Narrativity and Collaboration for Co-Constructed Change Between University and Community in Uruguay

• In Event: Grasping the Elephant: International Perspectives on Truth-Making in Participatory Design Research Projects

Abstract

Being part of UC Links has allowed us to integrate an international community of dialogue and reflection on the different research and action projects that we develop with the child population in situations of socioeconomic vulnerability, and in recent years with children and young people from Latin American migratory flows, in community and school centers in Uruguay. We are based on the narrative and collaborative model of the Fifth Dimension (Cole, 1996) that constitutes an opportunity to think of ourselves in terms of community plots (Gutierrez, 2018) that enable processes of collective construction, participation, appropriation of artifacts and transformation from the action and incidence of all members. We cultivate environments between the University and the different communities that allow us to sustain a common web of stories and feelings, to solve problems and organize a reciprocal experience of encounters. Theoretical contributions such as the feminist affective turn (Ahmed, 2015, 2019), decolonial theories (Quijano, 2014; Anzaldúa, 1987/1999), critical race theory (Fanon, 2009; hooks, 1994/2021), and the perspective of critical interculturality (Walsh, 2010) sustain our projects that seek to produce knowledge from a dialogic, collaborative and participatory model.

The studies underway are part of a qualitative research approach (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018) that privileges the intersubjective meanings produced in human interaction in a given socio-historical context. We form an interdisciplinary research team (psychologist, sociologist, educators and physical education teachers) and integrate university students undertaking pre-professional internships. We use three methodological approaches: (a) the dynamic narrative, to address how different narratives interact and co-construct conditions of encounter, differences, social and educational equity; (b) the critical ethnographic, to understand in depth the living dynamics of social and educational practices, situating the research in its social context, considering how knowledge is shaped by the values of human agents and communities; and (c) action research, to engage and co-construct with educational communities joint solutions to ethno/racial, gender, class, empowerment and inequality problems in education.

The current results provide insight into the educational inequality of vulnerable groups such as migrant and racialized children, or children and youth with precarious lives (Butler, 2010). The qualitative and participatory perspective also allows promoting committed actions for change, strengthening the affective network of the collectives based on the limits defined by the subjects themselves. This approach also allows us to reflect on our conditions of privilege as academics and to accompany without hindering changes in the educational spaces of the communities of reference.

Author

• Mónica Elena Da Silva Ramos, Universidad de la República
  Presenting Author