Media Activist Research Ethics - Livro

GLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN
MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

A PALGRAVE AND IAMCR SERIES
Media Activist
Research Ethics
Global Approaches to Negotiating
Power in Social Justice Research
Edited by
Sandra Jeppesen · Paola Sartoretto
IAMCR
AIECS
AIERI
Global Transformations in Media
and Communication Research - A Palgrave
and IAMCR Series
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Marjan de Bruin
HARP, Mona Campus
The University of the West Indies
Mona, Jamaica
Claudia Padovani
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University of Padova
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Sandra Jeppesen · Paola Sartoretto
Editors
Media Activist
Research Ethics
Global Approaches to Negotiating Power in Social
Justice Research
Editors
Sandra Jeppesen Paola Sartoretto
Lakehead University Jönköping University
Orilla, ON, Canada Jönköping, Sweden
Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and

IAMCR Series
ISBN 978-3-030-44388-7 ISBN 978-3-030-44389-4 (eBook)
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This book is dedicated to the global media activists, social movements,
and researchers who are engaged in organizing, reflecting, and writing
for radical social transformation.
Acknowledgments
This book is the result of a long-term collective effort that has included
colleagues from a wide range of academic institutions, community
organizations, grassroots collectives, and social movements, including
the many activists who collaborate and participate in research in many
more ways than we may acknowledge or give them credit for. We are
grateful to the many global activists who have embraced the endeavor of
research, with all of the conflicts and affective, intellectual messiness that
it sometimes entails.
The contributors to this volume have been working with us since
2018. They have made the process of editing this book stimulating and
enjoyable. We thank the authors for sharing their experiences and con-
cerns, opening up a much-needed dialogue about the ethics of our roles
in the nexus of activism-research. We have learned a great deal from
engaging in dialogues with them through and about their work, and for
this we are very grateful.
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada, grant number 435-2013-1385. In addi-
tion, Helge Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse, Sweden has financially supported
research exchange activities that helped us turn an idea into the book
you are now reading.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: Mapping Questions of Power and Ethics

in Media Activist Research Practices 1
Sandra Jeppesen and Paola Sartoretto
Part I Practice-Based Perspectives on the Ethics

of Research Activism
2 Research Ethics: Critical Reflections on Horizontal

Media Activism Research Practices 27
Sandra Jeppesen
3 Dealing with Ethical Dilemmas in Activist Research

on Social Movement Media 51
Paola Sartoretto and Leonardo Custódio
4 Challenges for Social Movement Research in Contexts

of Inequality: The MST in Brazil 67
Mayrá S. Lima and Solange I. Engelmann
ix
x CONTENTS
Part II Decolonizing Methodologies and Negotiating

Community Learning
5 Denaturalizing Research Practices: (Re)Signifying

Subject Positions Through Decolonial Theories 89
Vera Martins and Rosane Rosa
6 Disrupting Settler Colonialism and Oppression in Media

and Policy-Making: A View from the Community Media
Advocacy Centre 109
Gretchen King and the Community Media Advocacy
Centre (CMAC)
7 Wearing Multiple Reflexive Hats: The Ethical

Complexities of Media-Oriented Community Engaged
Learning 131
Sandra Smeltzer
Part III Negotiating Power Dynamics Between

Researcher and Activist Positionalities
8 The Ethics of Reciprocal Communication 157

Julia Velkova
9 Researcher Ethics: Between Axiological Reasoning

and Scientific Discussion 175
Gökçe Tuncel
10 Difficult Choices: Application of Feminist Ethics

of Care in Action Research 193
Ekaterina Kalinina
CONTENTS xi
Part IV Media Activist Research in the Context

of Global Crises
11 The Ethics of Media Research with Refugees 221

Eugenia Siapera and Sara Creta
12 Challenges of Ongoing Conflict Research: Dialogic

Autoethnography in Studies of Post-2014 Ukraine 249
Yuliya Yurchuk and Liudmila Voronova
Index 269
Notes on Contributors
Community Media Advocacy Centre (www.CMACentre.ca) was

founded in 2015 to disrupt settler colonialism and oppression in the
media. CMAC was co-founded by experienced media activists who
worked for decades in the vibrant community and Indigenous broad-
casting sectors within Canada. Today, CMAC is a registered non-profit
organization uniquely comprised of academics, lawyers, policy consult-
ants, and media practitioners who prioritize the perspectives, voices, and
lived experiences of Indigenous Peoples, racialized people, and people
living with disAbilities.
Sara Creta is an award-winning visual journalist and Marie-Curie
Research Fellow in the Institute for Future Media and Journalism,
School of Communications, Dublin City University, Ireland. Sara
has worked with humanitarian and human rights organizations and
communities in Sudan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, DRC, Libya, Chad,
Cameroon, Morocco, Tunisia, the Gaza Strip, and on a rescue ship in the
Mediterranean. With an academic background in international cooper-
ation and protection of human rights, she focuses much of her research
and writing on how dissident actors use Internet technologies in affect-
ing political action vis-a-vis the horn of Africa region and politics.
Leonardo Custódio is an Afro-Brazilian post-doctoral researcher at
Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland. He is one of the coordinators
of the Anti-Racism Media Activism Alliance, an initiative that promotes
dialogue and knowledge exchange between researchers and activists in
xiii
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Finland and Brazil. Custódio also coordinates the Activist Research

Network in Finland.
Solange I. Engelmann teaches in the Journalism program at IELUSC
College, Joinville, Brazil. She holds a doctoral degree in Communication
from the Rio Grande do Sul Federal University (UFRGS).
Sandra Jeppesen is Professor in the Media, Film, and Communications
program in the Interdisciplinary Studies department at Lakehead
University Orillia, Canada, where she has held the Lakehead University
Research Chair in Transformative Media and Social Movements
(2016–19). Her book, Transformative Media and Social Movements:
Intersectional Technopolitics from IndyMedia to #MeToo is forthcoming
with UBC Press.
Ekaterina Kalinina is Senior Lecturer, Department of Media and
Communication Studies, Jönköping University, Sweden. Kalinina
worked as a research fellow at the Swedish National Defence University
researching the questions of Russian patriotism and biopolitics. Her
recent research project investigated the role of affective mnemonic expe-
riences in triggering social mobilization. Kalinina runs the Swedish NGO
Nordkonst, where she manages cultural projects.
Gretchen King is Assistant Professor of Multimedia Journalism and
Communication at Lebanese American University in Beirut. Dr. King
also serves as the Director of Pedagogy and Curriculum Design at LAU’s
Institute for Media Research and Training. In Canada, Dr. King helped
to co-found the Community Media Advocacy Centre in 2015.
Mayrá S. Lima holds a doctoral degree in Political Science from

Brasília University and works as a communications officer in the Landless
Workers Movement (MST) communication sector.
Vera Martins is Assistant Professor in Media and Communication
at Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (UFSM) in Brazil. She holds
talks and is a consultant for civil society groups on feminism and gen-
der issues. Between 2017 and 2018, Martins received a grant from
CAPES (Brazilian Commission for Development of Higher Education
Personnel) and was a guest researcher at Universidade Pedagógica de
Moçambique.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
Rosane Rosa is Associate Professor at Universidade Federal de Santa

Maria (UFSM) in Brazil where she teaches in the graduate programs in
Media and Communication and Networked Educational Technologies.
She holds a Ph.D. in Information and Communication Sciences
from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul—UFRGS Brasil
and is currently a post-doctoral fellow in Social Sciences at Coimbra
University, Portugal and the coordinator of the project Intercultural
Educommunication in Mozambique.
Paola Sartoretto is Assistant Professor at Jönköping University,
Sweden. She is a Brazilian scholar based in Sweden where she researches
on the relation between social movements, mobilization, and commu-
nication with a particular interest in processes of knowledge production
and memory construction among social movements.
Eugenia Siapera is Professor in Information and Communication
Studies, at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her research interests are
in the areas of journalism, digital media, and politics, with emphasis on
questions of social justice. Her more recent books are Understanding
New Media (2nd edition, 2018, Sage) and Gender Hate Online
(Palgrave, 2019, co-edited with Debbie Ging).
Sandra Smeltzer is interested in areas of research including critical ped-
agogy, community engaged learning, the ethics of activist research, and
ICTs for social justice. She holds a SSHRC Insight Grant on experien-
tial learning; is a Teaching Fellow at Western University; c o-coordinates
Western University’s Media and the Public Interest program; and is
Assistant Dean Research (Acting) in the Faculty of Information and
Media Studies. She received Western’s inaugural Humanitarian Award;
her Faculty’s Undergraduate Teaching Award; and the USC Teaching
Honour Roll Award of Excellence.
Gökçe Tuncel is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology, Centre d’Études
Sociologiques et Politiques Raymond Aron, École des Hautes Études en
Sciences Sociales, Paris, France. She holds an MA degree on Alternative
Media Studies and Collective Action from the University of Paris 8. She
is interested in social movements, the public sphere, media studies, and
political agency.
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Julia Velkova Research Fellow in Technology and Social Change at

Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden. She is interested in infrastruc-
ture studies, open cultural production, and practices of technological
development by informal communities of media practitioners. Currently,
she is involved in several projects on data centers, and the elemental,
labor and temporal politics that inform their operation. Prior to working
in academia, she was engaged in projects on advocacy and education on
free software in the Balkans.
Liudmila Voronova is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Södertörn
University, Stockholm, Sweden. She defended her doctoral disserta-
tion Gendering in Political Journalism: A Comparative Study of Russia
and Sweden in 2014. Her research interests include gender and jour-
nalism, media and conflict, and, recently, photography and educational
processes. She has been engaged with the issues of gender equality and
diversity in the framework of cultural activities of “Nordkonst” NGO,
where she is a board member. Liudmila coordinates a social media group
of scholars conducting research on gender in post-Soviet countries. She
is also a member of a multidisciplinary network of feminist researchers at
Södertörn University.
Yuliya Yurchuk is a Post-Doctoral Researcher in History at Södertörn
University, Stockholm, Sweden. She defended her doctoral disserta-
tion Reordering of Meaningful Worlds: Memory of the Organization of
Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Post-Soviet
Ukraine in 2015. Her research interests are history of World War II,
memory studies, history of religion, nationalism, and post-colonial stud-
ies. Yuliya is a member of a team of scholars conducting research on
Ukraine in Sweden (Ukraine Research Group). She is also a member of a
multidisciplinary network of feminist researchers at Södertörn University.
Besides her academic contributions, Yuliya translates feminist literature
from Swedish into Ukrainian. Believing in intercultural communication,
Yuliya is also active on social media where her Ukrainian-language fol-
lowers learn about Swedish culture.
Abbreviations
ANCA Associação Nacional de Cooperativas Agrícolas (National

Association of Agricultural Cooperatives)
APTN Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (Canada)
BBC British Broadcasting Corporation
CAPES Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal do Ensino
Superior (Coordination for Development of Higher Education
Personnel)
CEL Community Engaged Learning
CEPATEC Centro de Formação e Pesquisa Contestado (Contestado
Research and Education Centre/BioNatur Natural Seeds
Network)
CMAC Community Media Advocacy Centre
CNN Cable News Network
CONCRAB Confederação de Cooperativas da Reforma Agrária do Brasil
(Brazilian Confederation of Agrarian Reform Cooperatives)
CRA Centre de Rétention Administrative (Centre of Administrative
Detention)
CRTC Canadia Radio-television and Telecommunication Commission
DNS Domain Name System
EL Experiential Learning
ELA Escola Latinoamericana de Agroecologia (Latin American
Agroecology School)
ENFF Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes (Florestan Fernandes
National School)
EU European Union
FRPC Forum for Research and Policy in Communications
xvii
xviii ABBREVIATIONS
ICTA Information and Communication Technologies Authority

(Turkey)
IEJC Instituto Técnico Josué de Castro (Josué de Castro Technical
Institute)
IOM International Organization of Migration
IP Internet Protocol
ITAC Instituto Técnico de Agropecuária e Cooperativismo (Technical
Institute for Agrarian and Cooperativism Studies)
ITERRA Instituto Técnico de Educação e Pesquisa em Reforma Agrária
(Technical Institute for Capacitation and Research on Agrarian
Reform)
MST Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra (Landless
Workers Movement)
MTCU Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities—Ontario
NGO Non-Governmental Organisation
NSM New Social Movements (Theory)
OSCE Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
PKK Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (Kurdistan Workers Party)
Pronera Programa nacional de educação da reforma agrária (National
Programme for Education in Agrarian Reform Areas)
PUC-PR Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná (Paraná Catholic
University)
PUC-RS Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (Rio
Grande do Sul Catholic University)
UCS Universidade de Caxias do Sul (Caxias do Sul University)
UECE Universidade Estadual do Ceará (Ceará State University)
UEL Universidade Estadual de Londrina (Londrina State University)
UEMG Universidade Estadual de Minas Gerais (Minas Gerais State
University)
UEPG Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa (Ponta Grossa State
University)
UFC Universidade Federal do Ceará (Ceará Federal University)
UFES Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (Espírito Santo Federal
University)
UFF Universidade Federal Fluminense (Fluminense Federal
Unversity)
UFG Universidade Federal de Goiás (Goiás Federal University)
UFMA Universidade Federal do Maranhão (Maranhão Federal
University)
UFMG Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Minas Gerais Federal
University)
ABBREVIATIONS xix
UFMT Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso (Mato Grosso Federal

University)
UFPA Universidade Federal do Pará (Pará Federal University)
UFPB Universidade Federal da Paraíba (Paraíba Federal University)
UFPE Universidade do Pernambuco (Pernambuco University)
UFPel Universidade Federal de Pelotas (Pelotas Federal University)
UFRGS Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (Rio Grande do Sul
Federal University)
UFRJ Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro Federal
University)
UFRN Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (Rio Grande do
Norte Federal University)
UFSC Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Santa Catarina Federal
University)
UFSCar Universidade Federal de São Carlos (São Carlos Federal
University)
UFSM Universidade Federal de Santa Maria (Santa Maria Federal
University)
UFTO Universidade Federal do Tocantins (Tocantins Federal
University)
UFV Universidade Federal de Viçosa (Viçosa Federal University)
UN United Nations
UNAMA Universidade da Amazônia (Amazonian University)
UnB Universidade de Brasília (Brasília University)
UNCPPDCE United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organization’s Convention on the Protection and Promotion of
the Diversity of Cultural Expressions
UNCRPD United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with
Disabilities
Unesp Universidade Estadual de Paulista (São Paulo State University)
UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund
Unifesp Universidade Federal de São Paulo (São Paulo Federal
University)
Unimontes Universidade Estadual de Montes Claros (Montes Claros State
University)
Unioeste Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraná (East Paraná Federal
University)
USP Universidade de São Paulo (São Paulo University)
UVA Universidade Estadual do Vale do Acaraú (Vale do Acaraú State
University)
List of Figures
Fig. 10.1 Organisational structure according to the project application 202

Fig. 11.1 LGBTQI+ intervention in Documenta 14, 2017 244
xxi
List of Tables
Table 4.1 Civil society organisations related to MST 75

Table 4.2 Masters theses with and about MST completed in 2017 78
Table 4.3 Doctoral dissertations with and about MST completed in
2017 79
Table 4.4 Keywords in research in the fields of pedagogy and education 80
Table 4.5 Keywords in research in the fields of geography and territorial
development in Latin America and the Caribbean 81
xxiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Mapping Questions

of Power and Ethics in Media Activist
Research Practices
Sandra Jeppesen and Paola Sartoretto
In the course of the past three decades, participatory researchers have

increasingly conducted empirical research within social movements as
research activists in order to document, understand, and archive knowl-
edge about social movements and media activism. While this trend allows
for more directly experiential empirical research findings, it has also raised
a host of ethical questions related to the exercise of power in research prac-
tices aiming to create equitable relations. Faced with this changing research-
scape, participatory researchers are integrating a consideration of these
questions into their research design and practice, with new approaches to
ethics protocols, relationship building, discourses, and processes emerging.
S. Jeppesen (*)
Lakehead University, Orillia, ON, Canada
e-mail: sandrajeppesen@lakeheadu.ca
P. Sartoretto
Jönköping University, Jönköping, Sweden
e-mail: paola.sartoretto@ju.se
© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. Jeppesen and P. Sartoretto (eds.),
Media Activist Research Ethics, Global Transformations in Media
and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4_1
2 S. JEPPESEN AND P. SARTORETTO
The increase in participatory social justice research has happened in

parallel with—and in opposition to—the global neoliberalization of the
university in which “civic discourse has given way to the language of
commercialism, privatization, and deregulation” (Giroux, 2002, p. 426).
These dynamics pose fundamental challenges to democratic education
and research as universities shift operations to mimic corporations or
edu-factories (Smeltzer & Hearn, 2015, p. 354) in which the objectives
and outcomes of research structures are oriented towards market-driven
imperatives. Students and research alike are measured and monetizable,
translated into commodities with no regard for the public good which
was once the aim and hallmark of a university education.
The neoliberal logic of higher education is particularly challeng-
ing for researchers in the social sciences because, “As large amounts of
corporate capital flow into the universities, those areas of study in the
university that don’t translate into substantial profits get either margin-
alized, underfunded, or eliminated” (Giroux, 2002, p. 434). Thus, in
many instances, “the ascendancy of neo-liberal globalisation has increas-
ingly shut down the spaces for scholar activism” (AGC, 2010, p. 246),
labelling this type of research biased and thus delegitimized in academia.
Even the most principled and ethical scholars are pushed towards quan-
tified conceptions of their scholarly outputs, research grant acquisition,
and so on, finding ourselves inadvertently supporting the neoliberal uni-
versity in ways that run contradictory to our research objectives and out-
comes outside the neoliberal university (AGC, 2010, p. 250). For those
who are researcher activists refusing this neoliberal logic, Springer pro-
vocatively argues, “negation, protest and critique are necessary, [but]
we also need to think about actively fucking up neoliberalism by doing
things outside of its reach” (Springer, 2016, p. 287).
We are using the term media activism in a broad sense, with respect
to both media genres (radio, print, news, music, digital, and so on) and
activism forms (grassroots movements, civil society organizations, col-
lectives, cultural production, pedagogies, and so on). Our view is that,
related to the objectives of activism forms, media activist practices will
depend on an array of social, political, cultural, and economic factors.
We thus define media activism in a broad sense as the production of a
wide range of media genres connected to communicative processes, in
conjunction with a broad range of social justice activist forms that they
support, with the shared objective of social transformation. We define
research activism here equally broadly as research typically conducted
1 INTRODUCTION: MAPPING QUESTIONS OF POWER … 3
within or with some connection to a university while simultaneously

being within or with some connection to social movements, again, with
shared social justice objectives.
In this chapter, we map out a series of questions regarding how eth-
ics are put into practice in creating relationships based on mutual under-
standing and equitable power dynamics between media activists and
research activists. We use these two structurally similar terms to indicate
that both parties are activists, the one producing social movement media
and the other producing social justice research. Both parties are commit-
ted to social change and write materials from interviews and observations
to support social transformation. However, they are not always situated
equally. While research activists working in social movements may have
faculty jobs of one kind or another in a university setting, media activists
working in social movements are often precariously employed. Although
university researchers may also be precariously employed—as graduate
students, postdoctoral researchers, or sessional instructors—there is often
unequal access to power and resources between those with university
positions and those who are strictly activists. This conditions the poten-
tial for not just structural inequalities but also conflicting interests, which
may create some of the ethical dilemmas discussed in this chapter.
We take a global approach as we map out research-activist practices
that attempt to build in ethical considerations relevant to social move-
ments, social justice, and social transformation. These include but are
not limited to: mutual accountability, relationships of care, building
trust, participant ownership and control of knowledge, researcher and
activist knowledge co-production, horizontality of relationships, decol-
onizing methods, consent-based research, self-representation and voice,
and community pedagogies. We find that sometimes the research eth-
ics we set out with will lead us into roadblocks, conflicts, or tensions
between researchers and participants, despite the best intentions and
practices of all involved. Moreover, research relationships will change
over time, as will positions of researchers within universities and partici-
pants within social movements. Movements ebb and flow, while life deci-
sions including campaigns, academic trajectories, employment situations,
family commitments, and more may tend to shift the social locations of
researchers and participants. How do research activists handle changing
situations so that we may continue to support media activist movements
and research while remaining ethical, trustworthy, and caring in our
research-activist practices?
Ethical concerns linked to issues of micro- and macro-power config-

urations will depend on who is involved in the research process, as well
as when and where the research is taking place. For instance, global
research activists conducting research with media activists in other coun-
tries in authoritarian or complex political regimes, or engaged in research
during a time of crisis or regime change, will need to find ways to keep
both research activists and media activists safe in shifting regimes of
macro-political power. Research activists may also consider power dif-
ferences with respect to intersectional structures along axes such as race,
ethnicity, social class, education level, gender, sexuality, and global power
axes such as nation, global location, colonialism, immigration status,
and so on. Moreover, with respect to these intersectional axes, it may
become evident that a research activist or a media activist may hold con-
tradictory positions of both power and marginalization. These may play
a role not just in research outcomes but also in shaping ethical research
practices when working in solidarity with or as insiders in marginalized
groups. Further, if research activists find specific practices to be troubling
or inconsistent with a participant media activist group’s stated objec-
tives, they may need to find ethical ways to engage in friendly yet politi-
cal critiques while attempting to support the activist work on the whole.
Finally, we acknowledge that research activists may be forced to consider
other power dynamics related to the development of ethical practices
that may not be accounted for by the current methodologies literature.
We have mapped eight key issues arising out of power relations, three
from the activist’s perspective, three from the researcher’s perspective,
and two with respect to reciprocal critiques and power asymmetries.
Activists: Beyond Extractive Research

