In January 2024 the Food Lives team attended the 7th European Congress Qualitative Enquiry (ECQE) in Helsinki, Finland, to present their research methods. The conference theme was Participation, Collaboration And Co-Creation: Qualitative Inquiry Across And Beyond Divides.
At the event, 450 international researchers came together to discuss participatory methods, new ways of knowing, doing and feeling, power hierarchies in research and dynamics between academic/non-academic; science and art; human and non-human.
Photo 1: Lecture theatre for the keynotes
We felt it was important to attend, as the conference focused on qualitative research and the theme of participatory research was relevant and timely for our own research.
We had designed and undertaken different research methods for two years and had two years left of the FoodSEqual project. Hence, we had experiences to share and lots to learn, but time to implement our learning from the conference.
Learning and development opportunities
The Food Lives team is embedded in Tower Hamlets, which is our research site – but we are also keen to participate in academic events.
Shazna, Sajna and Julie have attended online academic, policy and activist seminars and workshops and enjoyed participating . Giving papers at academic conferences is a central, and a routine, part of academia and scholarly development. So why shouldn’t community researchers do this too, if they feel comfortable in such an environment.
The conference
The conference offered a valuable opportunity for the Food Lives team to learn more about participatory action research from other disciplinary and geo-political contexts. In our research ethics, we inform participants that we will use their quotations and ideas in our writing and in seminars and conferences.
By Attending the conference, the Food Lives team were able to see how academics actually draw on participants’ accounts. In addition, giving a presentation based on our research methods also offered the potential for skills development in presenting in an academic context, improving communication skills, listening to other presentations, engaging in scholarly discussions with fellow researchers and experts in the field, networking and building connections, and receiving new insights and improvements on our work.
Presenting at the conference enabled us to extend the visibility of our work and that of the wider FoodSEqual project. The location of the conference in Helsinki in January offered the potential to remove ourselves from the daily grind and be in a reflective space. The fact that the whole team attended amplified the learning potential.
Photo two: Food Lives Team brave the cold
Community researchers’ reflections
For Community Researcher, Shazna Hussain, she gained the ‘experience of being in a university listening to all the keynote speakers, I never had the opportunity to attend university and wondered what it would be like.’
The Community Researchers learned about ‘interesting methods of research being carried out about various topics around the globe’. What Shazna noticed was the similarities between geographically distant communities, recognising in one presentation something of the Bangladeshi community in the way people from the Netherlands support each other ‘we look out for each other and our elderly neighbours, cooking and sharing food’.
‘we look out for each other and our elderly neighbours, cooking and sharing food’
On day 3 of the conference Community Researcher, Sajna Miah notes that ‘finally, the day had arrived to present our research method…we had a good turnout in our room which was a great feeling.’ Elaine, Julie and the Community Researchers introduced the FoodSEquals project and spoke about their research methods including the Food Exhibition, Shopalongs and Cookalongs, and asked how such methodological practices expand what we understand by participatory research.
Photo three: Sajna Miah presenting her experiences of doing a cookalong method
‘it taught us to face these challenges and take them as a positive learning experience’
The Community Researchers learnt to hone their presentation skills – anticipating questions, keeping answers succinct and keeping to the time limit. For Sajna it ‘taught us to face these challenges and take [them] as a positive learning experience’.
Julie explained ‘it was great to hear people asking questions and engaging with the research in an academic setting, people were coming up to us afterwards too’.
Attending the conference was an opportunity to bring our project and methods to an international audience and as Shazna commented, ‘to make connections with people outside our project’.
Photo four: Julie Yip, Shaza Hussain and Sajna Miah waiting for the conference to start
‘it was great to hear people asking questions and engaging with the research in an academic setting, people were coming up to us afterwards too’.
One of these connections was made with Amanda Vanggaard Wittwer, Citizen Science Advisor from Roskilde University who asked for a meeting after seeing the presentation to learn more about community research and the project. She felt it would be relevant to her work with the citizen science and community science agenda at Roskilde University. Shazna and Elaine met up with Amanda and an academic colleague on zoom later in January to share experiences and ideas. Amanda has invited the team to have a return discussion later in the year.
Sajna summarises her experience at the conference as ‘the feeling of what we can achieve when working as part of a team.’
‘the feeling of what we can achieve when working as part of a team’
Our Food Lives Presentation
Photographic Exposure: When Researchers Partake Of Their Own Methods
In this paper, we examined our involvement in our research methods in Food Lives, a project in Tower Hamlets, London. Food Lives forms part of a wider multi-disciplinary, multi-university and multi-stakeholder UKRI funded project called FoodSEqual which aims to transform the food system in the UK. We partner with Wen, the Women’s Environment Network, an environmental charity taking an intersectional feminist approach to tackling the climate and nature emergencies.
As a feminist organisation, Wen has been interested in multi-racial food knowledge production and sharing along feminist lines. Much of our research has been working with British Bangladeshi women and learning from their skills and expertise in food growing, domestic food work and food health. British Bangladeshi people make up over 30% of Tower Hamlets. To date, such food knowledge is marginalised in food partnership policy making and food strategies.
In this paper, drawing on feminist methodology, we explore what it means for participation to refer to researchers taking part in their methods. Participation typically denotes how researchers involve people with lived experience in designing research aims, methods and analyses to improve knowledge production and democracy. Scholars explore the practical, political, ethical, gendered, racialised and classed processes and consequences of ‘non-researchers’ and participatory research. In particular, they and activists argue for the involvement of minoritised groups as a critical, radical recalibration of academic power and domination in research.
In contrast to this focus on ‘non-researchers’, we reflect on what it means for researchers to participate in research methods as research ‘subjects’. Although academics reflect on power and positionality, very few partake in the research methods themselves. We reflect on our experiences and feelings of surveillance, embarrassment and exposure when photographing and sharing our own meals, oil and fat consumption, and other food related activities which formed part of our Food Lives research. We ask how such methodological practices expand what we understand by participatory research.
The team reprised their paper at Bristol University in May as part of The Bristol Researchers’ Food Justice Network – Spring Seminar Series 2024.
Key sessions at the conference we attended
The conference offered many panels, keynotes and individual papers. We decided to attend each as a team so we could learn together. These included:
- Multispecies Speculative Design And The Peculiar Ethics Of A Natureculture Research Station Dream Teams
- The Will And Way To Power-With: Challenges
- From Research To Filmmaking: The Collaborative Making Of The Documentary “Complexos”
- White And Non-White Researchers’ Positionality In Ethnographic Research On (Anti)Racism
Blog by Julia Kidd, Elaine Swan, Shazna Hussain, Sajna Miah and Julie Yip from the Food Lives team. This is an edited version. Read the full version here.
WHAT IS FOOD LIVES
Wen and University of Sussex are running a new programme on the St George’s Estate, Shadwell called Food Lives Tower Hamlets. It’s all about the role food plays in our lives and the importance of history, culture and heritage to our food habits.
Food Lives Tower Hamlets is part of a 5-year research programme (which started in 2021) and is funded by UKRI and led by University of Reading, FoodSEqual. It involves many universities, communities and food companies working alongside communities to create a better food environment. Read more.
