Learning about Sharing Authority With the Gathered Voices of Malmö

Abstract

ABSTRACT For more than two years we were involved in a collaborative process with the aim of finding out how sharing life stories could ensure “the right to the city” in Malmö, Sweden. This process led to the formation of the Gathered Voices of Malmö, an association for social justice oral history that strives to become a community archive. This article is about how sharing authority was interpreted collectively in the collaborative process when it could not be directly translated into Swedish, and how those interpretations reflect back on sharing authority as an intellectual development. Drawing upon documents created during the collaborative process and interviews with our coparticipants, we revisit what we learned, including our rereading of sharing authority’s genealogy through project-based research. As participants in, and then analysts of, that process, we learned that our trouble with translating sharing authority was not only linguistic, but also had to do with how the approach might conceal community-embedded ways of working, instead normalizing participatory practices which center research rather than community as the primary sphere in which important learnings are made. We suggest that a deeper consideration of the differences between “a shared authority” and “sharing authority” could help us avoid making participation the best practice.