One common question raised by different interlocutors is who bene-
fits from activist research. Both activists and researchers have limited
resources vying for their attention. Activists are usually pressed for time,
crammed between the need for paid labour to support themselves and
the desire to dedicate so-called free time to activism, so it is understand-
able that they might prefer to collaborate with researchers committed
to proffering processes and outcomes beneficial to their movements.
Researchers also juggle the potential conflict between the desire to use
our research resources and time to support the social movements we
believe in and pressure from funding bodies and university research
structures demanding scholarly outputs and upward reporting. The trick

is to find ways to collaborate towards the shared objective of social trans-
formation while mitigating any potential negative impacts of competing
demands.
When it comes to activist research, the argument that scholarly
enquiry creates and expands knowledge is seldom sufficient for the activ-
ists with whom we research. There is always the creeping danger that we
may be inadvertently engaging in what Waisbord (2019) calls extractive
research—a researcher extracts knowledge from movement activists, tak-
ing their time and resources without giving anything in exchange, and
instead using this knowledge to advance their university career. Most of
the time, research activists will have legitimate objectives that include
social justice aims in our research with and as activists, nevertheless, what
we have come to realize through the years is that our work might be seen
in a different light by those who are strictly activists. We may also begin
the research process while rooted in movements, and gradually spend
more time on research as we are sucked into the university institution,
slowly moving away from the activist milieu and losing sight of those
more direct movement impacts. When these types of concerns are raised
by activists participating in research, researchers, as the partners who rep-
resent institutional power, must take on the ethical duty of acknowledg-
ing the validity of such concerns and addressing them honestly and openly
through discussion and dialogue, attempting to return to the initial shared
objectives. We need to ensure we are making every effort in addressing
the multidimensional conflicting power relations and sometimes divergent
objectives that constitute activist research, committing our energy and
time towards building relationships through open, generative dialogues.
When activists cease to be the beneficiaries of research activism, then per-
haps we are no longer entitled to consider our work as such.
Activists: The Contradictions

of Anonymity and Consent
One of the ways activists may benefit from research is that their work
may be amplified in books, articles, and publications that reference their
project and the ideas they have shared in interviews or focus groups.
Standard research ethics protocols make it mandatory to get consent
from participants, and part of this process also includes the provision for
anonymity to protect participant data. However, sometimes pseudonyms
are inadequate to conceal the identity of a speaker, for example, in a

small project or media activism milieu. This may lead to tensions within
the group, social movement, or workplace in response to publications,
even when researchers have chosen excerpts carefully.
Media activists interviewed may already have an established reputation
as journalists, writers, or activists and may therefore want to have what
they have said attributed to their real name in publications so they are
credited for the ideas and knowledge expressed, which will help them to
continue building their reputation, a presumed benefit of the research.
Moreover, through attribution the research project or group will not
indirectly receive credit for the activist’s ideas. The ethical principle of
anonymity might contradictorily become an unethical mechanism for
invisibilizing the research participant.
The irony is that media activists share the political objective of provid-
ing a voice for the voiceless, an accessible avenue for marginalized groups
to come to voice. However, requiring media activists to be anonymous
in research publications can be interpreted as yet another structural
mechanism for silencing their voice. While their ideas may be amplified
through the research, through anonymization an erasure of the named
speaking subject takes place. Because the researcher may be citing some-
one’s words directly but attributing them to a pseudonym, and because
the analysis behind the thoughts and ideas contributed by the media
activist is published in articles not authored by the media activist but by
the researcher(s), the researcher(s) indirectly receive credit for the activ-
ist’s ideas. This contradicts the shared objective of empowerment and
creating a voice for the voiceless. When the interview participants are
in marginalized groups, there is a further consideration of intersectional
oppressions being reinforced rather than challenged by this practice. So
perhaps we should do away with anonymity. But not so fast.
Sometimes maintaining anonymity is crucial. In dangerous political
climates, for example, maintaining anonymity might be key to the liberty
or even the very survival of the interviewee, whereby being interviewed
puts a media activist at risk of surveillance, criminalization, and worse at
the hands of the state. Radical journalists have long been targets of state
ire, particularly but not only in non-democratic countries. Anonymity
allows for participants to express perspectives critical of the government
or society, and this should be without risk of safety of their person. It
also allows interviewees to express ideas critical of how their media pro-
ject functions internally without fear of reprisal from the group or the
broader social movement. The conversation between the researcher

and participant might be an opportunity to speak about a conflict or
other complex situations in a confidential setting, and it is often implic-
itly understood by the research participant that this should not be aired
in public, despite having signed a consent form agreeing to just that.
Therefore, the consent expressed in the consent form, though legally
binding, is not always adequate in protecting the research participant, or
moreover the relationship of the researcher with the research participant,
both of which might be damaged by following the consent form to the
letter, even though this same consent form might be effective in protect-
ing the researcher from legal reprisals. Consent must therefore be con-
sidered an ongoing process, where the participant may be asked after the
interview to reflect on whether they have said anything they might like
to reword or revoke from the recording or transcription, in an ongoing
open dialogue.
The potential silencing of voice, criminalization of the media activ-
ist, and breaching of an unspoken non-consent to be cited are all the
more salient when the researcher and the research participant do not
share an identity or social location. It is crucial in these instances to be
attentive to subtle (and not so subtle) power dynamics across race, class,
gender, sex, colonialism, and more that might arise between researchers
and participants. Dynamics might provide access to voice for some but
not others, in ways that reinforce already existing structural intersectional
oppressions, even in research groups working against these oppressive
structures in principle and practice. It should not be left to the research
participant to have to take the initiative to raise these difficult questions
related to anonymity and consent, but the researcher should always
ensure that participants know the door for dialogue is open, how to
reach them, and that their concerns will be taken seriously.
Activists: The Labour of Research Participation

Being a research participant, as we might surmise by now, can involve a
great deal of affective and material labour, both of which can be quite
time-consuming. To acknowledge their time, research participants may
be provided with an incentive for focus groups or interviews. In some
countries, this is expected as a matter of course; in other countries,
participants feel it is part of their civic duty to participate in research,
and the honorarium will be rejected. There can be requests for further
participation following an interview, however, as the project moves

forward, and these may be either compensated or uncompensated.
As an example of compensated additional work, research projects may
be able to receive additional funding to hire activists to engage in fur-
ther research collaborations, to organize focus groups, conduct inter-
views, create media art, build websites, put on events, and so on. These
funds may be received by activists with little to no awareness of the
accountability required by research funding bodies for the completion of
work, restrictions on payments, reporting requirements, and so on. The
research activist who spans both worlds is caught between the two.
As an example of uncompensated additional work, after having
engaged in interviews, participants should be offered the opportunity
to read through and approve their transcription in the ethical practice of
ownership and control of participants over their data. While some par-
ticipants may appreciate being given their transcription, others may not
have time to do the work of reading, revising, and approving it. A sti-
pend may be offered for this if funds and funding agencies allow. When
some participants have approved transcriptions and others have not, it
raises a question regarding whether the data should be handled differ-
ently, for example, not citing unapproved transcriptions. If the approval
is a condition of citation, participants may feel pressured to do the labour
in order to be quoted. The ethical practice of participant ownership and
control over interview data can thus result in the unanticipated conse-
quence of unforeseen media activist labour, raising the question whether
it is desirable or feasible to include and pay participants at every step in
the research. It certainly is time-consuming and leads to delays in publi-
cation to do so. Another risk is that monetizing every aspect of partici-
pation in research may result in the feeling that research participation is
alienated labour, where a perceived surplus value of participant labour is
extracted by the researcher, despite ethical practices by the research activ-
ist to avoid precisely this. If media activists and research activists share
social transformation objectives, they may have equal but different com-
mitments to the research.
Benefits for research participants from the research relationship may
not always be measured in direct payment. Researchers may volunteer
their time, capacities, and skills to contribute to the work of a collec-
tive of media activists, organize media activist events, assist with proof-
reading, copyediting, or video editing with media activists, and the like.
This kind of collaboration is many times made easier because, as highly
trained interviewers and writers, researchers share aspects of their back-

ground and profession with media activists and have specific skills that
can be an asset to the media activist organization or social movement
milieu. It can thus free up the media activist to do such research tasks as
proofreading their transcription, or other media activist tasks that may
always get pushed to the backburner. This intuitive and heuristic way of
engaging with activists may bring researchers closer to them. By collab-
orating on both research and media production, working in each other’s
spaces, both parties can develop a better understanding of each oth-
er’s work. Although this arrangement does not eliminate power imbal-
ances, it can create the social conditions for open dialogue and mutual
exchange through collaboration in activities not initiated by the research-
ers. Co-production in research activism is therefore a process in which
activists, as much as researchers, can take the initiative in creating spaces
for reciprocal and mutual participation.
Researchers: Hierarchies of Participation

While we can see in the above example that the roles of researcher and
activist may blur or even be reversed, research activism is often initiated
by researchers as part of an attempt to generate, investigate, and mobi-
lize knowledge and research in a socially useful way. However, in decid-
ing who participates in which roles in the research, there can be many
common ethical dilemmas that arise. This can be in building relation-
ships among researchers and activists, or within the hybrid subjectivities
of research activists located in both social movements and universities.
Research activists, as activists, are engaged in making claims for various
kinds of human rights, and therefore already attentive to issues of power,
oppression, marginalization, and the like. Therefore, we tend to want to
be self-reflexive in our desire not to recreate structures and processes of
oppression in research practices as we are aware that social justice objec-
tives must not just be aligned with outcomes but also with processes and
practices. There is a certain element of prefiguration in this, wanting to
ensure that the macro-social justice transformation the research is aim-
ing towards can be achieved on a micro-scale through the everyday pro-
cesses and practices of research (Breton, Jeppesen, Kruzynski, & Sarrasin,
2012).
Who engages in research forms part of this question, often depending
on who is afforded the material, immaterial, and structural resources to
engage, either as a researcher or as a participant. Moreover, this ques-

tion can shape whose voice within the research is most often amplified
and whose is most often silenced or side-lined. Questions pertaining to
leadership are fraught with contradictions in relation to activist practices
which may be horizontal, leaderless, or “leaderful” and not attuned to
having the hierarchical structure that may be imposed by academic prac-
tices. We must therefore be attentive to who takes the role of lead author
most often, or which activist is cited most often in a text, when trans-
lating non-hierarchical activist practices into the hierarchical functions
of the university institution, including its intensive publishing regimes.
Different strategies have been used by different groups addressing this
structural mismatch. A group might list co-authors alphabetically with
a footnote saying there is no lead author. Some have designated a lead
author for each paper who “bottom-lines” the work, an activist role
indicating that they would take on organizational tasks; in the case of
publication, holding others to deadlines, corresponding with the jour-
nal or book editors, copyediting, and so on. Other research teams might
decide to publish under a collective name with no named authors. None
of these strategies rest easily within academia, as traditional academics
attempt to interpret them through status-quo lenses. In academia, where
it is necessary to list publications that show your name as lead author
or co-author in order to maintain your position, achieve tenure, and the
like, there might be negative career consequences as a result of some
of these strategies. Similarly, time spent on research publications that
may sit on a scholarly shelf or in a repository behind a pay-wall can be
resented by activists who might like to see the articles published open
access or with a creative commons licence, or even that the academics
give up writing these obscure documents and get back in the streets
where protest support is needed.
Understanding the neoliberal university to be a hierarchical struc-
ture of oppression that attributes knowledge production most easily to
those with heterosexual, white, settler, cis-male, able-bodied privilege,
we must be attentive to attribution rights including who is getting the
greatest credit for the research and knowledge. The risk is that if femi-
nist collectives are engaging in ethical relations of care and horizontal-
izing research, and if Indigenous people are decolonizing research in
other ways, both of which include mechanisms for collaborative author-
ing, facilitating lead authorship of junior colleagues, and the like, while
their peers are doing the opposite (e.g. taking credit for a paper written
by a graduate student, or writing single-author publications that avoid

the time-consuming labour of collaboration), then the structural out-
come is that additional space in academia is in fact not being created
for women, Indigenous people, and other oppressed but collaborative
groups proportional to the work they are actually doing. Therefore,
knowledge being produced and consecrated by academia is dominated
by the already dominant voices, epistemologies, theoretical frameworks,
and so on.
Who presents research findings at a conference is another issue
imbued with power. It may seem like a simple question of interest,
capacity, and availability, but those, too, are intangible resources that not
every research activist has equal access to. Conferences tend to exclude
people who cannot afford to travel, who don’t have funding, who can-
not pay the high registration fees, who have disabilities, and so on. This
applies in specific ways to those in the Global South who have to grapple
with prohibitive visa application processes, poor exchange rates for their
local currency, inequitable earnings, and language barriers for present-
ing. Affordability is an issue for those in lower socio-economic groups,
such as early career researchers including graduate students, postdoctoral
fellows, and sessional instructors, but also some faculty members from
lower-class families whose professional salary may be absorbed by massive
student debt and/or their role in financially supporting ageing parents,
siblings, and/or their own children.
Beyond economic affordability, the capacity to travel to conferences
may be limited due to parenting, family, or elder care responsibilities,
community commitments, mental health support provision, and so on.
Moreover, a person may feel a lack of entitlement to present in certain
types of academic spaces or events which might be perceived or have
been experienced as hostile. For example, for academics of colour, main-
stream conferences do not always create welcoming spaces for equitable
participation. Research presentations of people of colour, women, peo-
ple with disabilities, LGBTQ+, etc., are often marginalized in confer-
ences, with topics being streamed by subject into panels or time slots that
the majority of conference-goers tend to overlook, such as the last day
of the conference, early morning after a big social, or in parallel with an
important keynote talk. Conferences are typically particularly inaccessible
to people with disabilities, although this improves when the conference
includes critical disability studies or is organized by those aware of disa-
bility and accessibility parameters. Furthermore, international conferences
are seldom carbon-neutral; conversely, carbon usage to attend them is

quite high, and those with an environmental consciousness may increas-
ingly choose not to attend in person. Some conferences are beginning to
provide opportunities for video participation, an imperfect but important
solution. The barriers to participation in conferences must be treated as
ethical questions by conference organizers and participants alike.
Attribution in written and conference texts not only provides access
to employment, funding, career opportunities, social capital, and
more, but leaves behind knowledge for posterity. Some people within
a research-activist project may be gaining more opportunities for attri-
bution, while others are organizing meeting logistics, submitting fund-
ing applications, transcribing interviews, doing paperwork, or taking
on administrative tasks. Instead, we need to consider how all research-
ers might be included in the critical analysis of the research findings,
named as co-authors, and fully participate in the research so their voices
and epistemologies are a legacy of the research in order to shift academic
power and knowledge production structures.
This raises the ethical question of not just who researchers and
participants are but how the relationships among them evolve. How

do we build trust, and how do we ensure relationships are equitable,
non-exploitative, sustainable, and non-extractive, based on continuous

dialogues that attempt to establish mutual understanding and reciproc-
ity. Researchers may have different relationships with various members
of a group they are researching with. These relationships will depend on
opportunities for individual and group interactions, and will change over
time. Although it is impossible—and it would be intellectually dishonest—
to provide universal formulas or templates for these relations, it may be
easier to create dialogues and construct long-term generative and respect-
ful relations of mutual trust and mutual aid when media activists and
research activists have common or overlapping life trajectories, experiences,
identities or positions, or when they share common values and principles,
and when they can establish that both are actively engaged in working
towards the same political and social change objectives.
Researchers: Rooted vs. Embedded in Movements

