Clinging onto hope: a dialogic approach to producing and communicating knowledge in participatory, qualitative inquiry

Even in participatory research, clear boundaries are very often drawn between the production of knowledge and its communication and between academic writing and popular dissemination. These boundaries work to exclude experiential, embodied knowing from the main sites of knowledge dissemination – dismantling the project “we” created through collaboration in research processes. In this paper, I will reflect on how to work dialogically across these boundaries by mixing storytelling and detached, academic analyses. I will explore how research dissemination can be configured as the dialogic production of experiential, embodied knowledge by way of concrete examples drawing on my new book on co-creation across participatory research and qualitative inquiry (Embracing the messy complexities of co-creation: a dialogic approach to participatory, qualitative inquiry).

I want to show how we can offer “stuttering knowledge” (Lather, 2010: 137) in the tricky interface between not-knowing and knowing. This means acknowledging and exploring the complexities of voice and experiential, embodied knowing; and I do this from the perspectives of poststructuralism and Bakhtinian dialogic communication theory in dialogue with new materialist, posthumanist thinking. It involves writing in ways that signal the partial nature of knowledge-claims, and invite dialogue across voices that articulate multiple knowledge forms including embodied, affective knowing. It means blurring the boundaries between producing and communicating knowledge: writing becomes a space for the dialogic production of knowledge across difference. I will argue that combining dialogic knowledge production and communication in participatory research and research communication is a form of research activism that clings onto hope-through-dialogue: it subverts the academic channels of knowledge production and communication and creates an opening for voices that have a potential to further social change. I will present this argument with humility and plenty of reservations; I am painfully aware about how ambitious and holy-grail-like the goal of social change is.