PLUS Stories

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In PLUS research, people are our focus. Are you curious to know more about how this happens? PLUS researchers share their first-hand narratives about the societal relevance and impact of their research.


Participatory Approaches in Project Work

From our, past and current, experiences in projects in India, Colombia, Germany, Nepal, and Indonesia, aimed to be done with a diversity of participatory approaches, our main learning has been on aiming to, and to "ensure" that research is being carried out in a way that is actually the process and its outcomes are created with, openly shared and of use for the communities which are part of it. In terms of values, we have encountered that open forms of research and data ownership and community-based ways of knowledge production, management and access are the core of this type of research. Lastly, we also believe our research should be more oriented to the public rather than only academic audiences.

Our experiences in these participatory projects make us aware and of the potential downfalls that participatory processes might have, for instance, on issues such as power imbalances, not "true" and meaningful access to the research, the context/history of participants with previous experiences with extractivist forms of research, the ways they have been represented before, or tokenistic forms of involvement. In research design, we try to tailor the methods to the specific group of participants we are working with, on the ways that are more familiar to them to ease their engagement and actions on these. In terms of participants, our experience allows us to be more aware of the different types of data that we can ask and to whom, and also design iterative processes of research which are more bottom-up and these are related to data analysis