The subject position of the research activist is crucial to consider and
account for in developing research projects, research questions, and
research findings. Research relationships are always already under
construction and must be nurtured throughout the process. There are two
different modes of participatory ethnography—rooted and embedded—
each providing different affordances and challenges.
If the researcher is rooted in and has deep knowledge of the activ-
ist group, including things such as shared principles and values, ideol-
ogies, or marginalized identities, their interpretation will tend to be
aligned with the activists from the beginning, without a steep learning
curve. Embedded researchers may align their interpretations and values
with participants although this may take more work. When a researcher
is unsure of their interpretation, follow-up conversations, questions,
and emails are necessary to better ascertain the participant’s perspec-
tive. However, these emails from embedded researchers may be seen as
demands for unforeseen unpaid labour on the part of the media activist.
For rooted researchers, on the other hand, the opportunity to have
conversations with participants arises in everyday life, even after the
so-called field research, as they are roommates, engaged in activist
groups together, or part of overlapping friend groups. The field is thus
their own everyday life. Embedded research, in which an academic
university-based researcher joins a group in order to research it, requires
a longer stay within the researched community and inventive strategies
for attending events and engaging in informal conversations with media
activists.
Rooted researchers usually have a deeper engagement in the move-
ment, as Jeffrey Juris (2005) argues, including staking claims and posi-
tions, organizing and taking on tasks within the movement, and so
on. These commitments come before the research. They precede the
research chronologically, and the activist tasks will often take prec-
edence over the research tasks for the rooted research activist. Rooted
researchers contribute to the movement from within by documenting
and co-creating an archive or knowledge base with their activist com-
rades. Therefore, according to Uri Gordon (2012), they allocate their
time, as movement activists, to collective self-reflection, which not every-
one in the movement will have the time or inclination to do, bringing
this thinking/feeling back to the movement for further discussion on an
ongoing basis or during activist events they may co-organize.
On the other hand, embedded research, where a researcher shares
activist objectives and values, although they were not a priori a part of
the researched community, provides other challenges and opportunities.
Outsiders, particularly foreigners, arriving in an activist group already
criminalized by police, may give rise to increased surveillance, including

tracking of digital interactions (dataveillance), preliminary research meet-
ings, workshops, or interviews. This is particularly so within authoritarian
regimes, or when regime change takes place in the midst of a research
project. Global researchers must be aware of the potential for exposing
their team and the activists they are working with to these sorts of risks,
although they may sometimes be difficult to predict.
At the same time, embedded researchers have the advantage of more
easily being able to provide external critiques or to bring in new per-
spectives that rooted researchers might not see. Coming from an exter-
nal perspective, their conversations and presence may inspire renewed
energy and engagement within the activist group. Participants may see
the opportunity to think through their practices with an outsider as a
moment for establishing a common affective experience or a space in
which new insights into their experiences or new directions for their
media activism may arise. Activist stories may be narrated as some-
thing the embedded researcher knows nothing about, whereas a rooted
researcher would already be familiar with the event or incident. Thus, the
outsider allows for the participant to engage in a deeper reflection, as the
researcher takes on the role of witnessing, and the research participant
can narrate their experience from start to finish. However, the rooted
researcher may be familiar with the debates, which might complicate the
storytelling process, and influence or skew the telling as the participant
angles it towards the listener’s already known perspective.
The point is not to privilege rooted or embedded researchers, but to
flag that the two are different and are imbued with different power rela-
tions vis-à-vis the research participants. In either case, establishing open
dialogic feedback loops and ensuring the development of relationships of
trust are key processes. Both modes can produce research that is benefi-
cial and supports the activists in their social movement or media activist
communities if the research is approached openly and respectfully.
Researchers: The Double Labour

of Research Activists
As we have seen above, those involved in both academia and activism

deal with competing demands that are many times difficult to integrate,
prioritize, or juggle. While neoliberal academia demands that scholars
engage with peers in scholarly conversations taking place through the
publication of journal articles, books, and academic conferences consist-

ing of formulaic panels, on the other hand, activism demands participa-
tion in events and dissemination structured as activism such as activist
participatory workshops, community forums, general assemblies, popular
education conferences, skill-sharing workshops, social movement conver-
gences, and the like. This situation leaves researchers in a position where
they must prioritize scholarly or social movement knowledge mobiliza-
tion because it will be very difficult, if not impossible to do both. While
funders increasingly require so-called community knowledge mobiliza-
tion, multi-audience research dissemination, or multi-stakeholder knowl-
edge exchange, the reality of finite capacities and time often means that
instead of complementary outputs, these may end up being competing
outcomes, where one suffers when the other is privileged.
When a researcher occupying the hybrid position of research activist
chooses to prioritize either scholarly or activist work, specific issues arise
in both social movements and academia. In social movements, activists
may feel betrayed by the research activist’s commitment to scholarly
work because of the reduced time spent in the social movement on the
ground. Similarly, research participants may also feel a double pressure
to continue to engage in activism and make time to be a research par-
ticipant. And in academia, when a research activist produces scholarly
work aimed at emancipation (Boltanski, 2011), they become targets of
academics who criticize the so-called politicization of research and sci-
ence. Or if they prioritize non-scholarly community events and activist
workshops, these may not be recognized by academia as having equiv-
alent value to a high impact factor journal (or any journal) article, thus
preventing the research activist from securing stable employment, earn-
ing tenure, receiving funding, and the like. Such contradictory pressures
put research activists in a vulnerable position as an outsider in relation to
both groups, because each group perceives of them as belonging fully to
the other.
While doing the unacknowledged double labour of both researcher
and activist, a subject occupying the hybrid position of researcher activ-
ist may feel alienated from both social movements and academia alike.
Judged as inadequate by both types of organizations or institutions, they
are in fact taking on twice as much work and attempting to meet twice
the demands as those activists or academics not occupying this hybrid
position. Researcher activists struggle to produce meaningful ethical
research in a context in which the ethical commitments of social justice
research are at best paid lip service through research ethics board mana-
gerial processes and at worst, undervalued, dismissed as biased, or rejected
as having no place in the neoliberal university. Thus, researcher activists
and media activists share the terrain of struggle against neoliberal imper-
atives that constrain not just our research and activism but the configura-
tion and logics of our everyday lives, work arrangements, professional and
personal relationships, societies, and the worlds in which we live.
Conclusions: Critiques and Power

From these reflections, it is clear that we must be consistently open to
reciprocal dialogues and finding new ways to account for asymmetries of
power.
Reciprocal Critiques Between

Research and Activism
Since both research activists and media activists are in these complexly
vulnerable positions, working with scarce resources and competing com-
mitments and demands, they may have the tendency or inclination to
brush away any criticism in order to avoid jeopardizing an already frag-
ile set of relationships and desired actions. This is not the best instinct,
understandable as it may be. It is, rather, in the ethos of both scholarly
research and radical activism to be critical and inquisitive. This can lead
to researcher critiques of activists, even when researchers are sympathetic
to the social movements researched; and it can also lead to activist cri-
tiques of researchers, even when activists believe the research is benefi-
cial. This situation puts an emphasis on the need to establish a forum for
open dialogue between those collaborating in research activism.
Two objectives of media research activism discussed here are: first, to
improve and support processes and practices of media and social move-
ment activism; and second, to engage in transgressive activist research
practices within the neoliberal university. The impacts therefore include
improved practices in social movement media and research. These two
objectives are not separate; both are based on practices used to build
community relationships and create social transformation. These prac-
tices will thus benefit on both sides from being open to reciprocal cri-
tiques. The aim of collaborative critiques is for everyone to work
together to develop and improve both activism and research.
That said, reciprocal critiques are not always explicitly stated objec-
tives of research, and there may not be effective (or any) processes put
in place for sharing them. However, it is crucial that research activists
find constructive ways to negotiate situations in which we have to express
criticism (even when overall sympathetic to shared social transforma-
tion objectives) of the groups with which we collaborate in research. At
the same time, it is equally crucial that we make space for dialogue in
which activists may express criticism of our research practices, or inter-
vene somehow against the research process. While these critiques may be
difficult to hear, if they are taken seriously and space and time is allocated
to processing and discussing them, the result should be to increase our
knowledge of and to improve our practices of social movement organiz-
ing and research—two explicitly stated shared objectives.
Radical social movements and researcher activists converge on the
point of self-reflection and the ongoing development of innovative
critical practices. It therefore seems logical that an ethical practice of
research activism would provide space to bring researchers and activ-
ists together for constructive collective self-reflection and reciprocal cri-
tique. This might occur periodically throughout the research perhaps in
a before-during-after model, or it might be a process put in place that
researchers or activists can call for at any time during the research pro-
ject. A word to the wise, however: this should not be seen as an oppor-
tunity for publicly calling people out, but rather a process for working
together for mutual improvements, and thus, it must be undertaken in
good faith with shared explicitly stated objectives. The risk, if this is not
a possible starting point, is affective overwhelm leading to possible burn-
out, which benefits neither activism nor research.
Asymmetries: Intersectional Power

in Research Activism
As social justice movements are trending towards multi-issue organizing

at the intersections of interconnected identities, issues, and structures of
oppression, research activists grapple with the process of identifying, assess-
ing, accounting for, and dismantling power asymmetries. This includes
power asymmetries and structural differences between the hierarchical uni-
versity and the horizontal activist milieu as well as within both of these.
Intersectional power relations have long been a concern of femi-
nist researchers, who focus on developing ethical relations of care with
community research participants (Fine, 2006; Jaggar, 2008). Some schol-

ars suggest it might be impossible to equalize power differences between
the security of researchers in universities compared to the insecurity of
activists, particularly those marginalized along intersectional lines (Patai,
1994). Participatory ethnography and participatory action research are
methodologies that include the researcher in the process of social trans-
formation, and more deeply engage research participants in the process
of research, including such approaches as mutual co-interviews, trans-
formative social movement research, and so on. Innovative work has been
undertaken in intersectional research collectives that integrate research par-
ticipants into the research collective itself (Breton et al., 2012; Costanza-
Chock, 2012; Jeppesen, Hounslow, Khan, & Petrick, 2017).
Decolonizing research with and as Indigenous peoples includes an
additional level of ethical engagement to ensure the historical practices
of extractive research, epistemological oppression, racialized other-
ing, and colonization through ethnography are not repeated. With
an explicit focus on decolonizing research, particular processes for
engaging with Indigenous communities in research are being put in
place, with additional ethics training and so on becoming mandatory
particularly for non-Indigenous researchers. Moreover, Indigenous com-
munities are creating explicit guidelines, training, and principles for uni-
versity researchers who may be interested in engaging with Indigenous
communities in ethical research practices and processes. For example, in
Canada, about twenty years ago, a codified set of principles for research-
ing with Indigenous peoples called the Ownership, Control, Access,
and Participation (OCAP®) principles were developed, which have now
been trademarked to avoid their misrepresentation by settler research-
ers (OCAP). In addition, specific Indigenous organizations might create
their own policies and processes for engaging in research with settlers.
These specific guidelines also align with or work in conjunction with the
United Nations principles of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent (FPIC)
put in place for any actions related to Indigenous land and peoples
(United Nations).
These various ethical principles and approaches that are attentive
to power, often put into practice by intersectional feminist, anti-racist,
LGBTQ+, and/or Indigenous researchers, raise a host of questions
regarding the commitments and limits of ethical research. Activists who
have long been engaged in horizontal organizations in multi-issue, femi-
nist, anti-authoritarian, and other types of activist collectives may have to
shift their practices to some extent when they become a university-based

researcher who must apply for and holds funds, with institutional-
ized rights and responsibilities. Similarly, Indigenous people initiating
research in their communities have found that they may need to nego-
tiate structural, epistemological, cognitive, linguistic, cultural, and
other differences between universities and their communities. There are
clearly complex positions of power and privilege evident when university
researchers engage with activists, even when those research activists have
arrived at the university fully immersed in activist, feminist, Indigenous
or other ethical structures, communities, and values. To create hori-
zontal, anti-oppression, decolonizing, and/or equitable relationships
through university-community research activism partnerships, projects,
collaborations, or collectives, it is necessary to account for and attempt
to mitigate these dynamics within this complex matrix of power.
Structure of the Book

This book is a contribution towards collective self-reflection, which is
why we have chosen to emphasize research practices rather than meth-
ods. While a research methods textbook may guide us through different
structures and processes for designing research, in this book we focus on
everyday practices of research with attention to questions that arise when
research activists and media activists collaborate in the co-production of
knowledge. We felt a need in the contemporary social sciences literature
for dialogical reflections addressing the daily practices of research from the
point of view of research activists and media activists. The chapters in this
book, taken together, provide a comprehensive collection of reflections
on a diverse set of practices engaged across a broad spectrum of global
social movements, and media and communications research activism. The
contributions have the objective of supporting activists, researchers, and
research activists in our shared commitments to social transformation, not
just through revolutionary results of research findings, but also through
revolutionizing relationship-based empirical research practices by integrat-
ing activist and grassroots concerns related to power and knowledge into
the process of collaborative u niversity-based research.
The book is divided into four parts. It is important to note that
although this has the appearance of an academic book, and the contri-
butions are indeed academic, many of the contributors are also activists
and/or scholars engaged in different forms of activism.
Part I, Practice-Based Perspectives on the Ethics

of Research Activism
Part I addresses the interconnection between practices of research in par-

ticipatory media and communication studies and practices of activism
in media activism, community mobilization, and social movements. In
Chapter 2, Sandra Jeppesen engages in critical reflections from her expe-
rience working on a six-year participatory communicative action research
project, negotiating the conflicts arising between the commitments and
practices of the horizontal research activist collective, the Media Action
Research Group (MARG) in Canada, while being simultaneously sub-
jected to the hierarchies of higher education institutions and funding
bodies. She probes the question whether it is possible to do ethical par-
ticipatory media activist research in the university under the currently
existing conditions of intersectional neoliberal capitalism. In Chapter 3,
Paola Sartoretto and Leonardo Custódio reflect on their past research as
Brazilian doctoral students based in Europe who were researching with
social movements and media collectives in Brazil. They argue that the
key to developing ethical research relationships with social movements
is to approach the movement with respect and open dialogue, includ-
ing sharing information across digital platforms, sharing research docu-
ments, and participating in movement events. In Chapter 4, Mayrá Lima
and Solange Engelmann analyse research carried out in Brazilian uni-
versities with and about one of Latin America’s largest and oldest social
movements, the Landless Workers Movement (MST). They argue that
research activism must support social movements by making their activ-
ism more visible in the public sphere, particularly in the context of the
intensifying criminalization of the movement.
Part II, Decolonizing Methodologies

and Negotiating Community Learning
In Part II, the chapters problematize epistemological and ontological

categories and roles that are taken for granted in teaching and research,
with an emphasis on decolonization and challenging institutional oppres-
sion. In Chapter 5, Vera Martins and Rosane Rosa examine research
practices with feminist activists in both Brazil and Mozambique from a
decolonial perspective, in an attempt to disrupt colonizing practices of
knowledge production and authority in the relations between activists
and researchers. They argue that research activists must assert the legit-
imacy of subaltern activists to be involved in the production of knowl-
edge, and to this end, they suggest that global researchers must take the
time to develop methodological processes and practices specific to each
new research context, particularly when researching outside their local
context. In Chapter 6, closing the divide between media activism and
research activism, Gretchen King and the Community Media Advocacy
Centre (CMAC) from Canada discuss the process of advocating for
media rights of Indigenous people and other intersectional marginalized
groups, through engagement in the media policy sphere, typically dom-
inated by hegemonic groups. CMAC prioritizes the perspectives, voices,
and lived experiences of Indigenous peoples, racialized people, and peo-
ple living with disAbilities who are largely absent from media policy
processes. They argue that, despite some grassroots movements avoid-
ing advocating through the state, communications policy concerns need
to be taken up by intersectional activists and researchers alike in order
to achieve social transformation ends. In Chapter 7, Sandra Smeltzer,
a scholar situated in Canada, explores activist pedagogies imbricated
in media and communications oriented community engaged learning
from her perspective as a sometimes conflicted nodal point triangulated
among community organizations, the university, and the students. She
argues that important conversations and dialogues are needed regarding
engaged learning, as the pressure intensifies to provide these experiences
in the neoliberal university, if we are to provide ethical and generative
experiences for students and community partners alike.
Part III, Negotiating Power Dynamics Between

Part III focuses on unexpected conflicts that might arise along dif-
ferent axes of power between activists and researchers. In Chapter 8,
Julia Velkova discusses conflicts that arose in a research project with an
open-software 3D graphics animation collective, when initially shared
understandings about activist and research practices diverged. She calls
into question the limits of reciprocity, particularly when increasing
demands are put on the researcher by the activists, not just risking a loss
of autonomy for herself but also potentially reversing the power dynamic
they had together been attempting to equalize. In Chapter 9, Gökçe
Tuncel reflects on how her personal views about citizen journalism
affected her work with a journalist collective in Turkey, assessing the

tricky balance between sharing ideological perspectives with an activist
project and doing rigorous research with that project. She reflects criti-
cally on both the project’s changing political commitments and the limits
of her own ideological assumptions on her capacity to make particular
kinds of observations and analysis. In Chapter 10, Ekaterina Kalinina
delves into the difficulties of managing a research project in Sweden,
promoting hip-hop culture among young women in Russia, and apply-
ing an ethics of care and co-responsibility when relationships were less
than reciprocal. She argues that it is possible for researchers and activ-
ists to have different understandings of horizontality and empowerment,
and that research activism to empower women in the cultural sector risks
re-inscribing the very dynamics of gendered power it is attempting to
combat, not just within the cultural milieu, but also between research
and activist groups.
Part IV, Media Activist Research in the Context

of Global Crises
Part IV addresses the timely issue of doing research with activists in

the contemporary era of intensifying political conflicts and crises. In
Chapter 11, Eugenia Siapera and Sara Creta, researchers situated in
Ireland, introduce the importance of the political dimensions of ethical
research relationships, focusing on the relationship between refugees
and the media during the Syrian War in 2015, with refugees attempting
to emancipate themselves from imposed media narratives. They suggest
that, as opposed to focusing on how journalists should cover conflict,
or the appropriate representations of refugees in media, media activist
research must make refugees visible themselves as agents who through
self-representation can challenge the source of exploitation, oppres-

sion, and subjugation they have experienced. In Chapter 12, Liudmila
Voronova and Yuliya Yurchuk, two researchers situated in Sweden,
engage in a dialogic autoethnography, a form of mutual self-interview,
about their experience co-researching propaganda in Kyiv, Hamburg,
and Vienna, during the Ukraine-Russia conflict as they each came into
contact with activists in various fields (journalists, professors, historians,
etc.). Together they develop a shared critical analysis, reflecting on the
complexities of engaging in ethnography with activists during a situation
of information warfare and armed conflict, particularly when the scholars

come from the different countries involved, and introducing the impor-
tance of the role of emotions and affect in research relations.
These twelve chapters show the multiplicity of global, personal,
professional, activist, academic, affective, cultural, pedagogical, and
institutional contradictions and tensions that can emerge in ethical con-
siderations arising in research activism with media activists. Even the
best ethical practices may lead to unintended consequences that must be
addressed during the course of the research, where processes and prac-
tices must adapt to the immediate realities of the situation. This book is
conceived as a call for much-needed collective reflection and dialogue on
how media and communications research intersects with different forms
of social justice activism and our increasingly complex positions in the
hybrid research activism nexus in the neoliberal university.
References
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Jeppesen, S., Hounslow, T., Khan, S., & Petrick, K. (2017). Media action
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Waisbord, S. (2019). The communication manifesto. New York: Wiley.
PART I
Practice-Based Perspectives on the Ethics

of Research Activism
CHAPTER 2
Research Ethics: Critical Reflections

on Horizontal Media Activism
Research Practices
Sandra Jeppesen
The Media Action Research Group (MARG) was an intersectional

feminist group of research activists at Lakehead University Orillia,

Canada, with members in Orillia, Toronto, and Montreal. We engaged
in research with intersectional autonomous grassroots media activist pro-
jects in 11 countries from 2013 to 2019. I was Principal Investigator (PI)
on this project from an institutional perspective (funder, university); how-
ever, we organised ourselves as a horizontal activist research collective.
Considering the day-to-day practices of our innovative methodology
of intersectional participatory communicative action research (Jeppesen,
Hounslow, Khan, & Petrick, 2017), in this chapter, I provide a critical
analysis of the complex struggles of doing horizontal research in the
hierarchical neoliberal university, with the aim of making these reflec-
tions useful to research activists. I put forward a somewhat irascible
S. Jeppesen (*)
Lakehead University, Orillia, ON, Canada
e-mail: sandrajeppesen@lakeheadu.ca

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4_2
28 S. JEPPESEN
question: Is it possible to do ethical participatory media activist research

in the university under the currently existing conditions of intersectional
neoliberal capitalism? I complicate this provocation with questions
regarding how we might work towards mitigating institutional, funding,
and structural limitations in negotiating these entanglements without
foreclosing the possibility of intersectional anti-authoritarian ethical
research. These are my own reflections; I do not speak on behalf of the
collective.
Grounding Principles and Inclusion Criteria

The MARG collective was founded to research with and as grass-
roots autonomous media producers from an intersectional perspective,
grounded in the principles of anti-capitalism, feminism, anti-racism,
anti-colonialism, and LGBTQ+ liberation.
Grassroots Autonomous Media

MARG research participants produced a variety of genres and were active
in multi-issue social movements. They aligned with four key dimen-
sions of grassroots autonomous media. First, they were participants in
grassroots multi-issue, intersectional social movements comprised of a
complex combination of social actors, engaged in direct action within
communities, while making demands for policy and legal changes
(Downing, 2007).
Second, content and structures were anti-capitalist, shaped by attempts
to counter capitalism and linked to anti-authoritarian, anarchist, and
autonomous movements. Anti-capitalist funding models included crowd-
funding, ethical advertising, grants‚ and avoiding pay walls. Labour and
decision-making models tended to be horizontal and consensus-driven,
with pay structures from paid (often underpaid) to unpaid (Jeppesen &
Petrick, 2018).
Third, they practised collective autonomy through prefigurative practices
that foster collectivity, such as direct democracy, horizontality, and autono-
mous self-determination (Langlois & Dubois, 2005; Wolfson, 2013).
Fourth, self-ownership provided for creation of independent media
content and a movement archive, while sometimes mobilising content
across social media platforms to reach broad-based audiences (Fuchs,
2006; Hanke, 2005).
2 RESEARCH ETHICS: CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON HORIZONTAL MEDIA … 29
Intersectionality
MARG was grounded in intersectionality theory and practice from its
inception. Intersectionality can be understood as follows:
When it comes to social inequality, people’s lives and the organization of

power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a
single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes
that work together and influence each other. (Collins & Bilge, 2016, p. 2)
Collins and Bilge highlight the importance of both individual experi-

ences of discrimination and exclusion, and systemic structures of oppres-
sion and domination.
Research participants worked from an intersectional perspective across
a complex matrix of interlocking axes of oppression and privilege.1 For
example, Black Lives Matter foregrounds anti-Black racism while con-
sidering LGBTQ+, police violence, mental health, incarceration, and
other issues in the context of racism (Cullors, 2016; Garza, 2014;
Khan-Cullors & Bandele, 2018). Our collective did not foreground
one particular issue, but valued intersectional identities and experiences
as important sources of expertise and knowledge production (Harding,
1998; Jaggar, 2008).
Horizontality in the Neoliberal University

MARG developed a Participatory Communicative Action Research
methodology to embed media activists and social movement ethics in
our research. Our activities are divided into activist and research practices
below; however, in practice, they were entangled.
Research Practices
Our research took place in three phases, each subsequent phase building
on the output of the previous one(s).
1 Participants were active in: no-border networks, intersectional feminist media,
Indigenous podcasts, trans sex worker support, anti-Islamophobia, challenging racialised

domestic violence, comics collectives, anti-Black racism, police brutality, women’s pay
strikes, climate justice, documentary film, Occupy, the Indignados, queer radio, youth
media, media collective houses, anti-capitalist magazines, journalism start-ups, and more.
30 S. JEPPESEN
Phase One: Radical Media Mixers. In 2014–2015, participants fit-

ting our criteria were invited to attend six radical media mixers across
Canada. These were what researchers might call focus groups, but they
were facilitated in a participatory activist workshop format, with food,
transportation, and childcare provided. Discussion questions focused on
current successes and challenges, and how our research might support
their work. The mixers generated activist outcomes, introducing local
media activists to each other, and opening space for conversations and
relationship building among them.
In terms of research outcomes, we audio-recorded the mixers, coded
and analysed the data collectively, and created working documents that
were shared with participants, providing avenues for feedback. From
these data, we published one academic paper on autonomous journalism
(Jeppesen & MARG, 2018) and developed further research questions
informed by current media activist experiences and debates.
Phase Two: Interviews. In 2015–2017, we conducted semi-
structured interviews with 89 activists in 11 countries, sharing the inter-
view transcription with each participant so they could verify and own
it. We published findings from these data in both popular media avail-
able on our website (mediaactionresearch.org) and academic journals
(Jeppesen & Petrick, 2018).
Phase Three: Community Knowledge Mobilisation. To make our
findings more available to media activists, we co-facilitated workshops in
four different global locations on topics local activists selected from our
research findings. Most chose topics related to the development of mate-
rial and immaterial resources. We worked with (and paid an honorarium
to) a local activist to prepare, organise, and facilitate the workshop to
make it relevant in the local context. A text was provided for participants
to read ahead of time and presented during the workshop in a partici-
patory discussion format focused on generating outcomes for the local
media activist community.
Activist Practices
We continued to engage in movement organising as activists and inte-
grated media activists (who were not currently students or academics)
into our research collective.
Internal prefigurative research practices. When looking for new
members, we considered both lived experience of oppression and
intersectional media activist experience as key dimensions of expertise.

