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Reflections on a failed participatory workshop in Northern Chile: Negotiating boycotts, benefits, and the UN declaration on the rights of indigenous people
- Source :
- Emotion, Space and Society
- Publication Year :
- 2020
- Publisher :
- Elsevier BV, 2020.
-
Abstract
- In this paper, we critically analyse our experiences of initiating participatory research in the challenging context of the Atacama Desert, Northern Chile. We use our experience of organising participatory workshops with Aymara and Quechua women community leaders to reflect on the politics of participation/non-participation, and explore these experiences in light of our multiple and overlapping positionalities as Chilean/British, male/female, white/mestizo. In the light of one workshop being entirely unsuccessful, we discuss the ways in which our empirical and methodological thinking has nevertheless been enriched by this experience. We situate the challenges we faced in relation to negotiating the tensions presented by debates on decolonising research from our positions within the neoliberal academy, exploring the questions raised by indigenous women activists' research ‘refusal’, and critically reflect upon the emotional responses this situation elicited in each of us. We argue for the importance of embracing such apparent fieldwork ‘failures’ and, recognising the resulting emotional swirl of panic, anxiety and inadequacy that they produce, emphasise these experiences as illustrative of the inherent tensions around decolonising research, as well as an often inevitable element of conducting research with marginalised communities involved in socio-environmental conflicts.<br />Highlights • Research refusal should be understood in relation to attempts to decolonise research. • Importance of embracing and learning from fieldwork ‘failures’ and the emotional responses this elicits. • Participatory research carries risks for participants and researchers. • Emotion-laden fieldwork characteristic of research on socio-environmental conflict.
- Subjects :
- L700
Participatory research
Social Psychology
L300
media_common.quotation_subject
Failure
0211 other engineering and technologies
0507 social and economic geography
Declaration
Participatory action research
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Context (language use)
02 engineering and technology
Indigeneity
Article
Indigenous
Extractive industries
Politics
Political science
Chile
media_common
Decolonising research
05 social sciences
Gender
021107 urban & regional planning
Gender studies
Citizen journalism
Negotiation
Element (criminal law)
050703 geography
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 17554586
- Volume :
- 37
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Emotion, Space and Society
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....95824ca6c83252d0302e0c64a8c3a270