EMANCIPATORY RESEARCH
AND
VULNERABILITY
History: The Emancipatory Research and Vulnerability project emerges from another British Academy-funded initiative in 2021/2022 called 'Researching the felt and lived experiences of in/security: a methodological exchange'. It ran alongside a sister project, the Vulnerability Studies Network (VSN), which brought together a range of scholars from different disciplines based in the UK and Canada to explore and engage with readings of vulnerability. These first projects facilitated conversations and practical sharings of methods for co-created knowledge development in contexts that might be perceived as vulnerable.
ABOUT
ERAV
The Emancipatory Research and Vulnerability project is funded by the British Academy and builds on an early BA initiative to bring together scholars from diverse disciplines, connected by vulnerability research. We understand vulnerability research as encompassing working with communities often deemed to be ‘vulnerable’ and thinking more broadly about the notion of vulnerability as a valuable concept for critically engaged, reflexive research. With the Emancipatory Research and Vulnerability project we wished to open up dialogue for inverting particular perceptions of vulnerabilised communities/states and to address extractive and reductive modes of research. We wanted to propose what doing research from a place of conscious vulnerability might offer towards more equitable and considered research methods and discourse.
We gathered as a collective, a transdisciplinary group of practitioner-researchers, to consider how our practice and research can strive towards a process whereby research participants are deeply and fully embedded in research practices, that their labour and knowledge is not solely extracted.
Together we shared and developed approaches to research that are emancipatory and creative, which foreground and centre lived experiences, the body and experiential learning as a means of knowledge making.
This website is an invitation to explore and build on our shared practices. In these pages you can find information about the individuals who are part of the collective and our curated approaches to emancipatory research practices.
APPROACHES
TO RESEARCH
We gathered as a collective, a transdisciplinary group of practitioner-researchers, to consider how our practice and research can strive towards a process whereby research participants are deeply and fully embedded in research practices, that their labour and knowledge is not solely extracted.
Together we shared and developed approaches to research that are emancipatory and creative, which foreground and centre lived experiences, the body and experiential learning as a means of knowledge making.
Drawing on learnings from our South African symposium, the group has designed and co-authored several outputs:
Videos
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Introducing Emancipatory Research Methods: Vulnerability in Practice
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Conceptions of Vulnerability
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Vulnerability and the Body
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Performing Vulnerability by Gerard Bester
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Cooking with Chef Noni
Zines
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Ethics
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Organising with Radical Kindness
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City, Place and Space
INTRODUCING
EMANCIPATORY RESEARCH METHODS
In this video principal investigator, Katharine Low, co-investigator and South African research partner, Alex Halligey, and research project manager, Ella McCarthy, introduce the Emancipatory Research Methods: Vulnerability in Practice project with a video montage from across the symposium week, 6-10 November 2023.
This research has been funded by the British Academy. We thank the British Academy; King’s College London; the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, University of Johannesburg; Rhodes University and the Windybrow Arts Centre (Market Theatre Foundation) for their support and championing of this research.
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