On a journey to democratising research
By Anna Colom & Paola Pierri
Demsoc’s mission is to strengthen and re-imagine democracy. As our Theory of Change outlines, this means designing and delivering inclusive spaces for participation and deliberation, using and fighting power by supporting citizens’ agency and diverse movements for change, and enhancing democratic principles in and beyond government. It also means democratising the research we do.
Research often entails public participation and the engagement of diverse groups of people and organisations because it is done to understand diverse lived experiences, knowledges, and attitudes in societies. This, however, does not mean that the research is democratic. In essence, democratising research is about intentionally identifying and redistributing power throughout the research process. It can be transformational, but it is not easy to do.
For Demsoc, democratising research is important for many reasons and it is a key feature of our Research Strategy as well. Firstly, from a place of values and justice, democratising research is important as a way of redistributing power and respecting people’s rights and agency in making sense of the world and contributing to the quest for knowledge and understanding. As Arjun Appadurai wrote, research is “the capacity to systematically increase the horizons of one’s current knowledge, in relation to some task, goal or aspiration” and is very connected to our capacity to aspire, hope and achieve changes in our lives and societies. “Without aspiration –Appadurai adds–, there is no pressure to know more. And without systemic tools for gaining relevant new knowledge, aspiration degenerates into fantasy or despair.” Democratising research, then, is not only valuable in itself but instrumental as an “essential capacity for democratic citizenship” (Appadurai 2006).
Secondly, then, democratising research is also about reclaiming the old idea that information and knowledge are central to navigate the public sphere and take part in democratic life. It can also be an infrastructure for democratisation and social change if we consider the power of research as “convocation” (Khasnabish and Haiven 2012) or the capacity to mobilise the position and resources of the researcher to create new spaces of encounter for citizens, social movements and social actors more broadly.
Thirdly, democratising research can improve how research is done and what it achieves because the research process opens itself to different ways of knowing and making sense of the world, different realities and lived experiences. What questions are important and for whom? How do we find answers and what do these answers mean for different people? Research will benefit some and exclude others depending on who has designed, conducted and disseminated the research. Being intentional from the onset about the distribution of the research benefits should be central to a democratic practice of research as we are outlining it.
Democratising research is important to us for all these reasons. Ansley and Gaventa helpfully summed it up: “Ultimately, a knowledge system that discredits and devalues common, every-day knowledge serves to disempower common people as well. Such a system represents a contradiction for any vision of democracy that values the participation of people themselves in key deliberations and decisions that affect their lives.” (Ansley and Gaventa 1997).
In the last year we have had some interesting opportunities to examine what this means and how it can work in practice. We have designed and implemented a peer research study with people seeking asylum to understand the impact of digital exclusion on health (more to come on this soon), we have conducted a small scoping study on how to meaningfully engage people with lived experience, we have supported civil society organisations in doing participatory evaluation, and organised public engagement processes to inform policies on use of data and AI.
This is what we have learnt:
Watch out for buzzwords and to not mix terms
Lived experience, co-production, peer research, participatory research, public engagement… These terms are not synonyms, and although they share values of inclusion and participation, their use does not mean that the research has been democratic. Research on the lived experience of people is not the same as doing research with lived experience. The “with” in the latter can imply some level collaboration or partnership and some research with people with lived experience may have been co-produced, but not necessarily. The extent to which power has been shared in a process of collaboration can vary, which means that labelling research as co-produced needs caution and nuance. In peer research, members of the ‘researched’ group take on the role of the researcher (Lushey 2017) but this does not mean that they are always ‘invited’ to the whole research process and that decision-making power in all stages, like design or dissemination, is shared. Participatory research is an approach that can work as an umbrella term for some of these methods of research but, again, it is understood as a spectrum depending on how much power is shared at what stages. Often, power cannot be equally shared at all stages and this is important nuance in the principle of democratisation. Using buzzwords can whitewash this nuance and depoliticise the effort of democratisation.
