Community Authority, Performance and Knowledge in Participatory Practice

Participatory research methods, cultural community development, and dialogic processes can foster community empowerment, authority, and genuine investment of people in governance and political process. The promotion and improvement of such methods can help us to move beyond the problem of democratic deficit and engender a positive response to the feelings of 'loss of authority' that characterises much of contemporary Britain. Considerable progress has been made towards this end, but that progress stalls when it comes to developing a robust theoretical interrogation and account of these methods, and their relationship to community empowerment. Political theorists and philosophers have been too far removed from engagement in participatory practice, whilst empirical researchers and community practitioners have lacked the confidence, time and expertise to push forward the theory behind their work. The insights of arts and humanities perspectives on performance, experience and experimentation have been insufficiently incorporated into research on authority, power and participatory process. Academic researchers and thinktanks alike are calling for a more sophisticated theorisation of the processes by which participation generates the bottom-up authorisation of community voices. By developing an account of the value of participatory methods, developed by researchers at the cutting edge of both theory and practice, this project aims to enhance the impact of participatory research methods as a central driver behind effective forms of local democracy and community empowerment.

Our collaborative and capacity building activities bring together researchers and expertise from four existing Connected Communities projects, which addressed different aspects of understanding community authority, performance and knowledge in participatory practice, as well as additional performance studies scholars. Representatives of two mental health community development and empowerment through performance groups will be key consultants on the project, involved in setting the agenda and contributing experiential expertise from an early stage. The collaborators share in a commitment to enhancing the capacity of academic knowledge to understand and to promote community empowerment, participation and vitality. Working together will add considerable value to our existing projects, enabling strong and elaborated conclusions to be drawn about the ways in which participatory practices, and experimental stagings of knowledge production, can succeed in creating stronger, more dynamic and positively interconnected communities. Outputs will include a practical tool kit to assist participatory and performative researchers in fostering the authority and impact of their research; in addition to a special edition of the open access peer-reviewed journal, Participatory Learning and Action (distribution 20,000 in 121 countries), a research paper on participatory methodology for Qualitative Methods, and an AHRC Connected Communities discussion paper, which will make a major contribution to academic theories and methodologies of participatory research on (and working towards) community empowerment.

Participatory research methods, cultural community development and dialogic processes can foster community empowerment, authority, and genuine investment of people in governance and political process. The promotion and improvement of such methods helps us to engender a positive response to the feelings of 'loss of authority' that pervade much of contemporary Britain. By developing an account of the value of participatory methods, drawing together the expertise of researchers at the cutting edge of both theory and practice, this project aims to enhance the impact of participatory research methods as a central driver behind effective forms of local democracy and community empowerment.The project will be of substantial benefit to academic researchers across disciplines by answering the call for a conceptual vocabulary capable of describing and differentiating between different participatory methodologies for researching communities and their varying effects and impacts. Additionally, by enabling participatory researchers to communicate more effectively with the wider academic community and thereby develop more powerful methodologies, it will enable researchers to have greater impact on the communities with whom they work. It will also have a direct impact upon the postdoctoral research assistants working on the project through developing their range of experience and skills.

Participatory researchers occupy a crucial 'hinge' position between academia and community development. However, they describe a lack of a theoretical vocabulary to articulate their complex understandings of the nature of meaningful participation to theoretical and scientific networks within academia. For the same reasons, those latter networks too often assume that participation processes automatically impact positively on community groups. They do not. In fact, as leading academics and thinktanks today suggest, the under-theorisation of participatory methods can lead to a significant waste of resources. It also inhibits the possibility of joined-up problem-solving between academics and community and researcher practitioners. This project will contribute to remedying this by working with participatory researchers and community groups to develop a conceptual vocabulary that grasps the complexities at stake in the attempts to use participatory methods to empower communities. This will improve the capacities of participatory researchers to communicate the implications, idiosyncracies and importance of their findings to wider academic networks. In doing so, it will improve their ability to make a positive impact upon the communities with whom they work.

The project will directly impact upon the two mental health community groups who are collaborating on the project, and who are looking to enhance their capacity to empower communities through creative performances of mental health issues. By sharing insights of performance researchers, community groups, participatory researchers, and theorists, the activities of the project will provide a space for sharing new ideas, tactics and methods for making performance-based community activities more powerful and effective.

The project will directly impact upon researchers and community development practitioners across the third and public sectors, through a special issue of open access Participatory Learning & Action (distribution 20,000 in 121 countries), which will extend the availability of the new vocabulary and conceptual apparatus developed during the project. In addition, the project website will share tactics on how community-based practitioners can most effectively communicate with both non-specialist and theoretical audiences.

Finally, the academic outputs of the project will benefit theory-based and scientific communities who have no first-hand experience of community development through participatory methods but seek to understand the relationship between knowledge and community empowerment.