Events

CALL FOR PAPERS

WORKSHOP ON COLLABORATIVE AND PUBLIC-FACING RESEARCH METHODS

 

WORKSHOP DATE: Friday 31st January, 2025, 10:00am - 5:00pm

VENUE: 3rd Floor Conference Room, Alma Jordan Library, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago; and breakout rooms 

REGISTRATION:  Register here by Monday 6th January, 2025

• ARE YOU INTERESTED IN USING COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH METHODS IN YOUR RESEARCH PROJECT OR THESIS? 

• HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT MAKING YOUR RESEARCH ACCESSIBLE TO PEOPLE AND COMMUNITIES OUTSIDE OF  THE UNIVERSITY? 

• WOULD YOU LIKE TO DEVELOP CITIZEN SCIENCE INTO CO-RESEARCH?

Collaborative methods can balance power relations between researchers and their interlocutors, as they work together on refining research questions, developing methods, considering analysis and publication. Public-facing research aims at conveying the research findings to different audiences, often in different modes. The shared labour and careful listening that go into collaborative and public-facing work can widen our scholarly imaginations and lead to unexplored possibilities. But developing meaningful, ethical, and mutually beneficial collaborative and public-facing approaches to research and publishing is seldom a straightforward  process. This workshop provides an opportunity for us to discuss ideas and practices together.

We begin the workshop with a plenary session in the conference room of Alma Jordan Library. The  session consists of presentations by Professor Tawanna Dillahunt (University of Michigan) and the project Imagining Futures at the Margins of the State (University of Helsinki) with ample time for a Question and Answer session. 

After lunch, the workshop continues in smaller groups in breakout rooms. In these group sessions, we  invite you to present your research ideas, ongoing work, or a project you have recently completed and  discuss these with the workshop facilitators and other participants. Each presenter will receive  individualised feedback and support. The presentations may include graduate students and researchers’  work, arts-based and multimodal research, or NGO projects that apply collaborative research. You are welcome to present work-in-progress – please don’t hesitate to take part if your work is still at a  preliminary stage! 

Please register for the workshop through this link by Monday 6th January, 2025. You are welcome to attend the plenary session in the morning or stay for the whole day. If you attend the group sessions in the afternoon, you are expected to present your own work. Please indicate your choice on the registration form. 

The workshop is free of charge and includes a coffee break and lunch for all participants. 

WORKSHOP SUBMISSIONS:  

• Your pre-submitted work for the workshop can take the form of an idea paper (1-3 pages) or a research proposal or paper (max 20 pages). In addition to written submissions, we welcome practice-based or multimodal work combining text with visual, audio-visual, performative or  other material.
• Depending on the stage of your research, your submission can be a reflection on  your planned research (idea paper or research proposal); your on-going or recently completed  fieldwork/data collection; or it may concern the dissemination and publication of your research. 
• Your submission can be produced specifically for the workshop, or it may be a well-chosen  sample of your work-in-progress 
• Please submit your contribution as a PDF file to maarit.forde@helsinki.fi by Friday 17th January, 2025. If your submission includes multimodal work, you can submit a link to the file. 
• During the workshop, each participant will briefly introduce their pre-submitted work, but most of the allotted time for each participant will be used for joint conversation led by the main discussants. 
• For further information on the Call for Papers and Workshop, please contact Dr. Maarit Forde, maarit.forde@helsinki.fi

Facilitated by the project Imagining Futures in the Margins of the State, University of Helsinki, in collaboration with the Institute for Gender and Development Studies, UWI St. Augustine  
 

Collaborative ethnographic methods may help to balance power relations between
anthropologists and their interlocutors, as decisions about research design, methods, analysis,
and publication can be made together. Ethical collaboration has become a catchphrase in recent efforts to decolonise our disciplinary practice, but developing meaningful and truly ethical, mutually beneficial collaborative approaches to anthropological fieldwork and publishing is seldom a straightforward process. When successful, the shared labour and careful listening of collaborative work can widen our ethnographic imaginations and lead to unexplored possibilities. This panel contributes to ongoing discussions about collaborative ethnography (for example Fuh 2019; Jarillo et al. 2020; Kalinga 2019; The Fire and River Collective 2021). We welcome papers and multimodal presentations on collaborative projects and more or less successful experiments with collaborative methods, both during and after fieldwork. These may include arts-based and multimodal ways of working together - for example by making music, performance ethnography, or photovoice - or various forms of co-research with more conventional social scientific methods. We are particularly interested in South-South collaborations, where anthropologists living and working in different societies in the Global South explore and create methodology for working together; but we are happy to include presentations on other contexts and regions as well. While the theoretical and methodological approaches of the presentations may vary, we'd encourage all contributors to critically consider the ethical, feminist, or decolonizing potential of ethnographic collaboration. 

Please submit your abstracts via the link below. For more information, contact Maarit Forde, maarit.forde@helsinki.fi