Local participants and uninvolved citizens: life beyond participatory research

Abstract

ABSTRACT Participatory ethnography brings together strands of academic and local knowledge, transforming the positionality of both academic and local participants in the research site. The extent of citizen involvement in participatory (action) research and the ethical dilemmas for both academic and civil researchers have long been the subject of debate [Lenette, Caroline. 2022. Participatory Action Research: Ethics and Decolonization. New York: Oxford Academic]. Our paper focuses on how local participants manage their new knowledge and transformed ideologies in a local reality that remains highly (in)securitised. The research site presented in this paper is a small town in Hungary with a large Romani-speaking community. We organised monthly workshops in the town with the participation of academics, local Hungarian-Romani bilingual and Hungarian monolingual citizens. The present study is based on the findings of these workshops and on ethnographic work conducted by the academic participants with citizens not involved in the workshops. We draw attention to the fact that the dissemination of workshop results in the locality can be successful only if local citizens succeed in developing a transformative voice of their own which disrupts conventionalised discourse repertoires. The intersubjective dynamics between local v. non-local and participating v. non-participating actors determines the long-term sustainability and impact of participatory research projects.