Stimulated Recall Interviews as Politicizing Methodology

• In Event: Methods for Studying Learning in Social Movements: Consequences for the Movements and the Field

Abstract

Research Question
Our research examines the impact of Stimulated Recall Interviews (SRIs) on the internal processes of the University of Toronto Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign and on the Participatory Action Research process that was embedded within it. SRIs are a technique of reviewing video data with participants as a tool for allowing participants to view themselves and describe their experiences from a first-hand perspective (Lyle, 2003; Dookie, 2015). We argue that SRIs were a tool for politicizing focal participants, which significantly shaped the learning of participants overall.

Perspectives
Feminist anthropologists argue that video-based research can destabilize hierarchical power relations and shiftd whose voices are heard and how stories are told and represented in research (Forsyth, 2009; Grant & Luxford, 2009; Kindon, 2002).

Methods
SRIs were conducted with eight focal participants across two years. SRIs lasted from 30 minutes to 2 hours and offered participants a chance to process the day-to-day interactions of the group, as well as their own thinking about strategy, process, and other aspects of participation in the group.

Findings
SRIS created space for politicization through reflection, since the video often led focal participants to naming dynamics, and articulating critiques of the ways race and gender played out within the meetings. For focal participants of colour, naming the racial dynamics of the group gave voice to their concerns and led them to create caucus spaces where they could collectively discuss what they reflected on individually in the SRIs.

SRIs were impactful in terms of generating the politicization we documented across the campaign for focal participants. During an SRI, Sam, a white man in his first year, noticed codes around gender and asked about them, leading to a brief discussion of gendered participation in meetings. Weeks later, at a meeting he told us that he had noticed the gendered participation of his engineering class and raised it with the professor because of our discussion.

SRIs shaped the political debates of the collective in the group related to gendered and racialized dynamics. During one SRI, Jade, a Chinese-Canadian woman, asked what other women in the group thought of the gendered dynamics of the group. Based on that question, she coordinated focus groups for women participants, which led to learning spaces for those participants, and subsequently a deeper conversation about the significance of gender and leadership in the campaign.

Significance
SRIs can be used as a tool for inviting co-generative analysis with participants and building relational accountability. The SRI method has some potential to disrupt normative researcher-participant power dynamics, as it opens space for participants to lead the analytic process. For social movement learning research, mobilizing SRIs with the goal of undoing uneven power relations represents a significant challenge to normative ideas of reliability and objectivity, and requires an epistemic shift to centre a different political vision of what research is and who it is for.

Authors

• Joe Curnow, University of Manitoba

• Sinead Dunphy, University of Toronto