We organised ourselves as a horizontal self-managed collective, conduct-
ing meetings using prefigurative anti-authoritarian, feminist, and hori-
zontal practices including go-arounds, check-ins, and check-outs, and
practising a relational ethics of care that included mental health mutual
support, access to emergency funds, and so on. We rotated facilitation,
rotated note-taking in an open collaborative editing tool, and used digi-
tal technologies for distance participation. Visioning meetings were held
bi-annually with an outside facilitator supporting our critical self-reflec-
tions and research planning.
A stringent ethics protocol was put in place to secure the anonym-
ity of research participants by separating names from data, storing names
offsite to reduce the risk of data exposure, and committing the PI to
withholding names in case of a court order or subpoena, given the state
might take interest in interviews with radical media activists. Consent
forms were developed as a starting point for ethical relations of care con-
ducted with self-reflection, transparency, accountability, respect, and reci-
procity through open dialogues.
Multi-audience knowledge exchange. Research hours were allo-
cated towards co-organising and co-facilitating the Alternative Media
Assembly at the People’s Social Forum (PSF) in Ottawa in 2014, and
organising the Media Action Research Conference (MARC) in 2016,
for which MARG received additional funding. The MARC conference
brought together global media activists, researchers, and research
activists in a multimodal format that included panels, hands-on work-
shops, roundtables, plenary sessions, and participatory discussions.
All presenters were funded for travel and paid an honorarium. Three
meals a day were provided, and we organised billeting as needed.
Registration fees were sliding scale from $0 to $200. Our objective
was for people to be able to participate without incurring any financial
costs.
We also prioritised presenting on panels and facilitating workshops
in activist media and social movement conferences in Canada and the
United States, such as Organizing Equality, Facing Race, and the Allied
Media Conference.
Partnering with media activist projects. Working with the Media
Co-op in Toronto and Montreal, we developed a model of partnership
whereby a media activist was paid for fifteen hours per week of research
activism: ten hours of media activist work with the Media Co-op and
32 S. JEPPESEN
five hours of research work with MARG. The latter consisted of creat-
ing activist media resources reflecting on movement and media practices
for publication on our website. We also developed a partnership with an
Indigenous activist‚ in conjunction with the Halifax Media Co-op‚ who
produced a bilingual Mi’kmaq-English podcast (Clair, n.d.).
Rethinking research outputs. MARG’s everyday research practices
blurred the boundaries between research and activism. Media produced
in research partnerships can be considered multi-directional research
exchange. Activist workshops and conferences are research mobilisation
for communities. The participatory communicative action research meth-
odology developed with activists is a key research outcome. Prioritising
activist dissemination has meant that MARG has not produced as many
scholarly journal articles, upon which a scholar’s academic merit may
be adjudicated, as expected by the neoliberal university for a 6-year
funded programme of research. To maintain my position, achieve ten-
ure, and justify the grant funds, beyond activist collective research and
social movement participation, I have also had to produce individualised
single-authored theoretical scholarly work. The irony does not escape me.
Critical Reflections: Contradictions and Tensions

Despite integrating ethical commitments into everyday research activism
practices, unintended troubling consequences of ethical practices may
arise. Our research was restricted by structures of the neoliberal univer-
sity and its funding institutions as well as the precarious labour market
of media activism. These contradictions and tensions played out across
three critical dimensions: research participants; researchers; and collective
power.
The situations analysed here are generalised, hypothetical, or theoret-
ical extrapolations of horizontal research activism. While the analysis is
drawn from my experience, I make the disclaimer that unless otherwise
indicated, all the names, characters, events, and incidents in this analysis
are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious
manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual
events is purely coincidental.
Why approach it this way? First, I prefer readers not attempt to fig-
ure out who might be referenced so I am not referencing actual people.
Second, I am not referencing real events, as this would require a pro-
cess of collective reflection and a collectively authored paper, which this
chapter is not. Third, I do not want to subject real conflicts to scrutiny,

as their complexity often defies representability, and their specificity may
not be applicable across research disciplines. Fourth, the objective is to
produce analytical examples from a rigorous scientific perspective rather
than a personal subjective one. And finally, these hypothetical examples
have been selected and generalised to be useful to researcher activists in a
range of different projects.
Research Participant Contradictions

For research participants, labour, anonymity, social capital, and affect
may play a role in the development of ethical research practices.
Labour. Compensating media activists with an honorarium for par-
ticipation recognises their important role in co-research. Providing par-
ticipants with transcriptions and working documents for review and
feedback has the objective of ensuring co-ownership and co-production
of knowledge. But is this asking too much of participants? The more
they are engaged in the co-research process, the more unpaid labour
they may undertake, in what Cowan and Rault (2014) call the labour
of being studied. Contradictorily, research in support of media activism
can consume the limited resource of time to do media activism. This may
be mitigated by ensuring research processes have direct activist outcomes
(Jeppesen, 2016) or providing continual honoraria or ongoing paid
labour such as the MARG research partnerships.
If activists are paid for being participants, does this construct a rela-
tionship of alienated labour? Research participants might feel knowl-
edge is being extracted and accumulated by the research team, for which
outcomes have higher value than for the participants, who realise less
of an opportunity for future monetisation (Cowan & Rault, 2014, p.
479). Payment may further underline differential access to resources,
entrenching a power dynamic based not on mutual collective knowledge
co-production, but on extraction of knowledge in exchange for mini-
mal material compensation. It may also further reinforce the hierarchal
boundary between university researchers and community activists that
co-research attempts to transgress. The value of honoraria is constrained
by granting bodies to avoid being perceived as coercive.
Providing honoraria for initial tasks but not subsequent ones may
underline rather than undermine existing neoliberal labour hierarchies,
with each new task potentially being experienced as too demanding.
34 S. JEPPESEN
Media activists sometimes engage in unpaid media activism as a labour

of love; however, this can be exploitative (Jeppesen & Petrick, 2018).
Participation in research attempting to unmask the exploitation of media
activism may contradictorily extend an exploitative labour of love model
to research participation. This is particularly troubling for people expe-
riencing multiple intersecting oppressions who tend to be the ones more
often expected to engage in unpaid media, activist, artistic, and immate-
rial labour (Cowan & Rault, 2014; Jeppesen & Petrick, 2018).
Anonymity. Related to tensions in the labour of being studied is the
contradiction between anonymity and voice. Ethics protocols typically
provide anonymity to protect participant privacy and minimise the risks
of participation. When researching with increasingly criminalised activists,
anonymisation of data may prevent police discovering activist actions dis-
closed in interviews. Without a guarantee of anonymity, activists might
choose not to participate in research; or they would not discuss politics and
actions openly, rendering findings meaningless. Anonymity therefore seems
the most ethical approach to protect radical activist research participants.
However, “an uncritical acceptance of anonymity generates concerns
about representation, voice, and authorship in research, particularly
amongst disadvantaged communities” (Berkhout, 2015). Some partic-
ipants may not want to be anonymous, preferring to have their words
attributed to their real names, where anonymity may be seen as silencing
their voices or appropriating their knowledge. Silencing intersectionally
oppressed media activists contradicts the objectives of media activism
and media activist research alike. Thus, an ethical anonymity-based ethics
protocol may have unforeseen consequences contradicting the objectives
of the research project. There is no one-size-fits-all ethical approach to
anonymity; rather, it must be negotiated with participants in the process
of research relationship building.
Social Capital. Media activists may assume that being a research
participant provides an avenue for self-expression that can amplify
their work, conferring social capital or status. A research collective may
develop criteria for selection of research participants that can have unan-
ticipated outcomes. Criteria, for example, to research with intersectional
media activist projects rather than individuals can inadvertently create
exclusions from social capital, with logical scientific decisions having per-
sonal affective impacts.
Establishing criteria for inclusion is always challenging. An intersectional
project hiring or engaging research collective members, participants, and
partners would need to be consistent with the intersectional commitments

of the project. For example, the prioritisation of hiring women, LGBTQ+
people, people of colour, and/or Indigenous people based on valuing lived
experience of oppression might cause those excluded to experience their
rejection as an undervaluing of their media activism, rather than an inten-
tional effort to revalue and recenter non-traditional forms of expertise often
overlooked, devalued, or actively silenced in research.
Moreover, the social capital of the research participant may be in
contradiction to their value within the research. Institutional processes
of consecration of expert knowledge producers with or in the process
of obtaining PhDs imbue researchers with social capital, even at varying
levels in the university hierarchy, including sessional instructors, teach-
ing assistants, contractually limited term appointments, postdoctoral
researchers, artist instructors, and the like (Cowan & Rault, 2014). The
research participant is being added as a supplement to the university
research team and the university confers social capital through this sup-
plementarity. However, this status is conferred based on the premise that
the marginalised media activist’s experience is of value only as long as
they remain marginalised in their position outside the university.
Furthermore, while the social capital of being a research participant
who circulates within the community might be invisible to researchers,
it is highly visible to those competing for the role. This is troubling in
communities where cooperation and mutual aid are valued over compe-
tition and individualism. The process of selection of research participants
and partners, in an ethical process of co-research and resource shar-
ing, therefore imposes a neoliberal capitalist competitive structure that
may cause media activists to vie for scarce resources, in the very type of
research where the objective is to challenge this competitive neoliberal
agenda.
Affect. The affective element of research emerges as we consider the
implications of social capital. Affect is essential to a horizontal research
collective’s feminist ethical relations of care, which introduces affec-
tive labour and an intentionality of care into the research process (see
Kalinina in this volume). The horizontal collective thus exercises care
for research participants and partners. However, the exploitation by a
research participant of a researcher’s offer of affective labour may lead
to unintended consequences related to gender and power. When engag-
ing in horizontal community relationships, with the researchers rooted
in the communities being researched (see Jeppesen and Sartoretto in
36 S. JEPPESEN
this volume), it might be appropriate to expect relations of care to be

reciprocal. However, if not, the assumption of unidirectional affective
involvement—the researchers care for the participants—can risk, on the
one hand, being patronising, and on the other hand, making research-
ers vulnerable to non-caring negative affect expressed by participants. It
raises important questions regarding the limits of relational affective care
within horizontal feminist research.
This negative affect can sometimes be directed at researchers by those
excluded as participants. When partnerships are paid labour, social move-
ment relationships are suddenly mediated by hiring decisions that might
be met with anger from those not hired. This can impact the research
collective, the media project, movements, friendships, and communi-
ties. A person who may have felt entitled to a position may be unable to
see their anger at rejection as imbricated with intersectional power rela-
tions of entitlement along lines of race, class, gender, and so on. Being
excluded, they may not have an opportunity to discuss the revaluing
of expertise with respect to intersectionality that is among the ethical
practices of the research collective. While the collective might want to
address negative affective impacts, a person’s exclusion from the research
project seems to foreclose development of the relationship, unless
researchers are rooted in the community and find informal opportunities
for conversation.
When researching within social movements in which researcher activ-
ists may be active, the research process may have ramifications for our
activity in those milieus, potentially impacting activist relations through
the researcher’s shifting social capital. This can lead to friend losses as
well, which plays out in a kind of catch-22. On the one hand, a nti-racist
and/or feminist and/or LGBTQ+ accomplices engaged in ethical
intersectional research practices may lose friendships with those in the
dominant group who feel unfairly excluded. Some may accuse the col-
lective of a so-called reverse oppression such as reverse sexism and racism
which are problematic terms eliding the importance of power structures.
On the other hand, these same accomplices may be told by intersec-
tionally marginalised groups that their intersectional practices are inad-
equate, and may risk losing those friendships as well. The position may
be expressed that white feminists should not do intersectional research
because it will automatically be incorrectly done, providing only orna-
mental intersectionality or decorative diversity (Bilge, 2016).
These types of affective situations can be handled well or badly with

a range of potential outcomes. When affect, and particularly negative
affect, is expressed digitally, sublimated, or not expressed, there can
be complex messy outcomes, some of which may be unknown to the
researchers. But regardless, researching in a long-term activist collective
will have affective repercussions and change relationships.
The contradiction that in the process of engaging with intersectional
affective ethics in relationship building, there may be negative affective
impacts based on assumptions among included and excluded partners
and participants—whether predominantly experiencing multiple intersec-
tional privileges or oppressions—of domination by the research activist
collective precisely because of their intersectional practices remains com-
plex and unresolved.
Research Collective Contradictions

For research collective members, funding and positionality may play con-
tradictory roles in the development of ethical research practices.
Funding. Receiving a government research grant in a highly com-
petitive research landscape offers incredible opportunities, with funds
available for media activist and research labour, travel for field research
and dissemination, purchase of equipment, honoraria for research partic-
ipants, event organisation, research partnerships, and more. At the same
time, when the assembled research team is rooted in social movements
and operates horizontally, funding can make things complicated.
First, funding means the research team can hire intersectionally
oppressed individuals and pay them decent wages to document and
reflect on their own practices, valuing and centering their media activ-
ist expertise. At the same time, grant funds are temporary, and thus so
are the part-time positions created, with no employment benefits, annual
raises, or contract guarantees, meaning the media activist is still engaged
in precarious labour. This creates inequalities. The team might decide to
pay PhD and MA students the same amount, but undergraduate wages
may be constrained by work-study programmes, which might also limit
hiring eligibility. With respect to intersectionality, who is admitted to
graduate programmes may be impacted by racialised, gendered, and
other oppressions, thus limiting research assistant pools, although this
may be transgressed by hiring non-student media activists as research
assistants, considered contractors by the funder. These details condition
38 S. JEPPESEN
involvement including commitment levels, work hours, workflow, avail-

ability for email, meeting times, and so on. For example, while a faculty
member or graduate student may conduct certain aspects of the research
at all hours, part-time workers will likely desire reasonable constraints
around work and email hours.
Second, for researchers staking a claim to marginalisation, the grant
immediately contradicts this, erasing social capital conferred based on
oppression in the problematic “oppression Olympics” (Dhamoon,
2015), discussed below. Some activists may argue you are no longer
oppressed enough to research anti-oppression media. Others may be
happy to join the project, feeling that finally grassroots intersectional
media is being taken seriously. Yet others may see it as an opportunity
to gain material wealth, with expectations exceeding capacities. Funding
for people with experiences of poverty can come with a sense of shame
or guilt, as if we have betrayed our roots, and exclude us from family
and friends. Being able to travel, rent a nice apartment or buy a house,
or afford the odd luxury item, when the majority of your friend group,
fellow activists, and family members cannot, may lead to alienation and
isolation. People may be accused of becoming elitist, a collaborator of
the neoliberal capitalist university, or “whitewashed” if they are a per-
son of colour or Indigenous. This calls into question how marginalised
academics can work within our own marginalised communities when any
success we have in the university structure pushes us out of those very
communities.
Third is the perceived limitlessness of funds. Although grants have
specified activities and expenditures, they may be flexible with potential
to support social movements and/or an individual researcher, such as
field research to visit media activist friends and interview them (part of
the methodology), purchase of new laptops, and so on. While pushback
against institutional regulations via the creative exploration of expend-
iture eligibility might reasonably be expected in transgressive research,
returning to the question of how this will benefit the research seems
crucial. In collective budgeting, it can be easy to spend too much time
making budgetary decisions, which may also be logistical, political or
ideological, engaging in long self-management discussions, and produc-
ing very little research.
Fourth, for those of us who have experienced poverty and depri-
vation, having a massive budget to collectively manage can be both
exciting and overwhelming. This is an inherent contradiction when
anti-capitalist research activists are suddenly managing a grant in a neo-

liberal capitalist economy and institution. There is an expectation that a
PI will know how to manage a large budget; however, as anti-capitalists,
it is likely that collective members will have no training, experience, nor
even interest in these administrative responsibilities. The flip side to
this is that activists are accustomed to doing a great deal with very lit-
tle money, so funding can be stretched using guerrilla strategies such as
couch surfing with local activists for field research or conferences, com-
munity food servings such as Food Not Bombs, or ride sharing to con-
ferences and meetings.
Many tensions arising from receiving grant funding are unresolved,
grounded in the shifting positionalities of research collective members as
they negotiate shifting, dynamic and sometimes competing or conflict-
ual roles within communities or countries of origin, activist communities,
academia, identity communities, social class, and more.
Double positionality. Power dynamics with respect to funding may be
related to a double positionality—within the horizontal research collective
and the hierarchical university. The roles and responsibilities research activ-
ists have in relation to the funder and the university may be contradictory
to practices and positions of horizontality. Everyone in the research collec-
tive may simultaneously inhabit two positions—horizontal collective mem-
ber and hierarchical employment position—in a double positionality.
First, accountability structures can be confusing for the PI, who is
contradictorily considered the employer of all other horizontal collective
members. The PI fills out their staff induction forms, ensures they have
done their workplace training modules, has signing authority on their
expenditures, and must account for all funds spent, even if the project
engages in collective budgeting. These specific tasks cannot be rotated
due to the institutional assignment of fiscal responsibility and hierarchi-
cal reporting structures. This can include: timely submission of research
travel claims, as required by the university finance department; working
required hours in the specific weeks for which they are paid, as required
by labour law; offering reasonable non-coercive incentives to partici-
pants, as required by the ethics protocol; and so on.
When travel claims, time cards, cheque requisitions, and the like
are missing, late, or done incorrectly according to these institutional
requirements, it is flagged to the PI by someone in the university hierar-
chy who treats them as the employer of the collective members. It then
becomes awkward for the PI in terms of how to pursue accountability
40 S. JEPPESEN
on the item through horizontal processes. If they bring an item to the