Commit to a set of values and principles
We could start with definitions but there is no single agreed definition for each of these terms, although substantial thinking and writing about them has taken place. What is common is to interpret them in a spectrum in which power and representation are key axes alongside the different stages in the research process, like design, data collection, analysis and dissemination. For example, many resources refer to Arnstein’s participation ladder (Arnstein 1969), which spans from non-participation to tokenism to citizen power depending on how much power is shared.
Other principles can be added to this spectrum to judge the extent to which research is democratic. The principles will vary depending on the context. The Co-Production Collective (O’Mara-Eves et al. 2022) identified a range of principles used by researchers to underpin their definition of co-production, like equality, accessibility, accountability, transparency, reciprocity or humanness. We know that there are a few likely reasons why research might not be able to follow some of these principles in practice. For example, our research is often done with limited resources and timelines or for funders who have additional internal decision-making processes that we cannot access. However, being clear on our principles can help us decide which research we should embark on depending on the extent to which it can be inclusive and democratic. Or can help us be honest and transparent with partners or participants involved about the extent to which some decisions can be shared or about the extent the research process was democratic.
Sharing power at the design and dissemination stages is a good indicator of democratic research
A lot of power lies in decisions made during the design and authorship of research, yet these are the stages in which participation and co-production might be more challenging because of reasons like resources, time and organisational and funding dynamics. The review by the Co-Production Collective also found that sharing authorship can be a good indicator of co-production and it “ensured that the different voices were retained throughout the project” (2022). Yet, it is not uncommon for co-production to end before the authoring stage. Institutional rules and processes, or norms on what ‘quality’ looks like, can be reasons for this. A group of academic researchers who embarked on a 3-year international participatory research study wrote about the risks they anticipated on the credibility of the process, including questions by funders or project partners on the quality of the research, of its reputation and of the relations. They argue however that it is only by embracing the ‘beautiful risk’ that comes with doing research in participatory ways that it can be emancipatory (Rix et al. 2022).
Ensure enough resources and time
Democratising research requires resources and time because the research process needs to account for diverse ways of interacting, engaging and learning; different socio-economic backgrounds and support networks; complex deliberation that results from different ways of making sense of knowledge; diverse abilities, skills and expertise; the need for inclusive spaces; and compensation of time and labour among many other factors. In a recent academic event, linguist, writer and activist Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, from the Colectivo Mixe, used the concept of ‘slow research’ (as a parallel to ‘slow food’) to refer to the need for time in research for it to shift power imbalances. Funding and organisational dynamics need to start embracing this need for slow research, including practicing the redistribution of the research resources more broadly (e.g.funding, research tools as well as reputation).
We have also learnt that democratising research can be transformational. At Demsoc, we have embedded participation, deliberation, and inclusion in our research but, due to time, resources and funding dynamics, not to the extent that we are aiming for in terms of how much power can be shared across all stages of the research. We are still at the beginning of the journey to democratising research. Yet, we have seen its transformational potential. Transformational for the parties involved and for the quality of the research and the different realities and experiences that it can help us to understand and potentially solve. We are now working on a more specific ‘how-to’ article to share some practical learnings internally and with you all. Watch this space!
References
Ansley, Fran, and John Gaventa. 1997. ‘Researching for Democ & Democratizing Research’. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 29(1): 46–53.
Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. ‘The Right to Research’. Globalisation, Societies and Education 4(2): 167–77.
Arnstein, Sherry R. 1969. ‘A Ladder Of Citizen Participation’. Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35(4): 216–24.
Khasnabish, Alex, and Max Haiven. 2012. ‘Convoking the Radical Imagination’. Cultural Studies 12(5): 408–21.
Lushey, Clare. 2017. Peer Research Methodology: Challenges and Solutions. London: SAGE Research Methods. https://methods.sagepub.com/case/peer-research-methodology-challenges-and-solutions.
O’Mara-Eves, Alison et al. 2022. Rapid Review of Evidence on Co-Production. Co-Production Collective. https://www.coproductioncollective.co.uk/news/what-is-the-value-of-co-production.
Rix, Jonathan et al. 2022. ‘Taking Risks to Enable Participatory Data Analysis and Dissemination: A Research Note’. Qualitative Research 22(1): 143–53.
