Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement

Writing research differently

Margaret Malone — 2025-01-31

This themed volume explores writing research differently: both the social practices that might foster experimentation and participation and the semiotic innovations needed to articulate knowledge plurality in our published scholarly texts. This collection of community-based research articles explores the many ways in which the standard genre conventions of the research article – order, structure, headings, images and quotes – can be creatively called upon to make visible on the page other worlds, other futures, other ways of knowing and being. Together, they demonstrate that coherence and cohesion – clarity – come in more shapes and forms than generally admitted, and can be welcoming frameworks for the rarely admitted: hope, sustenance, complexity, conflict and change.

Experimenting with twilight learnings and twilight writings for community engagement

Silvia Mugnaini — 2025-01-27

This contribution explores community engagement through the collaborative practice ‘Twilight Learnings – Seasonal experiments in the Tiny House on Wheels (THoW)’. In this article, we show that a reflective community can start to emerge through sharing experiences and knowledges in a confined space that is simultaneously connected to society in a fractal scaling (O’Brien et al. 2023) way. Some of the participants grew so fond of reflecting together on hope, allies, uncertainties, pain and frustrations, that they continued to build the community by articulating themselves through follow-up interviews and through writing together in different ways.

We document hidden and ‘marginal’ stages of a research process allowing longer timeframes so that practitioners and scholars can write together in a slow science (Stengers 2018) approach. This article mainly explores three aspects of community engagement: 1) reporting on community-based research and practice and reflective experiences in a workshop in the THoW; 2) reflecting on collective writing processes through performative writing 3) meta-reflecting on scaling and performativity. In other words, this article contributes to how knowledge production and world-making can go together through community engagement that extends into writing.

A curated walk with peer researchers and their communities: Engaging a research journey toward meaningful impact

Bradley Rink — 2025-01-27

As a collective of peer researchers, scholars and members of a non-profit organisation, we have come together to share a curated walk through low-income communities in Cape Town and London. We do so with the intent of exploring the embodied and social experiences of walking and writing research differently through a collaborative process of listening, co-creating and sharing knowledge about the pedestrian mobilities of young men as mediated by the precarities of urban life. Our walking-writing practices are a hybrid of the actual practices of walking and potential for enacting change by valuing the everyday experiences and knowledge of peer researchers. The curated walk that we share guides readers on the research journey that we have taken together from the homes of those involved to the metaphorical centre of power in the cities/regions where our work takes place, with the intention of long-term, meaningful impact.

Curating life in vacant spaces: Community action research and reversing the process of academic knowledge-making

Kelly Dombroski — 2025-01-27

For scholars in academic institutions, the process of research usually begins with a question often gleaned from academic literature, progresses through some methods and results, then ends in writing and dissemination of the findings. ‘Impact’ is identified by trying to see if anyone takes up the research and uses it to inform policy or action outside of academia – with contemporary impact databases measuring this by whether it has been cited in policy documents. But this way of understanding impact is fundamentally at odds with researching community-led activism, where impact is already happening, and researchers engage with communities to document and evaluate the impact in ways that support the work. For activists out in the community, research and learning are happening all the time and have impact without anyone writing it up at all. This article reflects on a research project in the city of Ōtautahi Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand, where researchers and community activists began with ‘impact’ and ‘dissemination’. From there, we developed frameworks and methods, developed evidence, then ended with asking wider theoretical questions relevant to academic literature. Effectively, we reversed the order that research projects usually follow. In order to recognise this ‘reversed’ order, our article utilises a reversed structure, using the concept of thinking infrastructures to understand what academic research adds to the knowledges already produced in community impact.

