Post on 01-Apr-2015
Collaborative Methods or Collaboration as Method
Michael Darcy
Western Sydney Housing Coalition‘Learning to Listen’:What your community says about housing
Knowledge and Methods
“The word itself “research” is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary . . . . . The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonised peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity.”
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2001) Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous People (p.1)
Constructing Knowledge
Power/Knowledge
Research generates and validates Knowledge
Who constructs and validates research?
Critical Social Science
“This awareness [that research is a power-oriented Western cultural practice] has led many to question their own research practices, to work with ‘those’ who have traditionally been labelled as ‘research subject’ as partners with equal voice in the research process, and to even determine that particular form of research (that are most likely to create power for the researcher) will no longer be acceptable”
Lincoln & Cannella 2004b p299
Research
Research Questions
Nature of Knowledge
Quality Assessment
Community Dissemination
Academic Curiosity
National Research Priorities
Disciplinary Conventional rigour
Peer review
Laboratory
Research Object
Peer reviewed publication
Consultant
Expert skills applied to ‘private’ questions
‘Commodified’
Utility for client
Customer
‘knowledge mining’
Commercial
Engaged researcher/Collaborato
r
Shared, negotiated
Contextual
Multiple
Meaning, relevance, identity
Owner
Participant
Multiple, reflecting ownership
. . . housing researchers need to question
far more the construction of ‘problems’ commonly
advanced by government policy makers if the
discipline is to retain critical and independent modes
of enquiry. (Jacobs Kemeny and Manzi, 2003: 431)
challenges to Housing Studies knowledge and understanding from other epistemic universes (‘‘lived experience’’, etc.) are
often dismissed as inferior. .
. . this is a form of fraudulent scientific imperialism because it fails to recognize the epistemological value of ‘‘lived experience’’
and the ‘‘local knowledge’’ that is constituted through it.
Allen (2009: 55)
REVIEW: Dominant Discourses of Place and Disadvantage ‘social exclusion’
imagines a boundary, and focuses attention on those outside it (Levitas)
metaphor contributes to construction of disadvantage as a spatial phenomenon, draws attention to geographic concentration as evidence of a causal link between place and poverty which is culturally mediated.
‘neighbourhood effects’ propinquity of disadvantaged households creates a local social or
cultural dynamic which perpetuates disadvantage ‘social capital’ sustains economic well-being, through role
modelling, networking and civic participation density, distinctive building design and specific combinations of
public and private space are all implicated
Evidence Based Policy
Masking difference Rationing resources Economic and political values Singular unchallenged truth
state policies which historically contributed to the geographical separation and containment of poor households now emphasize dispersal or penetration of low income communities as a way of generating social order in disadvantaged neighbourhoods
(see Uitermark et al 2007)
Housing, Place and Disadvantage recasting ‘neighbourhood effects’ and ‘disadvantaged
places’ using collaborative ‘emergence’ methodology
reframing contemporary debate about concentration and de-concentration of poverty, particularly through redevelopment of public housing
directly involving affected residents of disadvantaged areas in research design and implementation, and to provide opportunities for residents to develop and share insights across sites
“Liberatory Enquiry”
How do we pursue social justice without imposing our predetermined notions of emancipation (rescue?)?
How do we collaborate without denying difference or forcing consensus?
How can our research methods provide for people to choose how they are represented?
We are not seeking directly to engage theories of social exclusion or neighbourhood effects, but to create opportunities for residents to make and validate their own theories
Community Based Research is a “collaborative enterprise” between academics, students and community members that “validates multiple sources of knowledge and promotes the use of multiple methods of discovery and dissemination” aimed at “achieving social justice”
Strand et al 2003
dominant definitions of housing issues (whether in social science or society at large) are simply those whose protagonists have
successfully transformed them from concepts into ‘‘established facts’’ that are widely agreed upon
A key problem . . is that the social sciences ask questions about housing phenomena that are fundamentally different to the types
of questions posed (if they are posed at all) by people as they dwell in everyday life.
(Allen 2009)
'exclusion' extends to exclusion of poor tenant households from the discursive practices through which disadvantaged places have become problematised
discursive practices include academic research.
A methodology of emergence or . .
. . . emergence of a methodology community collaborators are competent agents and experts in
their own lives inform each phase of the research: developing specific research
questions, data collection, analyses and dissemination
support residents– as situated knowledge producers - to investigate the ‘problem’ of public housing ‘concentration’, and to
scrutinize the strategies of public policy agencies
Research Steering Groups: Sydney & Chicago
Multiple Local Research Teams in Sydney, Melbourne & Chicago
Academic Researchers- SJSC UWS- CURL Loyola
Diagram 1: Collaborative, ComparativeResearch Model
Linking across sites
context based story telling (autoethnography)
participatory diagramming
visual contributions (photographic, video)
Interactive website
Teleconferencing – ‘access grid’
Analysis analysis is an integral part of the process and is not necessarily
separate from the processes of data collection and production techniques.
Regular “moments of analysis” emerge at various points of the research processes as part of the collaborators’ reflective praxis. (Cahill, 2007: 306)
plenaries become arenas in which the social re-negotiation of the phenomena under discussion can begin to take place
Kesby (2000: 425)
emergent spaces for political action, notably spaces where those confined to the nation-state (citizens) or those who are immobile (because of poverty or political vulnerability) can actually engage
in global politics
(Sassen 2008)