Kinder cuts and passionate modesties: the complex ecology of the invitation in participatory research
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper draws on a series of applied theatre and popular education workshops in Glasgow, Scotland in 2010–11. While the workshop content involved participatory applied theatre and popular education as tools for community environmental and social justice organising, the performance‐based methods of these workshops also troubled assumptions of the participating subject as singular and self‐reflexive. In the paper I propose that the question of subjectivity in participatory research might be fruitfully linked to the ‘content’ of environmental and social justice in two ways. First, applied theatre is presented as a distinctively mediated participatory space that can rely on an unrealisable conception of subjectivity. I argue that exploring the tensions within this mediated space can illuminate such tensions in participatory research generally, and further a ‘passionate modesty’ – a shared reckoning of limitations that can enrich the potential for praxis of participatory research. ‘Passionate modesty’ is brought to bear on activist research, asking us not to bypass in our writing the complexities and costs of participating in relations of solidarity and resistance. This participatory space is further explored as one of important ecological consequence for the co‐production of knowledge. Barad and Bell's work on making the ‘cuts’ that determine what we include (and exclude) in our attentions is used to argue that participatory research, and creative methods in particular, can orient our attention to social–nature relations in distinct and powerful ways. An ecological perspective is proposed, where acknowledging the asymmetry of encounter and the co‐performance of responsibility might ‘cut’ such research more modestly but perhaps more generatively. In a concluding response to this invitation, I return to the content of the Glasgow workshops on environmental and social justice, and the complex relationship between the politics of grappling with injustices and a participatory politics of co‐learning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.110 | 0.129 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.190 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.031 | 0.034 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.030 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".