Reflections on multimodality: Making the most of Kairotic moments

M. Rebecca Genoe — 2025-01-29

It is generally accepted in extant literature that friends drift away after a person receives a diagnosis of dementia. In turn, we set out to explore friendships that continued to flourish following a diagnosis by interviewing people living with dementia, their friends, and family members. Along the way, we shaped and adopted a multimodal approach, incorporating artistically rendered, fictionalised vignettes based on our participants’ stories, thus incorporating visual and auditory components that encourage people living with dementia and their friends to reflect on how best to continue to nurture their relationships. In this article, we describe our process of adopting multimodality through an intertwined set of five kairotic moments, whereby we pushed ourselves out of our comfort zones to move beyond the format of the conventional peer-reviewed journal article, recognising the need to write differently to reach a broader audience. In another moment, we moved past an academic emphasis on writing to adopt multimodality. Subsequently, we connected with artists and knowledge mobilisation specialists to bring our collective vision to life. Finally, we aimed to make our study findings more accessible by sharing them through our website and engaging with various types of media. We conclude by offering a methodology for multimodality that includes relationality, axiology, passivity and action and temporality in embracing opportunities to write differently.

Participatory ESOL as process and product: Community-based participatory research with refugee English learners

Melissa Hauber-Özer — 2025-01-27

Adult English for Speakers of other Languages (ESOL) courses are crucial for the social and economic integration of immigrant and refugee families. These programs need to be customised to learners’ diverse educational backgrounds, needs and objectives. However, adult ESOL programs consistently face demand that surpasses capacity, and neoliberal funding requirements prioritise workforce integration. This article results from a community-based participatory research (CBPR) partnership established to address these intersecting challenges through ESOL instruction shaped by the needs and priorities of refugee adults. Participatory approaches have been used widely to engage adult learners in research, from needs analysis to curriculum development and program evaluation. However, in this article we argue that CBPR is both process and product, an effective method for facilitating learning and knowledge production. Through vignettes recreated from field notes, a learner-authored story and a participatory evaluation of the course, we examine the process we have undergone simultaneously as adult education and research about adult education. By examining the data for instances of vivencia, praxis, and conscientisation, we confirmed that critical adult education is participatory research. Community concerns sparked the project, and the expertise of those closest to the issue informed the solution, resulting in individual conscientisation and action toward broader social change. By centring learners’ own words in the article, we aim to trouble the presumed divisions between community and university, researcher and participant, and education and research. We encourage fellow community-engaged scholars to reconnect with the roots of this powerful approach and recognise the importance of living out their onto-epistemological commitments in both the process and the product of participatory inquiry.

Resisting scientific extractivism: A post-extractivist policy of knowledge production with marginalized communities

Baptiste Godrie — 2025-01-31

This article analyses scientific extractivism as a research process in which the experiences, discourses and knowledge of members of marginalised social groups are subalternised, i.e. reduced to raw data appropriated by academics. What has been captured and assimilated is then largely reinjected into closed circuits operating essentially between academics, from which marginalised communities are largely excluded. Ultimately, extractivism produces scientific careers and minefields; it confers disproportionate benefits to academics and little or no benefit on communities in material support, intellectual credit, or contribution to social struggles, which may lead them to turn away from academia.

This analysis then raises the importance of developing post-extractivist approaches in the social sciences, based on an ethics of knowledge production rooted in the concepts of epistemic justice, reciprocity and accountability. I introduce a set of post-extractivist research postures and practices: clarifying and negotiating expectations of research projects; promoting a relational ethics on issues of epistemic and social justice in the production of knowledge with communities; countering the subalternisation of knowledge by reconsidering the teaching of qualitative methodologies in the social sciences; valuing reciprocity and accountability towards communities; and reconsidering the logic of careers and the functioning of our academic institutions.

This analysis is based on pioneering work on this subject, particularly in a context of the relationship between the Global North and the Global South, such as those of Rivera Cusicanqui (2010), Tuhiwai Smith (2012), Betasamosake Simpson (Klein 2013), Gudynas (2013) or Grosfoguel (2016a, 2016b). They are also informed by my experience in participatory research with community-based organisations that work with marginalised communities in the field of the fight against poverty, homelessness and mental health in Quebec (Canada).