How can researchers involve refugee women more in the
development, design and delivery of research into refugee women’s experience?
Why should they? What challenges do participatory approaches pose to the need
to balance meaningful involvement by marginalised stakeholders, with the
production of reliable, credible research findings? What can be learned from
the community sector to help find answers to these questions? These are some of
the questions that have emerged through the preparation for our roundtable on
Researching With Refugee Women, to be held later this year.
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| Photo from Participate2015 |
To explore these questions I’ve been reading some of the
literature evaluating the vast experience of participation in the community
sector, the user involvement movement, and the international development field.
Grassroots community activists have been using participatory methodologies for
many decades to support marginalised people to be meaningfully involved in decision
making and research that affects their lives. What can more conventional
academic researchers learn from this literature?
In May I presented these questions and some of this learning
from the community sector at a conference in Paris on Producing Knowledge on
Migration. It was an exciting chance to raise these issues with migration
researchers, and hear their concerns about ‘participation’ and participatory
approaches. These included worries about the integrity of the 'participation'; differences in objectives of researchers and stakeholders; and a loss of objectivity and quality of findings. Many of these concerns have
been explored in depth in the community sector - it seems to me there’s a real need
to share the knowledge gained outside academia with those working within.
The questions we are exploring in this strand of work raise
exciting challenges for conventional researchers. They also open up space to
suggest possibilities for new ways of working, and opportunities to support the
empowerment of refugee women. This is an important objective for those working
on refugee women’s issues, whether as practitioners or researchers, and I’m
looking forward to convening the roundtable in October to discuss it further.
To find out where we get to, watch this space! c.cochrane@csel.org.uk
