Going public? Re‐thinking visibility, ethics and recognition through participatory research praxis

Bibliographic Data

ID8090352
AuthorsLuke Dickens (0000-0003-2521-4649, School of Geography and the Environment University of Oxford Oxford OX1 3QY, corresponding author), Melissa Butcher (0000-0001-5010-9133, Department of Geography, Environment and Development Studies Birkbeck, University of London London WC1H 9EZ)
Year2016
Volume41
Issue4
Pages528-540
Publication date2016-07-18
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/tran.12136
OpenAlexW2477845156
LanguageEN
Citations received19
References cited75

Recent work in human geography has articulated the principles of an emerging ‘participatory ethics’. Yet despite sustained critical examination of the participatory conditions under which geographical knowledge is produced, far less attention has addressed how a participatory ethics might unsettle the conventional ways such knowledge continues to be received, circulated, exchanged and mediated. As such, the uptake of visual methods in participatory research praxis has drawn a range of criticism for assuming visual outputs ‘tell their own stories’ and that publics might straightforwardly engage with them. In response, this paper develops an argument for adopting an ethical stance that takes a more situated, processual account of the ways participants themselves might convene their own forms of public engagement, and manage their own conditions of becoming visible through the research process. To do so the concept of an ethics of recognition is developed, drawing attention to the inter‐ and intra‐subjective relations that shape the public research encounter, and signalling ways that participants might navigate such conditions in pursuit of their intuitive desire to give an account of themselves to others. This ethical stance is then used to rethink questions of visibility and publicness through the conditions of reception, mediation and exchange that took place during the efforts of a London‐based participatory research project to ‘go public’. Drawing in particular on the experiences of one of the project participants, we suggest how a processual and contingent understanding of public engagement informed by such an ethics of recognition might be anticipated, approached and enacted

Argument (complex analysis · Citizen journalism · Epistemology · Mediation · Participatory action research · Participatory GIS · Political science · Praxis · Public engagement · Public relations · Reflexivity · Situated · Social science · Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Participatory Visual Research Methods · Qualitative Research Methods and Ethics

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