The Promise and Possibilities of Participatory Analysis

• In Event: Courageous Conversations: The Power and Possibilities of Participatory Inquiry With Youth

Abstract

As practitioners of participatory inquiry, we aim to build meaningful relationships with participants, increase understanding of their lived experiences, and work together to confront and disrupt systems of oppression. This paper emerged from an ongoing critical youth participatory action research (YPAR) project in Northern Virginia called Courageous Conversations which works to foster connections between high school students across difference and through multimodal art-based inquiry. Our intergenerational collective, which includes high school and doctoral students, a university faculty member, and a classroom teacher, has engaged in multiple forms of participatory meaning-making as we excavated and explored youth-generated artifacts, including spoken word poetry, digital video/photography collages, Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal, 1985) scenes, and nano-memoirs.
In this paper we trace the evolution of participatory meaning-making from its roots in the onto-epistemological underpinnings of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970/2000; Fals-Borda & Rahman, 1991; Martín-Baró, 1994), as many scholars proclaim goals of ‘empowering’ participants in order to increase reciprocity, reflexivity, ethical engagement, and validity (Byrne, Canavan, & Millar, 2009; Curry, 2012; Nind & Vinha, 2016). This approach is often used with children and youth (Byrne et al., 2009; Díez et al., 2017) as well as marginalized populations (Nind & Vinha, 2016; Pittaway, Bartolomei, & Hugman, 2010; Sitter, 2015; Vesely et al., 2019), and has become popular outside of academia, particularly in the development and aid sectors (Action Aid, n.d.; Peace Corps, 2007).
The paper briefly covers the many useful approaches to collaborative meaning making, including thematic coding (Nind & Vinha, 2016; Vesely et al., 2019), creating mind maps, collages, poetry, or storyboards (Burns, 2018; Pittaway et al., 1010; Sitter, 2015), and using more structured protocols, including photo elicitation (Díez et al., 2017; Sitter, 2017) and the voice-centered relational method (Byrne et al., 2009). Drawing on decolonizing methodological work (Patel, 2015; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012) the central premise of this paper is that, like PAR more broadly, participatory analysis runs the risk of co-opting or tokenizing participant ownership rather than genuinely sharing power and decision making (Burns, 2018; Sitter, 2017). Working across differences of age, profession, and ethnicity, the two authors on this paper take up a decolonizing frame to critically reflect on our experiences engaging in participatory data analysis over the past two years. We seek to explore both its pitfalls and possibilities for increasing intersubjective understanding, reciprocity, ethical engagement, and quality. We share our experiences with and lessons learned from using three specific approaches, including priority card sorting, forcefield analysis, and the ripples of change visualization process (Action Aid, n.d.; Chambers, 2002) as a way to encourage participatory inquiry that holds to its critical onto-epistemology and that enables the collective to reach both relational and structural goals, strengthen intersubjective understanding, equalize power dynamics, and work towards meaningful change that hopefully does not perpetuate the exploitation that is so often an unintended consequence of participatory inquiry.

Authors

• Meagan Call-Cummings, George Mason University

• Katelyn Sultana, George Mason University