapture the politic at the heart of many intersectional feminist critiques, such as those of Crenshaw and Hill Collins - that reconceptualizing knowledge requires centring the knowledge and expertise of those traditionally excluded due to interlocking systems of subordination.


2020 ◽  
pp. 147447402094955
Author(s):  
Alan Latham ◽  
Lauren B Wagner

Human geography has become deeply interested in a range of research methods that focus on researchers’ corporeal engagement with their research sites. This interest has opened up an exciting set of research horizons, energising the discipline in a whole range of ways. Welcoming this engagement, this paper presents a series of meditations on the process of using the researcher’s corporeal learning as a research tool. Exploring two research projects, as well as the work of the photographer Nikki S Lee, it examines how the process of becoming corporeally capable might productively be framed as sets of ongoing experiments. Framing such engagements as experiments is a useful heuristic through which to think rigorously about what such research can claim as knowledge. More controversially, the paper argues that the heuristic of the experiment helps us to attend to the varying durations of becoming in ways that much existing work has discounted. Developing corporeal capacities – gaining a skill, becoming capable of doing a particular activity – involves becoming attuned to a range of thresholds, the crossing of which open up novel and frequently unexpected perspectives. Attunement to these thresholds does not arise simply through the process of mixing in and participating in a research site. It requires careful attention to the parameters of transformation involved in being able to participate. The paper explores how such parameters might be decided upon and calibrated as part of an ongoing engagement with a research site or event. Our aim is not to artificially restrict or constrain how human geographers approach their research design. Rather it is to encourage human geographers to show more courage in their use of corporeal based research methodologies.


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