collective to find a collective self-management solution, it might seem
like an employee is being admonished by their employer in front of their
co-workers, which contravenes employee confidentiality of labour law. If
it is addressed one-on-one in a side meeting or email, the PI is acting like
a boss towards an employee, which contravenes horizontal practices. As
soon as administrative tasks are brought into dialogue, collective mem-
bers may both expect the PI to tell them how to correct the issues and
also resent the PI for being boss-like and telling them what to do, when
they were under the illusion they were only a member in an activist col-
lective. The horizontality is thus revealed to be false when the university
employment hierarchy’s structural roles and responsibilities are imposed
and oppress people, which is blamed on the PI.
The collective can thus only be successfully horizontal when every-
one takes full responsibility for their work commitments, including com-
pleting tedious administrative tasks. The contradiction is that collective
members have chosen to take responsibility for self-management but
when not meeting this responsibility, they may be forced by the uni-
versity hierarchy to revert to the employee/employer relationship in
order to resolve the issue, in essence facilitating the means for their own
oppression by not being personally accountable.
In horizontal activist spaces, the lack of mechanisms for accountability
continues to be an unresolved issue. Media activists in MARG’s research
have noted that it was difficult to hold fellow media activists accountable
for commitments or deadlines whether they were paid or unpaid. People
who had been volunteer media activists, who were subsequently hired by
a grant, refused to stick to deadlines and furthermore, expressed resent-
ment that the person was attempting to hold them accountable to a dead-
line they had committed to. Some paid media activists refused to do the
work after receiving the funds, while others demanded more money than
their contract had stipulated. Those who did not receive funded positions
also refused to do work, because—why should they work when they wer-
en’t being paid but their comrade was? Thus, project funding in a mixed
employment/volunteer horizontal project can demobilise people who are
both paid and unpaid. The mechanism encoding a lack of accountability
in media activism, often based on resentment of inequalities, can make
its way into a paid employment research activism horizontal collective as
well. Horizontality, in other words, cannot make everyone equal, nor can
it hold activists accountable, whether paid or unpaid.
A second place in which double positionality plays out is in relation

to ethics protocols. The PI will be responsible for establishing and car-
rying out the ethics protocol by the REB, even when other research-
ers may contribute to its development and implementation. If an issue
to do with anonymity arises, the PI will be expected to deal with it,
even if it might be another researcher’s behaviour that has caused the
issue. This expectation comes from the REB within the university hier-
archy, from other collective members, and from research participants.
Interestingly, research participants who are happy to engage with the
horizontality of the collective as equals, when a complex issue arises,
prefer to go straight to the top, even though any top position was sup-
posed to have been eradicated by horizontality. However‚ the PI can-
not be considered an equal within the horizontal collective, but has
greater responsibility for ethics. This is particularly problematic when
the entire collective is meant to be engaged in ethical relationship
building, but not everyone is equally responsible for these ethical prac-
tices in the end.
This is not a problem with the activists, collective members, or
research participants, but rather a problem with everyone’s double posi-
tionality—the duplicate and contradictory structures of university
research regimes and grassroots horizontal activist collectives. There is a
lack of clarity in how to act because each person inhabits two positions
simultaneously, and never knows from which position other people are
speaking, or into which position a person will be interpellated in any
given moment. These complexities are related to collective power.
Contradictions in Collective Power

Horizontal and hierarchical structures welded together can lead to mul-
tiple, complex interrelated power dynamics that can be hard to see,
understand, unpack, disentangle, and address. Horizontal research
collectives are committed to creating flat structures through intersec-
tional practices. Sometimes what is valued, however, in lieu of collective
self-empowerment is a superficial effacement of any vestiges of power.
This contradiction risks translating a collective politics against intersec-
tional power abuse into a power abuse of intersectional collective politics.
What do I mean by this?
This last contradiction is the most complex, the hardest to recog-
nise, the trickiest to put into discourse, and the most complicated to try
42 S. JEPPESEN
to change. It is the fact that intersectional movement and media activ-

ists can sometimes use anti-oppression practices as power over others.
Intersectional discursive power can be exercised in multiple simultaneous
directions, through what Foucault (1978) calls mobile unequal relations
of discursive power, integrated into the shifting complexities of overlap-
ping structural power of multiple researcher positions defined simulta-
neously by intersectional horizontality and the hierarchical university
institution.
In horizontal collectives, conflicts can arise as people mobilise inter-
sectional identities‚ through the political and discursive power developed
from an oppressed experience and positionality‚ to assert power over
others who may also be engaged in similar repertoires of communica-
tion and experiencing similar or different intersectional oppressions. Rita
Dhamoon (2015, p. 30) calls this the intersectional matrix of domina-
tion, which reveals “multiple co-constituting horizontal struggles.” She
cautions against a trade-off model that pits these struggles against each
other, which she refers to as the “oppression Olympics” (p. 33). When
this is experienced as jockeying for the position of most oppressed in
order to gain the legitimacy to speak, it can become an act of oppression
from below, a mechanism which—and here is the contradiction—relies
on maintaining the interlocking structures of oppression it attacks. The
effect is neither that the individual will get out from under an oppres-
sion, nor that the group will become collectively empowered through
this discursive process. Rather the effect is that the interlocutor is called
out or denounced not necessarily as being oppressive, but as not being
oppressed enough. This in turn is disempowering not just for the one
denounced but potentially for the entire collective.
Within any group, there can be multiple intersecting power dynamics
at play. When they result in denunciations, it can be destructive of move-
ment groups, as the required negative affective labour can take a lot of
time and energy away from media production or movement organising,
often leading to burnout and disengagement. It can produce a morass of
publicly-vented discursive confusion and do very little to empower the
individual(s) engaged in the denunciation, in terms of their power and
capacity to produce better media or achieve improved material social con-
ditions in society. Instead what results is the cultivation of the appearance
of having the correct position and analysis, whereas those denounced are
not given space to grow and change. Movements, collectives, groups,
and individuals end up being constantly worried about everything they
say and do, because they might be next. While affect can be a positive
motivator that generates expressions of solidarity or affinity in social
movements (Clough, 2012; Collins, 2009), the mechanisms of negative
internal affective dynamics can be destructive. Certainly, people should
raise questions of power dynamics in collectives; however, it should be
done with constructive objectives for social transformation in mind.
Similar intersectional power dynamics can play out in horizontal
research, for example, in the dynamic between the researcher and the
researched. Here I return to the discussion above with respect to the
inclusion of research participants as supplements to the research team
who nonetheless remain outside the university, in an unequal power
relationship where they are presumed to have less social and economic
capital or power than the researchers. There are two kinds of power at
play here, however—institutional power and social power. The forego-
ing analysis elides the potential that a research participant may not just
be institutionally marginalized vis-a-vis the university‚ but may also be
an intersectionally marginalised media activist (social marginalisation),
or have a position within the university as a graduate student, part-time
employee, or precarious sessional instructor (institutional power), or
come from a background of social class privilege, being supported by a
family or partner with a well-paid job (social power).
Researchers may be interviewing a range of media activists with differ-
ent levels and positions of social and economic capital, a range of expe-
riences of intersectional oppression and privilege, and different levels of
social and institutional power. Participants may have greater social power
than some research team members, or they may have greater institutional
power through playing a leadership role within one or more marginalised
groups, for example, leading an anti-poverty, anti-racism, Indigenous,
or LGBTQ+ organisation. There is also a perception that having experi-
enced a greater number of multiple oppressions gives someone more of
a right to speak, so their oppression, perhaps contradictorily, grants them
power through the inverse social capital of oppression.
In another example, feminist university researchers who may be young‚
women, queer, trans, people of colour, and/or Indigenous (institutional
power, social marginalisation) may attempt to engage in a relational eth-
ics of care with non-university media activist research participants who
are older‚ heterosexual‚ white‚ and/or cis-male (institutional marginalisa-
tion, social power) and thus experience gender oppression while simultane-
ously being perceived as having greater power than the participant.
44 S. JEPPESEN
These examples call into question the oversimplified assumption

of one specific form of non-intersectional inequality between research-
ers and researched where all research participants are presumed to have
lower social, economic, and institutional power than all research team
members‚ which is typically not the case.
Fellows and Razack argue that it is important for feminists (and I
would argue all social movement activists) to understand how inter-
locking systems of oppression implicate us in the oppression of other
women and by extension, other marginalised groups. Intersectionally
speaking, we can be both oppressed and oppressor. They suggest that
the “race to innocence”—in which women may defensively attempt
to position themselves as being innocent of the oppression of others
because they are oppressed through patriarchy but neglect to con-
sider race, social class, institutional power, and more—overlooks the
functioning of interlocking oppressive structures and thus ensures all
women remain subordinated (Fellows & Razack, 1998, p. 336). When
challenged regarding inhabiting systemic positions of domination, it
may be difficult for activists to understand ways in which these systems
of oppression are mutually constitutive (p. 339). However attempting
to establish “who is most oppressed is unproductive” (p. 339). Rather,
we must understand how systems that may oppress us are connected to
and intersectional with those that grant us privilege (p. 352) and work
to dismantle them.
This argument should absolutely not be understood as an admonition
to avoid speaking out against oppressive dynamics as they arise within
social movement, media activist, or research collectives, or between any
of these groups. We must always speak out against oppression, that much
is clear. However, it is meant to show how structures of oppression and
power are not simple or linear but complexly interwoven intersectional
systems.
Recommendations and Conclusions
Recommendations
Based on the foregoing critical analysis, below I map several recommen-
dations followed by tentative conclusions.
Ethics, consent, and anonymity. An initial discussion of ethics pro-
tocols should take place in dialogue with potential research participants.
This may seem impossible, as the ethics protocol must be in place before
research with human participants is initiated. Nonetheless, informal dia-
logues about anonymity with potential participants before engaging in
the formal research process are advised.
Consent forms should present various options from full attribution
to full anonymity. Full attribution would mean attributing the individu-
al’s name, project, words, and images (video, photos). Some participants
may want contributions included in aggregate form with no specific
words attributed to them even with a pseudonym; they may prefer to be
able to approve every excerpt that is going to be used in a publication
where they are named; they may prefer to name their project or their
location but be referenced by a pseudonym; and so on.
While researchers and the REB can approach the process extremely
ethically, they cannot always know in advance what will be preferred by
any specific group of research participants. An ethics protocol should be
treated as a living document responsive to participants’ concerns.
Intersectionality and affect. Affect looms large within intersectional
discourses, as people are speaking about personal and structural experi-
ences of oppression. Any research project studying intersectional media
activism should be attentive to affective effects and not decorate itself
with intersectional tropes (Bilge, 2016). Research design, collective com-
position, theoretical frameworks, and ethical commitments should be
grounded in intersectional practices, processes, discourses, and affect.
There is not just peril in this kind of research: transgressive relation-
ships and intersectional affective intimacies may be positive outcomes
of ethical media activist research. Intersectional research across many
intersectional oppressions that integrates a range of concerns, as well as
individuals with lived experience and expertise on these concerns, can be
extremely fulfilling. In building collectives and partnerships, new rela-
tionships can grow and develop, and a deeper understanding of people’s
various social locations and experiences can bring people closer and cre-
ate life-long relationships. Friendships and intimacies may develop and
grow in unexpected directions. These can emerge despite conflicts or
even because of them. If space is given and respect is cultivated, inter-
sectional affective projects can produce not just research but also positive
political and personal outcomes.
Collective budgeting. Part of the collective self-management of
funded horizontal research includes financial responsibilities. This means
budgets. Budgets and financial responsibilities should be discussed
46 S. JEPPESEN
openly. Funded anti-authoritarian research, to accomplish its objectives,

will need to be accountable to the authoritarian structures of funders, or
risk having funds revoked. Collective members need to commit to this
responsibility.
If there is flexibility in expenditure decisions, criteria for these deci-
sions should be collectively developed early on. Budgetary decisions
should not be revisited weekly or monthly, as new opportunities may
arise, as this can lead to not just budgets but also people’s capacities
being over-extended. Instead, create and approve an annual transparent
budget, and assign a person to track expenditures through collaborative
software, providing regular financial reports to the collective. This task
can be rotated on an annual basis, if there is interest. However, often
activists are not interested in budgets, so if there is one person who is
interested and capable, the collective may decide to have them do it
throughout the project, providing continuity and stability. If this person
is to be the PI, because they have signing authority, they might consider
pairing with another collective member in this task to share the power
attached to working on budgets and provide checks and balances with
respect to horizontality. Spending decisions, however, are still left to the
collective budgeting process.
Horizontality and double positionality. Clarity regarding taking
on specific tasks is paramount. For a research collective to negotiate the
double positionality of the university institution and the activist col-
lective, it is necessary not to assume that everyone within the research
collective is operating under the same conditions of everyday life and
labour. Instead, the collective might openly acknowledge the differ-
ent spaces each person inhabits, not just in terms of identities, but also
with respect to experiences, capacities, financial need, research inter-
ests, workflow, and more. If these can be discussed openly in the pro-
cess of allocating work, visioning, research planning, implementation,
and building research relationships, this transparency has the potential to
create a more honest, equitable, and fair horizontality, both within the
collective and in the collective’s relationships with research participants
and communities.
A mistake is to assume horizontality requires all participants to erase
differences that might be perceived as setting them above or below oth-
ers. These differences derive precisely from the intersectionality being
studied and undergird the foundations of the collective’s power to do
exceptional work. If each person is hiding the strongest elements of their
capacities and achievements in order to create a flat structure by having

everyone appear to be at the median of the group—for example in terms
of their experiences in media activism, ability to express complex theoret-
ical concepts, knowledge and experience with anti-oppression processes,
or even budgeting—then the collective risks invisibilising and losing out
on those very strengths. Moreover, rather than empowering everyone to
speak up, to take on responsibilities, and to develop their strengths and
capacities, it penalises people for doing so, whereby the primary objective
of horizontality—collective self-empowerment—risks being lost. The fine
balance of horizontality is the recognition that an empowered autono-
mous collective facilitates empowered autonomous individuals and vice
versa. Horizontality thus should not flatten out people’s differences in
terms of their specific capacities to achieve excellence. Rather, it is a set
of processes and practices that elevate these contributions, valuing all of
them equally.
Ending the oppression Olympics. Rethinking horizontality in
terms of facilitating people’s capacities for achievement clearly provides
a way to rethink the oppression Olympics and the race to innocence,
to develop processes by which we can accomplish ethical media activist
research practices rooted in mechanisms of affinity and trust (Clough,
2012), and also challenge unequal power dynamics without oppressing
others in the process.
First, in the context of media activist research, everyone must feel
empowered to speak about experiences of oppression and be respected
for doing so. Ideally, this should be done using a relational ethics of
care and a process of “calling in” rather than denouncing, calling out,
or “cancel culture.” The objective is to shift behaviours and develop a
shared understanding of interlocking systems of oppression through
methods of discourse that create and nurture positive relationships based
on mutual respect and understanding.
Second, we must find mechanisms for holding each other accounta-
ble for oppressive behaviour, mechanisms through which we are provid-
ing opportunities for educating ourselves on interlocking structures of
oppression and privilege in which we are all implicated. We must do so
without shaming people for their inherent identities. Denouncing some-
one because they are white, male, cis-gender, or heterosexual—identities
they cannot change—is not a movement building strategy. Instead, the
focus must be on building consciousness and nurturing behaviours that
48 S. JEPPESEN
create change through inviting people to consider what it might mean to

take on the role of anti-racist, feminist, queer, and/or trans accomplice.
Third and finally, it is crucial that we do not use political commit-
ments, identities, and discourses of anti-oppression to oppress others
with whom we are engaged in liberating processes of social movement
organising, media activism, and collective research. Instead, the focus on
liberating processes must be maintained as conversations about intersec-
tional power and oppression evolve, where we keep in mind that it is the
structures of oppression themselves that remain the focus of our attacks.
Nobody wins the oppression Olympics or the race to innocence. For
Fellows and Razack (1998, p. 352), “our task as scholars and activists
is to trace all the hierarchical connections for the purpose of developing
strategies for change.” Dhamoon (2015, p. 4) similarly suggests that we
must consciously and carefully question “the presumed ontologies and
epistemologies that frame practices of liberation” if we are to challenge
intersectional power structures in the matrix of domination.
Conclusions as Departure Points

These reflections have revealed a myriad of contradictions within hori-
zontal collective social movement research within the neoliberal uni-
versity, proposing some potential strategies for change. My objective
has been to initiate a complex dialogue that I hope may be generative
for those engaging in similar projects. New research activism practices
may produce unintended consequences, which then must be further
addressed in an ongoing dialectical process. Although these preliminary
thoughts may provide departure points for developing innovative every-
day research practices, those practices may produce unintended conse-
quences or contradictions in turn, which may call for further innovations
and dialogue.
I argue that research activists can engage within the university to
struggle against the impacts of an intensifying intersectional capitalist
neoliberalism (Jeppesen & Nazar, 2018). On one hand, if power dif-
ferences in research practices are to be adequately addressed, university
research and funding practices and structures need to change. On the
other hand, social movement reflections on negative affective mecha-
nisms, such as call-out culture, cancel culture, the oppression Olympics,
and the race to innocence, would be beneficial in generating processes
of consciousness raising and political analysis both grounded in healing
and constructively oriented towards intersectional meta-issue movement

building.
Whereas I understand that one small research collective in Canada
cannot hope to have massive impacts, it is my hope that these reflections
shine a light on some of the material, immaterial, and affective articu-
lations and contradictions among power structures, activist practices,
and ethical research frameworks, revealing the necessity of collective
self-reflection among research activists on potential directions for struc-
tural and practice-based change.
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CHAPTER 3
Dealing with Ethical Dilemmas in Activist

Research on Social Movement Media
Paola Sartoretto and Leonardo Custódio
In this chapter, we reflect on challenges we have faced during our

ethnographic research processes studying social movement media
(Downing, 2011) among rural and urban low-income populations in
Brazil. Our reflections are based on fieldwork that we each carried out
independently for our doctoral dissertations, in which we explored the
intersections between media use and political mobilization among subal-
ternized groups in Brazil. This discussion focuses on research on activism
and social mobilization in which we constantly depend upon the collab-
oration of people who are engaged in activist or militant roles. We con-
sider this kind of research and subject-group relevant due to the ongoing
attention that activism and media activism have received within media and
communication studies in recent years (e.g. Meikle, 2002; Milan, 2013;
Shukaitis & Graeber, 2007; Tufte, 2017). The groups with which we
P. Sartoretto (*)
e-mail: paola.sartoretto@ju.se
L. Custódio
Åbo Akademi University, Turku, Finland
e-mail: leonardo.custodio@abo.fi

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4_3
52 P. SARTORETTO AND L. CUSTÓDIO
researched in our projects—the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement

(Sartoretto, 2015) and low-income favela-resident youth (Custódio,
2017)—are in resource-poor and particularly vulnerable sociopolitical
situations in comparison with the researching scholars. We believe that a
discussion about how our research may affect media and movement activ-
ist practices, as well as how we as scholars can contribute to social move-
ments and activism through the research we do, is urgently needed.
Our main objective is to contribute empirically to interdisciplinary
debates about the challenges to scientific rigour in activist research,
engaging with critique targeted towards the alleged political bias of activ-
ist research (e.g. Becker, 1967; Hale, 2008; Hunter, Emerald, & Martin,
2013; Milan, 2014). To this end, we describe and analyse some of the
dilemmas we faced during the process of producing our doctoral disser-
tations and suggest ways to overcome such dilemmas and tensions. This
discussion resonates with the work of other scholars who have dealt with
and reflected upon issues of reflexivity and positionality in fieldwork ded-
icated to investigating actions of subalternized and marginalized social
groups (e.g. Nagar, 2003; Savin-Baden & Major, 2010; Sultana, 2007).
We hope to contribute to ongoing efforts to develop a collective con-
sciousness among scholars about how we position ourselves as socially
engaged researchers and activists and about the kinds of relationships
we build with those who participate in our research projects, whether as
informants, subjects, or co-researchers. Furthermore, we aim to encour-
age self-reflection, exchange, and debate among scholars in media and
communication studies and cognate disciplines. This discussion is espe-
cially relevant to the field of communication for development and social
change, which has faced epistemological and methodological challenges
(Rodriguez, Ferron, & Shamas, 2014; Thomas, 2015; Tufte, 2013) fol-
lowing the widespread uses of digital media for political demonstrations
and mass protests around the world (Castells, 2015).
This co-written text results from our own reflexive processes as
researchers committed not only to scientific rigour, but also to contrib-
uting to the very social change we investigate (cf. Becker, 1967). In our
research practices, we subscribe to what Boltanski (2011, p. 4) describes
as critical social sciences in the sense that we aim to change social reality
“in the direction of emancipation”.
Sartoretto (2015) has explored communicative processes and media
practices among militants in the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in
Brazil, critically analysing how these processes and practices contribute to
3 DEALING WITH ETHICAL DILEMMAS IN ACTIVIST RESEARCH … 53
the movement’s internal cohesion, the formation of a c ounter-hegemonic

media alternative, and the generation of dialogue with the broader soci-
ety. The study reveals that among movement militants there is a high level
of reflexivity regarding the relation between media technologies and the
processes of communication both within the movement itself and out-
ward to the wider society. This results in ambivalence towards using social
network platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Instead, during its three
decades of activity, the movement has directed efforts towards construct-
ing communication networks within the organization.
Custódio’s research (2017) describes and analyses characteristics and
trajectories in media activism among low-income young residents of
underprivileged and violence-ridden favelas in Rio de Janeiro. For seven
years (2009–2016), Custódio conducted ethnographic research about
how favela residents engaged in online and offline media processes for
their own struggles for human rights, social justice, and respect. The
research identifies cases of newspapers, radio stations, websites, and social
media pages which favela residents used to denounce police violence,
to produce and circulate positive representations of their often discrim-
inated against selves, to build collective senses of identity, to remem-
ber and celebrate local histories, and to create channels of conversation
and mutual support within the favelas. In addition to in-depth analysis
of the sociopolitical relevance of these cases, Custódio also analysed the
nuanced processes of engagement of favela residents in media activism
and how citizenship enactment may happen in contexts of everyday life
shortcomings and threats.
In both programs of research, we experienced different forms of
interactions, dialogues, and activities with the people in whose actions
we were interested, in all phases of our research process from the stages
of planning, through empirical fieldwork, to writing up findings (see
Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). Based on these experiences, we will
address different ethical dilemmas that researchers tend to face in their
efforts to build relationships with people from the researched social
groups who collaborate and participate in our research. In our discus-
sion, we will focus on four different areas: (a) overcoming suspicion and
resistance to researchers among activists; (b) justifying research to activ-
ists; (c) balancing between social science and advocacy; and (d) build-
ing cooperation and dialogue. We reflect on these themes from a general
sociological perspective, but also considering the specificity of media and
communications research.
Overcoming Suspicion and Resistance in the Field

Some of the first challenges to arise during our research processes were
the elements of suspicion and resistance to researchers among the people
in whose actions we were interested. Suspicion can arise from the fact
that activists have little control over how and where what they share with
researchers will be used. Resistance, in turn, comes from not seeing any
benefit (personal or collective) in collaborating with researchers. A com-
mon feature of the organizations researched is the scarcity of time and
resources; many times the time spent with a researcher could be used for
directly beneficial and instrumental tasks.
With the MST, Sartoretto found it was noticeable that many militants
in the movement were used to having researchers approaching the move-
ment and people outside the movement coming to observe in different
settings (see Lima and Engelmann’s chapter in this book). The fact that
many of those working with communication within MST held degrees
in media and communication or were studying for a degree was in some
ways a facilitator in the relationship as there was a somewhat common
understanding and framework of reference of what research in commu-
nication entails. Within the movement, education—including formal
post-secondary education—has always been valued and MST has devel-
oped cooperation with a number of state universities in Brazil. However,
the contact with researchers seemed to be institutionalized into the
organization’s routines and it became a challenge to engage in activities
outside what was already prepared, predetermined, and systematized. In
this kind of ethnography-informed organizational research, it is impor-
tant not only to gain access to key people, settings, and documents, but
also to establish a rapport and cooperation between the researcher and
research participants. This proved to be a challenge with MST when the
researcher was considered just one more among many who approach
the movement. With the increasing attention that media scholars are
paying to MST members in general and media activists in particular,
there is a risk that activists will develop a “researcher-trained” attitude
that includes institutionalization of interactions. Instead of creating the
conditions for the development of emancipatory knowledge, the risk is
that this systematization produces a kind of descriptive research with low
validity. However, militants and activists in social movements cannot be
blamed for their efforts to optimize their scarce resources.
In the favelas, Custódio noticed the potential problems of suspicion

and resistance as he mapped cases of favela-based media activism in social
media platforms (mainly Facebook). In open discussions online, favela
residents who were engaged in activism expressed that they were tired
of and to some extent angry towards researchers. To them, researchers
represented individuals who exploited the life histories and experiences
of those in the favelas for their own career benefits, benefits that would
not be returned to the favela residents (see Martins and Rosa chapter
in this book). Studies conducted in the favelas have rarely been made
available, readable, or accessible to residents who contributed to them.
Instead, researchers would disappear, or on the rare occasion that they
would provide research findings, the language of the text was so charged
in academic jargon that it would be virtually impossible for favela resi-
dents without university experience to read and evaluate.
Custódio experienced this critical stance (which fed the suspicion and
resistance among favela residents throughout the research process) in a
debate (May 2013) organized by local activists and residents in a favela
in Rio de Janeiro during his first fieldwork trip. Sitting in the audience
along with other non-favela researchers, Custódio listened to the conten-
tious statement of André Constantine, an activist and community organ-
izer of the collective Favela Não se Cala [The Favela Doesn’t Remain
Silent]. Constantine spoke about the necessary changes in the relation-
ship between favelas and researchers. He said,
the structure of the university is bourgeois. Moreover, the academics

have a problem: they are like semi-gods. The science of the academics is
the only one that suits. The knowledge of the academics is the only one
that suits. Therefore, I make a proposal for you who live in a favela: let
us start questioning researchers who enter the favelas to do their research.
Sometimes I feel like I am a rat in a lab where they research and study me.
They conclude their theses, their studies and don’t even leave us the mate-
rial that they produced. This is a shame.1
This account and others like it indicate another issue that seems to
influence the suspicions and resistance of organized rural workers and
1 André Constantine, May 2013. The speech, in Portuguese, is accessible here: https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8UnW9Ws07A (last accessed in January 17, 2020).

favela residents against researchers: the fact that researchers often belong
to urban, middle, and upper classes in a highly class-stratified Brazil.
Our position as Brazilian researchers gives the advantage—compared
to foreign researchers—of sharing a language and to a certain extent a
cultural framework with our activist interlocutors. However, within the
Brazilian social context, we both are in some respects privileged in rela-
tion to our activist interlocutors, which puts us sometimes in the same
position as other researchers considered outsiders by the groups partici-
pating in our projects. During the research process, we became increas-
ingly aware of the intersectional character of our identities. We shared
nationality and culture with those we were researching but came from
urban middle-class backgrounds.
With that in mind, we both created strategies in our fieldwork pro-
cesses to deal with participants’ suspicions and resistance. Sartoretto
created a document in language that would speak to movement com-
municators, explaining very openly her research aims and intended out-
comes. She also tried to negotiate ways to collect interviews and be part
of activities that would not require focused time away from necessary
activities by those collaborating with the research project. Attempts were
also made to follow the schedules of some key people in order to maxi-
mize opportunities to speak to them informally in addition to the sched-
uled interviews.
In Custódio’s case, one issue that helped him overcome the barriers
of suspicion and resistance was the fact that he is Black and comes from
a peripheral region in Rio de Janeiro. In one case, for example, while
introducing Custódio to a favela resident reluctant to be interviewed,
one activist referred to him as “different from the typical researcher” and
“one of us” for being Black from Baixada (a predominantly low-income
working-class region in the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro). In rec-
iprocity, Custódio made himself available to support activists in tasks
where they felt his assistance would be helpful. These included participat-
ing in radio shows, workshops and demonstrations, proofreading news-
paper articles, and counselling activists about their university applications
and assignments. These actions were fundamental to building a rapport
and a sense of mutual support between researcher and researched. Like
Sartoretto, Custódio prepared two easy-to-read documents (an out-
line of the contents of the dissertation and an extended abstract) for
the interviewees to evaluate prior to the writing and publishing of the
manuscript. Even though few actually commented on or evaluated the
documents, they all expressed how respected they felt for the possibility
of reviewing the work before publication.
The tactics described were heuristic ways we had to devise in order
to close the gap that is structurally created between the knowledge pro-
duced by academic institutions and the intended subject of this knowl-
edge—in our case social movement militants and activists. To those who
participated in our projects, at first sight we represented these institu-
tions that instrumentalize their life experiences and to which they rarely
have direct access themselves. We needed to present ourselves as indi-
vidual researchers with our own personal biographies and identities, and
engage our interlocutors in personalized communicative processes—as
opposed to sending out communiqués (Freire, 2018/1967, Chapter 4).
Justifying the Research to Activists

While gaining access to the field is a necessary condition for the exist-
ence of any empirical research project, making the research meaningful
to social actors is crucial for research committed to social emancipation.
The knowledge we produce and the social commentary in which we
engage must not only contribute to disciplinary development but also be
relevant for the actors with whom we are researching. We must there-
fore convince activists of the relevance and significance of this kind of
research. This challenge is due to the gap between an abstract rationality
presumed to ground media and communications research and the con-
crete, empirical, and ad hoc character of media activism. Boltanski (2011,
p. 9) argues that the relationship between different forms of knowledge,
between the knowledge of “ordinary actors reflexively engaged in prac-
tice and the knowledge of social reality conceived from a reflexivity reli-
ant on forms and instruments of totalization”, is the conflict from which
social science is created.
In order to justify to activists the relevance of our research and the
knowledge we produce, we need to be aware of the differences in our
epistemological standpoints and be prepared to deconstruct such differ-
ences. There is a common assumption among both researchers/schol-
ars and activists that the former build and know about theory while the
latter are focused on action and practice. However, the idea of praxis
(cf. Freire, 2018/1967) defines a combination between critical thinking
and action. In this sense, researchers/scholars may engage in social action
while researching, in the same way that activists many times critically
assess the realities in which they live in order to devise forms of action.
From this perspective, we can engage in a dialogue with activists about
the significance of our research to their practice. There are at least two
ways in which scholarly enquiry in media and communication can inform
the practice of media activists or those activists performing m edia-related
activities. The first way is learning from the critical reflexivity that guides
scholarly enquiry. New media technologies impose their immediacy
upon users which, coupled with neoliberalism’s communicative logic,
puts pressures on activism and social movement mobilization. Many par-
ticipants in our projects expressed concerns about the omnipresence of
media and the possible consequences of the continuous pressure to com-
municate. The kind of reflexivity that characterizes scholarly enquiry can
help activists think about their media practices with a critical outlook.
The second way research can be relevant and useful for activists
is to use findings and results to evaluate and inform their activities.
Organizations and groups like those we investigated in our projects
many times use research results within their field of action to inform dif-
ferent activities. Within the MST, militants seemed to be knowledgea-
ble about research in agricultural sciences. Likewise, favela activists
(with and without a history within the university system) have engaged
in producing favela-based knowledge concerning, for example, urban
planning, sustainable development, security, and welfare development.
Interestingly, however, it is less common that these groups relate to and
discuss research undertaken about them, a fact that seems to validate
the claims of activists when they argue that researchers rarely return the
results of their findings and studies, as described previously.
We have learnt from our research projects that in order for the groups
of activists with whom we worked to apprehend meaning in our research
we cannot use the same methods we use to justify our research among
academic peers. It is also a learning process for researchers in the sense
that we have to re-learn how to communicate and present ourselves and
our work. Custódio’s solution to communicate the research to research
subjects illustrates one such situation. Once the dissertation had been
submitted for evaluation, Custódio proposed to write a shorter version
for the activists. The original idea was to reflect on the research process
and present the results to the people who had informed the research.
Later, Custódio also persuaded activists from favelas to reflect on their
own activism. These reflections were included in the text. The univer-
sity unity in which Custódio was based at Tampere University, Finland,
supported the idea by printing 500 copies of the book and making an
electronic version of it available online. After his dissertation defence
(June 2016), Custódio spent six months in Brazil delivering copies of the
book and participating in seminars, public discussions, and workshops
not only to return the research knowledge to those who had produced
it, but also to collaborate with activists from different favelas in Rio de
Janeiro.
Balancing Science and Advocacy

Inasmuch as scholarly social critique endeavours to contribute to eman-
cipation and social transformation, our contribution is more the social
critique that we articulate than advocating solutions for the problems
we take up. As media and communication scholars working with media
and movement activists, however, it is difficult not to become involved
with the causes of the groups with whom we research. We also must
add an affective factor to the equation because our position as Brazilian
researchers based abroad meant that it was difficult to distance our-
selves from many of the problems we were investigating. Inequality,
unjust treatment of people in vulnerable conditions, corruption, clien-
telism, etc., are problems with which we grew up and that affect peo-
ple in our affect networks. Even though we both have lived abroad for
a long period, we feel strongly connected to our social circles in Brazil
and share a social and cultural framework with people who participate
in our projects. It was therefore important to remember throughout the
research process how scientific rigour was crucial to balance the rather
natural tendency we have to pick sides when conducting research in the
social sciences (Becker, 1967).
With this commitment to scientific rigour in mind, we took some
measures not to jeopardize the validity of our research while also con-
tributing to the activism of the people in whose actions we were inter-
ested. In her case, Sartoretto created a fieldwork plan which was
discussed with peers and senior colleagues in order to ensure that the
study would make a valid and relevant contribution to the field of
media and communication. MST had been the object of many studies
within media and communication in Brazil and abroad. Many of these
studies focused on content analysis of journalistic coverage of MST and
concluded that Brazilian media is mostly hostile to the movement (with
a few exceptions). This is also something that is widely known by MST
militants already. Sartoretto chose instead to focus on the communica-

tive processes and media practices within the movement and was able to
offer a critical look by identifying the ambivalences and anxieties related
to media practices and communicative processes (see Sartoretto, 2016).
In his case, Custódio developed his research plan in such a way as
to avoid producing biased results while at the same time being able to
contribute critically to media activist initiatives in the favelas. For exam-
ple, had Custódio chosen to compare the favela media activist narratives
and practices to those of the mainstream media, the research would have
likely demonstrated ways in which the material favela residents produce
as discourse is more sociopolitically relevant than what the mainstream
media publishes about them. Similar to Sartoretto, he observed that this
would already be known by the favela residents. Instead, Custódio chose
to investigate the nuances of engagement and practice in favela media
activism. By doing so and openly positioning himself as someone on the
activists’ side, it was possible to scrutinize the social phenomenon under
study without advertently or inadvertently manipulating the data to con-
firm his or the activists’ own beliefs and political views. Thus, instead of
supporting the cause by repeating with academic legitimacy what activists
already know and say, Custódio focused on using a scientific approach
to identify and analyse aspects of media activist practice which activists
themselves may not have noticed. The researcher can be, to some extent,
an annoying but nonetheless helpful and supportive external and critical
eye, able to provide activists with materials which may contribute to the
development of their own activism if they accept and decide to imple-
ment the criticism.
Many times, in the role of researchers who communicate among other
researchers, we tend to—usually not deliberately—speak about activists.
When dialoguing with media and other sectors of society, we many times
assume a position in which we speak for activists, sometimes taking up
the role of activists. Reflecting on our practice in retrospect, we conclude
that we have attempted to conduct our research in a way that allowed
us to speak with activists in a sense not to treat them as “objects” or
“underprivileged people in need of help”, but as citizens whose knowl-
edge and experiences are valuable for the construction of a more plural
and egalitarian society. Our goal for future projects is to become more
conscious of these three modes of communicating our research and learn
ways in which we can use the knowledge that we produce to engage
in conversations with activists and social movements. These modes of
communicating research are deeply connected to how we understand

and perform our relations with our research interlocutors; when we
speak about or for activists we are still viewing actors who are studied but
are not subjects in the process of knowledge production. When we speak
for and about activists, we the researchers are the knowledge-producing
actors, analysing activists practices. When we interact with activists in
their role as knowledge-producing subjects, making this knowledge vis-
ible without appropriating it, we are speaking with activists. Of course
this is not a straightforward process and nor is it dependent only on the
researchers’ will to dialogue (see, for instance, Velkova’s and Kalinina’s
chapters in this book). At the same time, these positions need to be dis-
tinguished during the research process.
Paths for Researcher-Activist Dialogue

and Collaboration
In different ways, what we have reflected upon in this chapter so far

can be summarized in one word: respect. Our starting point was iden-
tifying situations of suspicion and resistance among research subjects
towards researchers due to a long history of scholarly disrespect. Thus,
by describing our concern with the language we used to communicate
and making efforts to enable the “researched” to read, comment on, and
evaluate our research throughout our research processes, we aimed at
systematizing methods to conduct research with respect. The same pur-
pose applied to efforts to make the research results available in accessible
ways to the participants. In addition, we believe that developing critical
awareness about the boundaries between science and advocacy represents
an act of respect. While echoing and voicing support for the activists’
claims and demands is a valid and important method to join them as they
struggle for their causes, we believe it is not enough. As social scientists,
we must also engage our theoretical and methodological knowledge to
conduct in-depth analyses of media activist and social movement pro-
cesses. By doing so, we are able to use our position as social scientists
and outsiders to unveil nuances, to identify patterns, and to develop
mechanisms that may be helpful for activists to improve and develop
their own actions if they so choose.
Once social researchers build and act upon a respectful mind-
set towards those people in whose lives and actions we are interested,
dialogue and collaboration are subsequent steps to follow. In this

