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How can participatory research create evidence that has a direct benefit to people’s lives, creates generalizable knowledge, and supports policy, regulation, and litigation?

Last week, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society convened a lunch discussion with CAT Lab director J. Nathan Matias, facilitated by Jonathan Zong, to discuss this topic and collectively brainstorm. At CAT Lab, community partners approach us because they want to know how to make digital environments fairer, safer, or better. We asked the BKC community to share examples of participatory work in their own fields that have inspired them, and share challenges they have faced or support they would need for participatory work to make more of a difference. Here, we share some of the discussion points that were raised.

What are notable examples of participatory work in your field?

  • Biometrics for payment systems in India. When these systems were implemented, people had many concerns: for instance, feelings of alienation due to lack of face to face interaction for transactions, having nowhere to go for help with technical issues, and more. To address this, civil society groups developed social audits that involved monthly meetings with the public to create a participatory process to identify issues and improve the system.
  • Technology adoption for women farmers in the global south. Researchers used participatory methods to engage with farmers and stakeholders and understand barriers to adoption: cultural issues, lack of training, access to information. They developed gender-sensitive training that centered the experiences of women. Using this approach, they tested with control and test farms, and saw improvements.
  • Peer editing on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a place where communities get together to establish facts, which can involve varying epistemologies that sometimes conflict. People engage in edit disputes to decide what is credible. Volunteer editing tends to be successful at preserving the quality of information on Wikipedia.
  • Counting Feminicide. Many in the room were inspired by Catherine D’Ignazio’s work that culminated in her recent book Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action. Her work creates change by creating publishable evidence that reflects feminist values.
  • Peer led sexual violence prevention. (cw: sexual violence) Sometimes when university administrations change, guidance also changes about how to implement sexual violence prevention programs. At one university, students created a bottom-up program in which peer facilitators came together to make presentations, test them on groups, and get feedback from students. This involved tailoring presentations based on what a particular group of students needed help or education on. This resulted in a living education system that is more resilient to policy changes at the top.
  • Understanding software needs in research. Research can be more than published academic papers. It can include software, art, and design. Scholars are a community that rely on (often proprietary) software to access ideas. A discussion participant who is a staff member at a university tries to approach their work through a lens of ethnography, understanding how people want to use technology.

What are barriers in participatory research you have faced?

  • Requirements from funders and ethics reviewers. Discussion participants noted that funders sometimes have requirements that nudge researchers towards certain approaches, possibly away from participatory research. Participation is often brought in after the money is brought in and research questions are decided, which constrains what researchers can do and makes it hard to follow what communities care about.
  • Institutional support from universities. It can be difficult for institutions to see participatory research as viable, rather than risky or not worthwhile. Researchers need to work for institutional buy-in. How do we articulate the benefit of having in-depth community led conversations?
  • Incentive structures for companies. Platforms often don’t have the right incentive structure to support community ownership over things like content creation. Venture capital and API providers also have separate incentives. Can there by safe harbors where community organizers can do their work and manage liability for the companies?

Many thanks to everyone who joined the conversation!