Impact in Qualitative Research: Nat Gohlan on power dynamics in co-production
Nat Gohlan is the Participatory Research Coordinator at King’s College London. They work to embed a culture of co-produced and collaborative research with communities. Informed by their background in youth and community work, Nat aims to encourage and enable researchers to reflect on the hierarchies that can exist between academic and community partners and develop approaches to address these power imbalances. In this blog, Nat shares insights and reflections from a recent training session they ran with Voices That Shake!. The blog was written by Nat with edits from Bella Spencer.
What is participatory research?
Participatory Research (PR) is research led by and for the community that the research affects or is related to. PR follows the logic that if you want to know what a community need, ask them, they are the best people to speak about their lived experience. Recognising the expertise that communities bring to the research, they should be compensated for their time, energy and labour. This collaborative working between institutions and communities can challenge traditional hierarchical partnership models and make space for radical power sharing.
Why is it important to understand and address power dynamics in Participatory Research?
Done well, PR should be non-hierarchical. As community-led projects, PR emphasises having the community at the centre of the research project, often with them directing the research agenda and generate outcomes they feel will be of most benefit, highlighting the value and weight of their input. This is where the importance of addressing power dynamics comes in. To truly have horizontal power structures, both researcher and community partners' positions and voices should be held, understood and respected. To achieve this, there must be an ongoing conversation around power dynamics that critiques traditional institutional forms of knowledge production.
The knowledge and stories of the communities are often removed from their context and retold through researchers' own bias. This process distances the communities from their own words, eroding trust between communities and universities.
Addressing power dynamics is particularly important due to the history of extractive research that has failed to uplift, represent, or reflect the experiences of racially, socially, and economically marginalised communities. Many communities that I have worked with, particularly Global Majority communities and those with intersecting marginalised identities, are very weary of working with universities due to the legacy of extractive research. Extractive research sees researchers parachuting into communities and extracting knowledge, benefiting the academic and the university without reciprocating to the community. The knowledge and stories of the communities are often removed from their context and retold through researchers' own bias. This process distances the communities from their own words, eroding trust between communities and universities. Extractive research practices often do not lead to positive change for the communities involved. Over time, this can lead to fatigue and mistrust among communities toward universities.
Trust can be established through transparency. For researchers, this means being honest when communicating with community partners about the possibilities, limitations and expectations of the research. It's important to openly discuss the challenges of working within a traditional university structure, where systems may be slow-moving and not necessarily designed for collaboration with small community organisations or peer-researchers, and address these obstacles together.
That is not to say that these conversations are easy. Examining your positionality and power, can bring discomfort. However, I firmly believe that this discomfort is good and important for learning. It is through these challenging conversations that we break down existing dynamics, explore how we can best work together, and discover what collaborators need to bring their full selves to the project.
Delivering training
We partnered with Voices That Shake!, a community group that uses creative practices to reimagine social and transformative justice responses to social issues. As PR has its origins in grassroots activism, we wanted to commission an organisation that operates outside of the realms of traditional academia to provide an anti-oppressive alternative to extractive research.
It often falls to marginalised communities to educate groups that hold more power. We did not want to replicate this dynamic, recognising that the weight of the labour is tiring and emotional.
We decided to host two in-person workshops; one for King’s staff and one for community partners who had previously been involved in co-produced research at King’s or were interested in collaborating. These workshops would be followed by a collective online workshop. It often falls to marginalised communities to educate groups that hold more power. We did not want to replicate this dynamic, recognising that the weight of the labour is tiring and emotional. Therefore, we wanted to use the first workshop to create spaces where people with similar experiences could share, reflect, and learn from each other.
King’s Faculty Workshop
In the workshop for King’s Faculty, we aimed to explore the impact of power imbalances on community members and develop approaches to enable non-hierarchical relationships.
One researcher was looking for alternative ways of engaging members of a local community group that would work with their busy schedules, varying access needs and communication styles. Voices That Shake! talked about the importance of flexibility and adaptability and suggested that researchers could offer multiple formats for engagement to suit the needs of individuals. For example, they had previously used a WhatsApp group for a project and invited the community members to engage in a way that they felt most comfortable, at a time that suited them. Voices That Shake! described it as “a space they could ask hard questions in a soft environment”, where community partners could respond to prompts through voice notes, photos or a written message. The flexibility of this approach relies on the agency of community collaborators to choose how to engage with the project (for further details, please see page 27 of the SHAKE research report).
Using play and arts-based methods, rather than a lecture and formal discussion, can allow people to share ideas more freely.
Community workshops
In the workshop with community members, we aimed to explore the researcher's responsibility for maintaining an equal partnership, while also developing community partners’ confidence to recognise and uphold their boundaries.
The group talked about how the language and communication styles used by researchers can make community members feel like their knowledge is not as valued. This highlighted how important it is for researchers to use clear, accessible language in their work and to be open to questioning assumptions and definitions. This approach decentres academic knowledge and instead allows communities to contribute their experiences and perspective in a way that is familiar and comfortable for them. For example, using play and arts-based methods, rather than a lecture and formal discussion, can allow people to share ideas more freely.
Reflection Workshop:
Following these lively in-person workshops, a third online workshop was offered a month later to bring community partners and King’s faculty together.
Voices that Shake! asked everyone to contribute one pledge that they would like King’s to make. King’s College London should:
- Set up and fund networks within the university to allow for peer learning. There is a lot of good work happening in silos that should be amplified and supported.
- Provide investment and infrastructure to facilitate approaches that are truly community-led. approaches. At present, most research questions are initiated by researchers who then invite community members to collaborate. There should be funding and programmes available to enable community partners and King’s researchers to come together at the inception of a project, to develop a research question and approach together.
- Provide community access to online and physical library resources. This is fundamental to community members having agency and access to drive their own investigations.