final section, we reflect on different ways in which the relationship
between “researcher” and “researched” can lead to dialogue-based
researcher-activist partnerships. Based on our experiences and insights
during our fieldwork processes, we identified four actions in which
researchers can engage to promote dialogue and collaboration with activ-
ists: (a) social media as platforms for interpersonal and collective connec-
tivity; (b) accessible publications; (c) promotion of activist access to the
university; and (d) academic internationalization and mobility to facili-
tate social movement exchange.
In different ways, social media (e.g. Facebook) and messaging appli-
cations (e.g. WhatsApp, Telegram) are important platforms and tools
to bring researchers and research participants closer. In methodolog-
ical terms, social media and messaging apps are key to expand what
“the field” means in ethnographic terms (Custódio, 2017, pp. 23–24;
Sartoretto, 2015, pp. 128–129). As Brazilian researchers studying
Brazil from abroad, social media were fundamental in approaching
activists, communicating with them while we were back in our offices,
and observing the online dimension of their activism. More impor-
tantly, in terms of reciprocity and dialogue, social media also enabled
activists to observe and evaluate us, the researchers. By being con-
nected online, activists are able to analyse our posting, commenting,
and interacting behaviour online. In this sense, researchers are also
observed and our actions are also evaluated. This evaluation happens
not necessarily for the purpose of collection of empirical materials, but
as a means that activists have to decide whether to contribute to our
research or not. In this sense, social networking sites and apps can offer
a door to a dialogue in a way that is accessible for both parts, provided
that the activists with whom we are collaborating are comfortable with
these platforms and that all parts are aware of safety concerns associated
with this kind of communication.
Thus, interactions on social media between researchers and activists
can be useful to reduce suspicion and resistance throughout the field-
work. In other words, social media and messaging apps are platforms
and tools for activists and researchers to know more about each other, to
build trust, and to cooperate. For example, when Custódio published his
book in Portuguese, interviewed activists received free copies which they
could sell to support their income. Social media were, in that case, an
important tool for Custódio and the activists to advertise the book and
to announce events in which copies could be bought.
In terms of accessible publications, we believe that open-access
journals are very important, but also a mere first step towards making
research available for activists. First of all, it is necessary to clarify what
publications mean especially for early-career scholars. Today, the neo-
liberal ethos has become extremely pervasive in academia. In these cir-
cumstances, doing social research and making efforts to build dialogue
and collaboration with activists can sometimes lead in the opposite direc-
tion of career-building efforts. Choosing alternative venues to publish
research that is more accessible to those with whom we collaborate in
our research projects instead of publishing in established peer-reviewed
journals can lead to career setbacks regarding academic prestige and
reputation (e.g. for jobs, scholarships, and funding applications). In addi-
tion, in our case, making our research available in Portuguese required
extra resources. Thus, university institutions must also commit to sup-
porting efforts to build dialogue and cooperation with activists and
other marginalized research participants. In Custódio’s case, for exam-
ple, his department covered the printing and mailing costs of the books
in Portuguese. Sartoretto has so far been able to publish two articles
in Portuguese in open-access journals, which were also made available
through MST’s website.
Another important step towards more dialogue and cooperation
between activists and researchers is to include activists in research pro-
cesses. Some researchers have already developed successful practices and
methodologies to reach out to the streets and contribute to different
sociopolitical struggles while conducting research (Jeppesen, Kruzynski,
Lakoff, & Sarrasin, 2014; Reguillo, 2017). Nevertheless, the empirical
knowledge and voice of activists are not often directly present in aca-
demia. While researchers have occupied activist spaces, there is still space
in academia (especially in the Global North) to be filled by activists as
protagonists in producing knowledge, i.e. as researchers and educators.
As socially engaged researchers, we understand that it is our role to facil-
itate this occupation. By creating spaces for activists not only to speak,
but also to publish and participate in academic debates, researchers end
up sharing the legitimating power of academia with people outside of
it. One way to do so is to invite activists to scholarly gatherings such
as workshops, seminars, and conferences. By inviting, we do not mean
merely as attendees, but actually as speakers whose knowledge and expe-

rience are relevant to academic and societal debates. The Ørecomm
Festival2—a conference on communication for development and social
change organized between 2011 and 2014 in Denmark and Sweden—is
a successful example of an academic-activist event. In addition, activists
can also be co-authors of academic publications. For instance, instead of
a researcher describing case studies, an article could consist of a dialogue
between an activist and a researcher, each contributing to the discussion
from their epistemological standpoints but without hierarchization of
these different forms of knowledge.
Finally, we believe that the internationalization of academic practice
as well as increased scholar mobility brings a potential for interchange
among social movements. We can use conferences, symposiums, and
other international scholarly spaces to promote this exchange by facili-
tating the participation of social movements and activists, inviting local
organizations, and making remote participation possible. Transnational
comparative projects where researchers from different countries col-
laborate also offer an opportunity for dialogue with and among social
movements if activists are invited to participate in research and academic
activities.
Within neoliberal academia, we must do research against the grain if
we want to do research in collaboration with certain social actors, with-
out treating them as research objects.
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CHAPTER 4
Challenges for Social Movement Research

in Contexts of Inequality:
The MST in Brazil
Mayrá S. Lima and Solange I. Engelmann
The Landless Workers Movement (MST hereafter) was officially c reated

in 1984,1 in the state of Paraná, Brazil (Morissawa, 2001). During
the military dictatorship in Brazil, between 1964 and 1985, landless
workers, groups brought the occupation of land and public spaces to
visibility, with their recognisable black-tent camps. The occupation of
land has become one of the main instruments for struggle and social
pressure on governments.
1 Landless workers groups, organised in associations or unions, were active in Brazil since
the 1960s, often working in clandestinity during the military dictatorship. With the end of
the dictatorship, many such groups formed a nationwide organisation to demand agrar-
ian reform, named Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra, Landless Rural Workers
Movement, commonly called by the acronym MST.
M. S. Lima (*)
Department of Political Science, Brasília University, Brasília, Brazil
S. I. Engelmann
IELUSC College, Joinville, Brazil

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4_4
68 M. S. LIMA AND S. I. ENGELMANN
The emergence of MST represents a collateral effect of the moderni-

sation of agriculture in Brazil that brought with it the mechanisation of
many agricultural activities and resulted in a rural exodus beginning in
the 1970s, when many rural workers were forced to migrate to urban
centres. This is one of the central contradictions that generated a critical
mass of farmers and rural workers who became landless and started to
wander around the countryside seeking land and ways to resist in order
to remain in the countryside, supporting themselves through farming.
In this context, the MST organised historically as a political syndicated
social movement of the marginalised rural masses, demanding the access
of rural workers to land through redistribution of land by implement-
ing a countrywide agrarian reform in Brazil. In this chapter, we focus
on the case of MST, a social movement in which the authors participate.
However, we are not providing a personal account of our experience in
combining research and militancy, but identifying several important chal-
lenges in the debate about the function of research within social move-
ments (Flacks, 2005), or what some authors call ‘militant research’
(Bringel, Bravo, & Scott Varella, 2016). This study is situated in the field
of communication, focusing on the relation between researchers, educa-
tional institutions, and social movements.
Our objective in this chapter is to better understand how research
conducted about and with the MST contributes to making social move-
ment demands visible in the public sphere in contexts of inequality and
criminalisation, which is the case in Brazil. The country ranks 79th of
130 nations in the United Nations Human Development Ranking 2019
(UN, 2019). Furthermore, repressive violence against activists and social
movements has regularly been deployed by both the state and paramil-
itary actors. We have applied qualitative and quantitative approaches,
using content analysis techniques (Bardin, 2009) to analyse data—a sam-
ple from masters theses and doctoral dissertations completed in 2017—
collected from the database of the Brazilian Coordination for Training of
Higher Education Personnel (CAPES).
Relevance of Research with Social Movements

and Militant Research
Social movements, in their capacity as sociopolitical organisations com-

posed by people moved by needs or interests, have been studied since
the first half of the nineteenth century, after the Industrial Revolution
4 CHALLENGES FOR SOCIAL MOVEMENT RESEARCH … 69
and the scenario of separation between workers and owners of the

means of production. Since then, theories of collective and social move-
ment action have emerged in different versions including interactionist,
psychological and behavioural approaches encapsulated in the resource
mobilisation paradigm, developed in the United States; the European
paradigm of New Social Movements (NSM); and approaches based on
Latin American realities (Gohn, 2009; Souza, 2008). The New Social
Movements theory highlights cultural and identity aspects underpinning
mobilisation. Scherer-Warren points out that NSM studies indicate that
certain movements share an anti-authoritarian ideology and are charac-
terised by decentralisation of power, both in their organisation and in
their relationship with the state (Scherer-Warren, 1996, p. 51).
It is necessary here to acknowledge the work of Charles Tilly, Doug
McAdam and Sidney Tarrow from which a conceptual framework
emerged that was influential on social movement research focused on
what they call contentious politics. Analysing the work of these authors,
Flacks (2005, p. 48) presents a definition considered consensus in the
field: social movements are collective efforts that last for a period with
a certain degree of organisation that utilise non-institutionalised meth-
ods to achieve social change. In this conceptualisation, the objectives of
social movements focus on social change, but implicate the state in the
process from a political perspective.
The debate in this field of study in the Brazilian context is dominated
by the framework of contentious politics proposed by McAdam, Tarrow
and Tilly (2001). If on the one hand scholarly production has gained a
theoretical framework capable of guiding research in the field of social
movements, on the other hand it is necessary to question whether such
knowledge and research developments become in any way useful to those
who seek social transformation (Flacks, 2005, p. 52). We enter a debate
that, although considering the relevance of theory, epistemology and sci-
entific method, highlights the importance that knowledge produced by
research is also socially relevant (Trindade & Viana, 2017, p. 5).
The relation between researchers and activists can be considered
from the perspective that these interactions may improve the relevance of
research for social movements. For Flacks (2005, p. 53), the schematisa-
tion proposed by McAdam et al. (2001) provides the conceptual means to
explain the emergence of various movements, to compare their dynamics
and to identify aspects on which to focus when studying a social move-
ment. The model’s proposition concerns political opportunity to the
extent that social movements emerge when those who are in a situation
of authority are not able to repress their actions. In other words, it
refers to mobilisation opportunities afforded by the political environ-
ment. According to Flacks (2005, p. 53), this idea is useful to explain
the emergence of social movements, leading analysts to look not only at
participants’ behaviours and beliefs, or the origins of dissatisfaction, but
also at the situation within the established elites and political structures.
Nevertheless, this same idea can distance academic research from the
knowledge produced through activism motivated by the movement’s con-
crete needs.
In this sense, it is necessary to highlight the work carried out in Brazil
that, inspired by the legacy of Latin American critical thought since the
1960s, introduced the concept of militant research (pesquisa militante)
as part of the search for an alternative logic of knowledge production
involving social movements. The notion of militant research as a specific
field presupposes relations between researcher and researched guided by
an ethical and political commitment to social change and to the demands
of the social movement that is the research object.
Militant research includes research initiatives connected to various
forms of collective action, oriented towards social transformation goals
(Bringel & Varela, 2016, p. 482). For Bringel and Varela (2016, p. 8), a
militant research practice:
Involves proactive positions and actions in many realms of life, such as the
professional and scholarly, involving the insertion in collective spaces of
discussion, articulation and mobilisation aiming to enable and potentialise
political struggles that represent the construction of a just and equitable
society.
Militant research takes a political stance towards the scientific practice

imbued in its scope. It does not dissociate science from social processes,
while acknowledging the importance of historicity, the critical orienta-
tions of subjects and the comprehension of the deep inequalities that
mark Latin American realities. It does not intend to turn knowledge pro-
duction into an instrument for domination and exploitation, but to con-
tribute to social transformation processes through critical thought and
reflection (Jaumot & Varella, 2016).
Informed by the fundamentals of militant research, Bringel and
Varella (2016, p. 15) bring the influences of the thought and practice
of Karl Marx, Mao Tse Tung and Antonio Gramsci to the practice of
knowledge production through militant research. From Marx, the
authors draw the historical-materialist perspective in which knowledge
can only be produced through social practice, sensorial experience, the
materiality of life and its material reproduction (Marx cited in Bringel &
Varella, 2016, p. 483).
From Mao Tse Tung, Bringel and Varella (2016, p. 484) draw the
defence of authentic knowledge constructed through direct experience
of the participation in daily struggles and contact with ordinary people in
order to apprehend the specific reality of the knowledge they generate in
aiming to transform reality. They also incorporate Gramsci’s philosophy
of praxis as the unity between theory and practice that emerges from his-
torical processes as well as the conceptualisation of organic intellectuals
as individual or collective actors who organise and educate subalternised
masses.
Through these discussions, Bringel and Varella (2016, p. 485)
identify four theoretical reference points for militant research in Latin
America: (1) valorisation of social practice and experience; (2) impor-
tance of marginalised sectors of society in the production of knowledge;
(3) connection of knowledge production perspectives with broader
worldviews towards the construction of knowledge capable of ques-
tioning the inequalities produced by the capitalist social order; and (4)
need of continuous communication between the activities of research
and action, facilitating a qualitative improvement both in theory and in
the practice of social groups in a process of constant formation. In this
sense, the process of knowledge production takes into account the exist-
ence of asymmetric positions and distinct collectivities, actors, countries
and regions, which results in a diverse range of experiences and dialogues
between paradigms and knowledges (Bringel & Varella, 2016, p. 476).
Latin American authors have inspired the conceptualisation and
practice of militant research by way of their theoretical and method-
ological contributions strongly connected to the social realities in the
region. This is the case of Colombian scholars Orlando Fals Borda,
Victor Bonilla, Gonzalo Castillo and Augusto Libreros who developed
the methodology of militant investigation, a perspective influenced by
anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism in search of critical knowledge that
benefits marginalised groups. This is also the case of Brazilian scholar
Paulo Freire, whose ideas in the field of popular education propose
the incorporation of popular knowledge in the process of knowledge
production through educational work conducted together, with and for

groups, communities and social movements (Bringel & Varella, 2016,
pp. 485–486).
If, on the one hand, what we conceive as militant research in Brazil
includes the perspective of the scholar engaged in social struggle, on the
other hand, we have the perspective of militants who have secured access
to the university—individually or collectively—as a result of social trans-
formations in Brazil after the democratisation of higher education, such
as social and ethno-racial quotas and programmes specifically targeting
students in rural areas.
The concrete experience of all these individuals also potentialises
a wave of transformation within academia which, originally a space for
hegemonic elites, may potentially open up to a broader demographic
not restricted in their thinking to theoretical-methodological framing of
Eurocentric or US-based notions that fail to consider the specific realities
of Latin America. In this sense, it is notable that many undergraduate
programmes, particularly in state universities in Brazil, have been seeking
partnerships with societal sectors such as rural social movements, trying
to come closer to this public through research and outreach projects. At
the same time, members of social movements have sought out scholarly
spaces affording deeper reflection on their social movement actions and
better comprehension of contemporary social contexts, as well as societal
support and resolution of their collective demands and needs.
In general, these research and educational partnerships are centred on
exchanges between science and popular knowledge, aiming to establish
strategies for action and development of alternative technologies that
can aid social movements in meeting their needs, solving their problems
and achieving their objectives. One of the examples of this dynamic is
the debate and practices around agroecological agriculture that emerges
as an alternative to the model of industrial agriculture and agribusiness,
which is socially exclusive and harmful to the environment. In collabo-
ration with universities, social movements have devised experiments to
cultivate land and produce healthy food using natural resources in a way
that benefits rural populations without harming the environment.
This does not mean the abandonment of previously developed knowl-
edge, but the construction of knowledge from a critical standpoint
aiming to support human and ecological emancipation in the develop-
ing relationship between the university and the social movement which
is committed to the promotion of equity and justice in rural areas.
The self-organisation of individuals in social movements also makes

possible the construction of knowledge that facilitates their participation
in society. Such knowledge takes the form of social analyses conducted
to understand the time and form of political action, memories, discourse
and narratives constructed in the process of social mobilisation.
To conduct militant research entails more than the adoption of
research techniques that prioritise the researcher’s participation in social
issues, or a simple proximity to the object of analysis. The researcher is
expected to engage in and commit to the values that guide the social
movement or group with which she conducts research, because research
can also be a factor in the transformation of reality. Militant research
is not a one-way street, but a relation of reciprocity, involving the
de-objectification of social movements as study objects and the use of
theories and methodologies constructed in collaboration with these
groups (Trindade & Viana, 2017, p. 9).
The Context of MST and Its Appearance

in Scholarly Research
MST has historically been organised as a mass popular movement, with

a political focus on the rural working class, demanding access for rural
workers to land through land redistribution and agrarian reform. The
movement has had the objective to become a collective organisation
by constituting an organic structure that would sustain and create the
means for its own continuity.
The conception of MST in 1985, when the military dictatorship that
had ruled Brazil since 1964 was coming to an end, brought together
1600 delegates from around Brazil in the organisation’s first congress
in the city of Curitiba. Under the slogan ‘Occupation is the only solu-
tion’, the congress made the occupations and black-tent campsites visi-
ble nationally. MST demonstrated its efficacy, organisation and results in
facing the state. MST’s own survey and collected data indicate that 80%
of redistributed agrarian reform areas in Brazil were granted through
occupations organised by the movement (MST, 2010a)—rural work-
ers occupied land, demanded its expropriation by the state for redistri-
bution through agrarian reform programmes, and finally gained rights
to the occupied land. The congress showed the contradiction imposed
by the large number of landless workers, who had lost their jobs to
modernisation of agriculture and mechanisation of farming, and the

reality of property concentration in the hands of a few owners, much of
which was left unused.
Occupations became an efficient protest tactic organised by the mass
of landless workers. They influenced various rural and urban workers’
organisations, transforming workers into a collective actor struggling for
their own collective interests (Caldart, 2014). The occupations put land-
less rural workers on the political map and on media agendas, with the
specificity of their political actions (Bruno, 2009, p. 65). When a camp-
site was constituted from an occupation, the ways of organising space
and work were altered, and in consequence, social and political relations
changed.2
Through its history, MST has developed an organisational structure
that surpasses the instances of elected representation, through the inte-
gration of decision-making fora from local cells to the national con-
gresses, while also involving task forces that organise the movement’s
multidimensional actions. The movement is internally organised into
the following sectors: production, collective organisation, health, gen-
der, communication, education, finance, and culture. There are also col-
lectives organising for human rights, international relations, youth, and
LGBTQ+ rights. The participation of militants and leaders is organic and
happens through new members joining one of these sectors or collectives
(Engelmann, 2013).
In terms of producing its own media and communication strategies,
the MST is an editorial member in a number of media outlets and pub-
lishing houses (Editora Expressão Popular, Jornal Brasil de Fato), and in
charge of their own organisational media (Jornal Sem Terra, Revista Sem
Terra, MST website, and community radio associations).
Facing externally, there are many organisations that are transversal
to the MST’s organisational structure, maintaining a relation with the
movement through its demands and issues (see Table 4.1).
The MST is currently organised in 24 states and has successfully
granted land ownership rights to more than 350,000 thousand families,
who have benefited from land, agricultural credit and basic infrastructure
for production and subsistence, thus leaving the landless condition and
becoming settled farmers (MST, 2016).
2 Other mobilisation forms were also used such as marches, hunger strikes and occupa-
tions of public buildings.

