Negotiating Power: Co-Collaborative Research with Justice-Involved Women

• In Event: From Data to Impact: Developing Research and Tools to Inform and Improve the Application of Sociological Methods

Abstract

This lightning presentation examines how epistemic authority is negotiated and redistributed within a co-produced doctoral project conducted with justice-involved women, defined as women who have experienced imprisonment and are navigating the structural barriers of re-entry. Their lived expertise regarding incarceration, stigma, and labour market exclusion exceeds what a university-based researcher can access alone, positioning them as co-collaborators rather than research subjects. This orientation reflects the goals of sociology in practice settings, where knowledge is generated collaboratively and must remain accountable to those who are directly affected by institutional decision-making.

The project originally included a CV-based experimental survey informed by Gray and Wegner’s (2011) work showing that individuals framed as victims of circumstance tend to receive more sympathetic judgments, while those framed as morally exemplary “heroes” are judged more harshly due to being perceived as more responsible. This study offered a useful starting point for examining whether similar narrative expectations shape employer assessments of justice-involved applicants, particularly in relation to racialised hiring bias.

During early consultancy meetings, however, the women unanimously rejected the idea that they should rely on narratives of trauma, hardship, or redemption to render themselves employable. They argued that such expectations reproduce respectability politics by demanding moral performance as a condition of inclusion. This extends carceral logics beyond prison, positioning justice-involved women as perpetually accountable subjects who must justify themselves, rather than interrogating the structural racism embedded within labour markets. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, their refusal illustrates the ordinariness of racism and the persistent institutional demand that racialised subjects must justify their worth to gatekeepers.

Through a Bakhtinian lens, this intervention illustrates the tension between authoritative discourse, rooted in institutional research traditions, and internally persuasive discourse grounded in lived experience. The consultants’ refusal re-authored the project’s trajectory, demonstrating that co-production in practice settings is not additive participation but a dialogic struggle over epistemic legitimacy and methodological power.

Author

• Mariam Swehli, University College London