Table 4.1 Civil society organisations related to MST
ANCA: National Association of Agricultural Cooperatives

CONCRAB: Brazilian Confederation of Agrarian Reform Cooperatives
ITAC: Technical Institute for Agrarian and Cooperativism Studies
CEPATEC: Contestado Research and Education Centre/BioNatur Natural Seeds
Network
ELA: Latin American Agroecology School
IEJC: Educational Institute Josué de Castro
ITERRA: Technical Institute for Capacitation and Research on Agrarian Reform
ENFF: Florestan Fernandes National School
Source Fernandes (2010)
‘Popular Agrarian Reform’ is MST’s flagship issue. Using popular as a

qualifier gives the ideological meaning to MST’s political actions and to
the construction of popular alternative narratives in the public sphere. In
this perspective, using the term popular questions the hegemonic agricul-
ture system, based on agribusiness, and seeks to establish ties of solidarity
with the working classes in order to gain support in the dialectical pro-
cess of resistance and struggle (Morigi, Engelmann, & Stueber, 2016).
New demands were included in the first Agrarian Reform Program
from 1984, such as agroecological production, food sovereignty, rural
education, confrontation of agribusiness, rejection of genetically mod-
ified organisms and agricultural chemicals, and preservation of natu-
ral resources, among others. These demands are related to the agrarian
question in Brazil and to landless workers’ struggles against capitalism.
Some of these demands were also shared by La Via Campesina, an inter-
national rural workers organisation of which MST is a member.
MST has also developed formal and technical popular educational
processes, offering an array of courses to rural workers and landless
workers living in campsites, aiming to articulate the resistance to agri-
business advancement and to construct agroecological experiences lead-
ing, in the long term, to the transition from conventional to sustainable
agriculture without chemicals, preserving rural workers’ health and bio-
diversity. Beyond this important popular educational process, the move-
ment has also historically developed a struggle for the implementation
and maintenance of official public schools in its campsites and settle-
ments. MST has worked since 1984 for access to public, free and quality
education in all levels for children, youth and adults in campsites and set-
tlements (MST, 2010b, pp. 23–24).
Due to the scope and breadth of its organisation, action and work,
it is understandable that MST would attract the attention of researchers
interested in better understanding the complex character of the
movement.
Challenges for Research with MST as an Object

In their construction of a theoretical framework to guide social move-
ment studies, Tarrow, McAdams and Tilly bring up the concept of
political opportunity structures as a key aspect fundamental to social
movement opportunities for mobilisation in a given political environ-
ment. According to Flacks (2005, p. 53), the concept of political oppor-
tunity structure is fruitful to explicate social movements, going beyond
the focus on behaviours and beliefs among participants in social move-
ments to identify political structures including structures of established
elites that will influence a social movement’s strategies and actions.
Flacks (2005, p. 53) calls attention to the problem that it is only pos-
sible to effectively identify relevant opportunities after the emergence of a
movement that has taken advantage of the opportunity. In other words, it
is much more difficult to identify a priori the potential opportunities for
a given movement. More precisely, Flacks calls attention to the scarcity
of studies that look into how political opportunity structures are analysed
and identified, a quandary that might be resolved through collaborations
among researchers and activists. According to Flacks (2005, p. 54):
Activists and community organisers with a sense of strategy already know

that they must try to understand what potential access points and possi-
bilities exist within a given political environment. […] It is fundamental to
realise that community organisers involved in planning and debate proba-
bly have a better understanding of the nature of political opportunity than
researchers who are outsiders to the reality of social movements.
Another point of potential collaboration, according to Flacks (2005,

p. 55), is in the study and writing of activists’ biographies. The author
argues that this kind of study can help to understand people’s motiva-
tions to act outside institutional frameworks, accepted beliefs and con-
ventional objectives, as well as how commitment is sustained through
time. Flacks (2005, p. 58) draws on a survey, conducted by long-term
activists Doug Bevington and Chris Dixon (2005), among activists
critical to capitalist globalisation that points to problems regarding inclu-

sion (related to class, ethnicity and race), organisational structure and
leadership. Understanding these three items better might serve the con-
crete needs of social movements, as well as identifying where scholars
may consider locating research agendas that will advance theory while
also benefiting social movements.
Against this backdrop, we aim to understand how research with and
about the MST contributes to a better understanding of the movement
as a social actor. In order to critically question this body of research, we
carried out a search in the database of the Brazilian Coordination for
Development of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES). The CAPES
portal registers and compiles all theses and dissertations completed in
Brazilian graduate programmes. We used ‘MST’ and ‘Movimento Sem
Terra’ as keywords in the search with the objective to map out research
about MST and its spaces of struggle (settlements, campsites, schools,
education centres, among others) in 2017. The search results provided
the initial input to map out research about and with the movement, in
order to answer the guiding question of how research conducted about
and with MST may contribute to making social movements’ demands
visible in the public sphere in contexts of inequality and criminalisation.
The search resulted in 68 studies completed in 2017 in Brazil, 55 mas-
ters theses (see Table 4.2) and 13 doctoral dissertations (see Table 4.3).
These figures show that in the context of graduate research in Brazil,
MST is a research subject of great interest. The interest can be credited
to the movement’s mobilisation practices through which it confronts
land concentration and the agribusiness model, and proposes a new alter-
native agricultural system based on agroecology and human relations.
The subject with the highest number of studies about the MST is
Education and Agricultural Education, with 15 masters theses and one
doctoral dissertation. Geography comes second with four masters the-
ses and six doctoral dissertations. Third is the graduate programme in
Territorial Development in Latin America and Caribbean Islands at
UNESP (Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho), with
seven masters theses.
This specific graduate programme at the UNESP focuses on geogra-
phy and territory, and is offered through a partnership between the uni-
versity and MST’s school ENFF (Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes),
located in the state of São Paulo. It is a programme that targets pro-
fessionals working with agrarian reform supported by the National
Table 4.2 Masters theses with and about MST completed in 2017
Programmes Number of theses University
Education and agricultural 15 UFC, UFSC, UFMT, UFPel,

education PUC/PR, UPE, UEMG,
Unochapecó, Unioeste, UCS,
PUC Minas, UFRJ
Agricultural development in Latin 07 Unesp (Sede)
American and Caribbean Islands
Geography 04 UFC, UFTO, UVA
History 03 UFMA, UEPG, UEL
Business administration 03 USP, UNAMA, UECE
Rural extension 03 UFSM, UFV
Social sciences 02 Unifesp, Unioeste
Society, culture and borders 02 Unioeste
Applied ecology 02 USP
Social service 02 PUC/RS, UECE
Languages 01 UEL
Social memory and cultural 01 UFPel
heritage
Agroecosystems 01 UFSC
Social politics 01 UFES
Social anthropology 01 UFRN
Sports 01 UFSC
Agroecology and rural 01 UFSCar
development
Law 01 UFPB
Public health 01 UFPE
Communication 01 UFG
Social development 01 Unimontes
Architecture 01 UFPA
Total 55
Source CAPES database, compiled by the authors
Program for Education on Agrarian Reform (Pronera).3 We note that

most research projects completed within this graduate programme in
2017 focused on the MST as an object of study, on its mobilisation and
3 Pronera is an educational programme for agrarian reform areas maintained by
the Brazilian Federal Government and operationalised by the National Institute for
Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA in the Portuguese acronym). Its main goal is
to facilitate access to all levels of education to youth and adults living in MST settlements
and campsites (INCRA, 2016). In April 2019, César Augusto Gerken an army official with
Table 4.3 Doctoral dissertations with and about MST completed in 2017
Programmes Number of dissertations University
Geography 06 USP, UFPE, UFRGS, Unesp/

Prudente
Sociology and social sciences 02 UFG, Unesp/Marília
Education 01 UFMG
Anthropology 01 UFF
Language and literature 01 UFRGS
Law 01 UnB
Social politics 01 UnB
Total 13
organisation practices. This is explained by the fact that the majority of

students come from campsites or settlements connected to MST and to
social movements linked to Via Campesina. These are projects address-
ing objects close to the students’ realities or areas of action, conducted
by members in social movements and activists, bringing a new outlook
on MST-related research to scholarly spaces.
Considering that education and pedagogical practice within the
MST comprise some of the main research topics, we looked into the
most-used keywords related to education and pedagogical practice in

these specific studies (see Table 4.4). This helps understand the main
debate threads about education within MST and how they are being
developed in graduate programmes.
There is a strong research interest in reflecting about and under-
standing pedagogical practice within MST. We note that many studies
focus analyses on the concept of rural education, created through the
collective organisation of social movements in the 1990s. Rural state
schools in agrarian reform areas adopted the pedagogy that valorises
rural areas as spaces for life, knowledge and development, considering
those who live there subjects of popular knowledge. Among the projects
that address questions related to rural education, the core focus is on
no specialisation in education was designated to coordinate the programme, causing gen-

eral preoccupation among social movements regarding how the programme will be run and
impending militarisation prospects (Hermanson, 2019).
Table 4.4 Keywords in research in the fields of pedagogy and education
Keyword Entries
Rural education 8
MST 6
Work/work and education/meanings of work 6
Politico-pedagogical project/MST politico-pedagogical 3
Social movements/popular social movements 3
Teacher capacitation/continuous capacitation 3
MST’s pedagogical approach for rural education (Educação no Campo),

seeking to understand its development and application in MST schools
and other spaces of education and organisation. In this context, most of
the studies focus on the relation between rural education in MST and
work in the movement, seeking to understand how education is con-
nected with mobilisation practices in social movements. Many studies
also identify challenges in the capacitation of educators to give continuity
to MST’s pedagogical practice in settlement schools.
The second most prominent theme in graduate programmes con-
cerns the fields of Geography and Territorial Development in Latin
American and the Caribbean. In general, these programmes present
debates focused on the geographical and territorial spaces occupied by
social movements such as MST. Studies in the fields of education and
geography are related insofar as they seek to analyse MST’s practices of
political action in the territories where these actions emerge: agrarian
reform settlements, state-funded public education and schools through
rural education pedagogy (see Table 4.5).
We thus observe the effort of graduate school researchers to compre-
hend the relationship between these territorialities on the one hand, and
on the other hand, the MST project of agrarian reform with its specifici-
ties for rural development and as a popular project for improving rural
workers’ living conditions and diminishing inequality in the country.
These two keyword surveys demonstrate that the programmes analyse
social movement actions in the researched territories, seeking to concep-
tualise these actions. Furthermore, these studies analyse MST’s agroeco-
logical practices in the space of the settlements and in the debate and
construction of public policies for family agriculture.
Table 4.5 Keywords in research in the fields of geography and territorial devel-
opment in Latin America and the Caribbean
Keywords Entries
Settlement 7
Education/rural education 7
MST 6
Territory, peasants’ territory, territoriality 6
Agrarian reform, popular agrarian reform 5
Social movements/rural social movements/social movements in rural area 5
Agroecology 3
Public education and rural education appear as fundamental elements,

in a transversal and interdisciplinary way in studies in other disciplines
and fields, such as social sciences, social work, language studies, soci-
ety, culture and borders, and business administration. Our survey also
demonstrates that MST is a frequent study object in the areas of history,
social sciences, rural extension, culture and society, social services, and
ecology, among others.
We acknowledge that such studies conducted within academia about
and with the MST are crucial to broaden public debate and shed light on
topics such as land concentration and the landless rural workers strug-
gle to remain in rural areas, creating better living conditions for these
populations. Conversely, they bring Brazilian universities closer to reflec-
tions, analyses and practices related to the context of social inequality,
particularly in rural areas. These studies also contribute to questioning
the criminalisation of the struggle for land democratisation in Brazil and
reinforcing collective action processes.
However, given the differences in MST’s organisation and work flows,
in relation, for instance, to a union, because of its membership and forms
of collective representation that act through collectives and national,
regional and local coordination, the majority of the studies still have as
their central focus the description and analysis of MST’s organisational
structure, particularly the structure of MST communities and the move-
ment’s educational projects. Such focus generates significant collabora-
tion on a critical debate about land concentration, social inequality in
rural and urban areas, class struggle, and the role of agrarian reform as a
state policy for the development of family agriculture and technological
innovation in rural areas. At the same time, these studies end up contrib-
uting through their findings to monitoring public and private organisa-
tions, many times revealing their lack of interest in solving the problems
of concentration of land ownership and poverty in rural areas.
Final Considerations
We argue that education is the most frequent theme in studies about
MST, demonstrating the importance of the movement’s pedagogical
project and the innovative practices that it has been developing in the
area. Informed by Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, education is understood
within MST as a dialogical and collective process in which people edu-
cate themselves on the dynamics of struggles and daily life as social prac-
tice to the extent that they understand their position as subjects capable
of changing their living conditions.
The scholarly interest in MST also denotes curiosity and lack of com-
prehension by the state, social institutions, society in general and even
universities of the concept of rural pedagogy created by social move-
ments and adopted by MST since the 1990s in their itinerant schools
created to attend to the needs of families living precariously in campsites.
In this pedagogical approach, education is centred on the landless work-
ers’ reality of landlessness, valuing rural areas as spaces for life, develop-
ment and hope. Students learn and develop knowledge through their
relation with the land, and the struggle to remain in rural areas, coming
to understand these territories as spaces where they can live a good life
with their families.
Accessing the right to public education in rural areas in the
twenty-first century remains a social problem that has not been resolved
by the Brazilian state. Furthermore, the problem of land ownership con-
centration, addressed in studies in the field of geography, evidences this
historical problem and its outcome, rural violence, as a serious, and yet
unresolved social issue. Many studies analyse how the spaces of settle-
ments and agrarian reform have positively modified regional and local
environments in terms of development, political action, valorisation of
the cultures in the countryside, and local production of food not just for
settled families but also to feed the wider Brazilian population.
We consider the partnership between social movement members in La
Via Campesina and public universities to be fundamental. Such partner-
ships are developed mainly in public universities (funded by the state)
because MST members (settled and camped families) understand that

it is the duty of the Brazilian state to offer quality public education to
all social groups in Brazilian society. In the view of MST, it is crucial
to grant the right to public education at all levels, from primary school
to the university. Already in its first years of action, the landless work-
ers that created MST realised the need to demand quality public educa-
tion in rural areas in order to minimise illiteracy and grant the right to
quality public education to rural workers and their families. The demand
for education is materialised today in the efforts to build and maintain
schools in MST settlements and campsites, and in the construction of
education programmes attuned with the reality in the countryside,
respecting and utilising rural workers’ knowledge based on humanitarian
values of respect for the environment. Such partnerships are operation-
alised in the creation of undergraduate and graduate courses aimed at
rural workers and their families which have been crucial to the numeri-
cal growth of activist researchers from the marginalised classes and social
movements in graduate programmes.
In this sense, beyond the integration of social movement partici-
pants in academia in graduate programmes, in the case of the MST in
recent years, we have observed an increase of students from settlements
in post-secondary education programmes. This has been made possible
by the demands put forward by the MST through its education sector,
aiming to establish partnerships with public universities to offer classes
catering to the needs of rural workers. These efforts resulted in the
National Programme for Education in Agrarian Reform Areas (Pronera)
supported by the Ministry of Education, for students in agrarian reform,
Indigenous peoples, and formerly enslaved communities (quilombolas4).
This brings landless workers closer to academic spaces and researchers
closer to MST’s spaces of struggle, allowing for the emergence of new
research and viewpoints, from the subject position of students who have
deeper and more diverse knowledge in relation to their experiences and
identification with their research objects and subjects. Such pedagog-
ical processes are crucial to providing higher education to those living
4 Translator’s note: quilombos were settlements formed by enslaved people of African ori-
gin in Brazil who succeeded in escaping slavery. Quilombos were also spaces for community
organisation and resistance against slavery in Brazil. Many of these communities, usually
located in remote rural areas, exist until today.
in rural areas, a right granted by the Federal Constitution which was

being accessed until the coup against democracy occurred in 2016.
Improvements in access to education for those living in agrarian reform
settlements have made a strong contribution to political participation,
exercise of citizenship, and to the development of alternatives to pro-
mote change with urban and rural working classes as protagonists.
As Flacks (2005) points out, the access of mobilised subjects to edu-
cational institutions and environments enables a production of academic
knowledge that is closer to social problems related to the struggle for
land and other topics related to rural areas and social movements. This
kind of research also allows new critical reflection in connection with
the struggle for citizenship and social justice. Thus, insofar as the MST
represents a collective subject that, through mobilisation processes, has
influenced public debate and the political conjunctures on the agrarian
question in Brazil since the 1990s, this kind of militant research creates
possibilities to develop new insights by increasing the proximity between
researcher and researched subjects. It is a kind of research that, based on
ethical and political principles, brings to the fore views and reflections
that aim towards human emancipation, which is crucial for social trans-
formation and for the struggle towards justice and equality, which can
also be nurtured in academic contexts.
The actions of the movement also inspire new scientific studies and
analyses. We observe the growth of militant research, according to Bringel
et al.’s (2016) definition, characterised by a stronger involvement of the
researchers with the subjects of research. Such studies encourage the prox-
imity between researcher and research subjects because they are founded
on ethical and political principles of human emancipation and social trans-
formation connected to scientific production.
The volume of graduate research projects about the MST in Brazilian
universities in 2017 demonstrates the importance of the movement
as a collective actor that plays a key role in research on rural education
and agrarian reform. The recognition of MST’s role in public debate
has been crucial to strengthening its legitimacy and problematising the
criminalisation of the movement and its actions within Brazilian society.
Nevertheless, this recognition is not enough to eliminate the violence
perpetrated by the Brazilian state against the MST’s organisation and
collective actions.
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PART II
Decolonizing Methodologies
and Negotiating Community Learning
CHAPTER 5
Denaturalizing Research Practices:

(Re)Signifying Subject Positions Through
Decolonial Theories
Vera Martins and Rosane Rosa
‘And I invented myself in the joy of exploring the idea’ (Rosa, 2005,
p. 26). This is a statement expressed by a character in a novel by João
Guimarães Rosa when telling his story to a stranger who arrives at his
farm. In the narrative, the sertanejo1 Riobaldo draws himself as the sub-
ject of experience. Through a continuous interrogation process that
explores possible answers, this subaltern social subject, who is margin-
alized in Brazil’s official history, tells us about a social and political real-
ity filled with war strategies and affect, at the same time as he organizes
1 Translator’s note: sertanejo is the inhabitant of sertão, dry and arid hinterlands in north-
eastern Brazil.
V. Martins (*)
Department of Communication, Universidade Federal de Santa
Maria (UFSM), Santa Maria, Brazil
R. Rosa
Department of Communication, Universidade Federal de Santa
Maria (UFSM), Frederico Westphalen, Brazil

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4_5
90 V. MARTINS AND R. ROSA
his knowledge about a given time and landscape. Riobaldo knows the
regimes of blowing winds and falling rains, of bird routes, plants and
their properties, the habits of animals, conflicts and injustices, happiness
and faith that mark the lives of men and women who inhabit Brazil’s
rural universe.
The possibility of inventing oneself through a self-narrative—as
Riobaldo does—is denied to many social subjects, who have been
reduced to objects of dominant discourses produced about them, exter-
nal to their worlds and experiences. This process, devoid of complexity,
renders the richness and diversity of experiences invisible and constitutes
a colonial practice that has produced a dominant universal subject who’s
founded on the subalternization and erasure of others.
This process is fundamentally grounded in colonization projects—as
an invisible and constitutive part of modernity—of territories that today
are Africa and the Americas. The colonization project is actualized and
sustained by economic, political, cultural and scientific articulations
that produce its legitimizing material and symbolic conditions. In this
context, our objective with this text is to engage in a critical theoreti-
cal reflection about research methodologies and relations from a critical
decolonizing perspective, while analysing how science participates in a
colonial project.
In the following reflection, we are going to engage in discussions
that: (a) problematize the acritical reproduction of research practices,
(b) reclaim the same degree of legitimacy for all subjects involved in the
production of knowledge and (c) demand from researchers the construc-
tion of methodological processes from and for each research context.
This approach does not constitute a decolonizing methodology per se,
but a challenge to promote dialogic, creative and participative practices
as well as solidarity among all parties or partners involved in research.
Challenged by the socially conservative political climate that emerges in
the contemporary context in many societies, we will discuss how rela-
tions constructed in research processes can become strategies to both
reproduce and confront oppressions and subalternities that surface in the
interaction between researchers and their interlocutors.
Here we make explicit our political position in this reflection: we
believe in a practice committed to social justice values that must be con-
ceived and developed in constant dialogue with politically mobilized
social groups that resist many systems of oppression. With this per-
spective, we refute the separation between what is usually understood
5 DENATURALIZING RESEARCH PRACTICES: (RE)SIGNIFYING SUBJECT … 91
as activism and what is usually understood as the scientific practice of

research. This view has historically served to mask projects aligned with
dominant systems. Without dismissing scientific criteria and rigour, what
we defend is a practice in which research subjects can make explicit their
positionalities, and researchers, grounded in scientific legitimacy, can par-
ticipate in social activism offering specific competencies, in an open dia-
logue with knowledge constructed in other spheres of social life.
To achieve this aim, we will engage in a theoretical reflection illus-
trated by examples from our research practice. The debates in the exam-
ples brought up here emerge from an ongoing research project looking
into women’s experiences and practices with social media. The project
‘Cria tua casa, cria teu futuro’ (Create your house, create your future)
articulates communicational, feminist and decolonial aspects in its prob-
lematization of digital social networks in the experience of Brazilian and
Mozambican women. Vera Martins is the author of a doctoral thesis
supervised by Rosane Rosa, in which these experiences are being studied
in Brazil and Mozambique analysing women’s testimonies in the feminist
Facebook page Vamos juntas? (Let’s come together?) and the group Algo
mais (Something more). The fan page Vamos juntas? from Brazil and the
group Algo mais from Mozambique are open to anyone identifying as
women, without any restrictions. The former is an online movement that
supports women to act together confronting violence; it publishes tes-
timonies of women and encourages sisterhood actions. The latter is an
online group that organizes meetings in Maputo aiming to offer a safe
space for women to discuss their problems.
Forty-two testimonies from Vamos Juntas were collected for the pro-
ject and Vera Martins participated in an invitation-only event organized
by the page. The project also included fieldwork in Mozambique, during
which Vera Martins participated in the meeting organized by Algo Mais,
as well as 11 interviews with participants in the group. The data collec-
tion at both sites was conducted between March and April 2018 and all
women were informed about the research project and how the interviews
and testimonies would be used in the future. The testimonies are criti-
cally analyzed through the lenses of decolonial studies, communication
studies, feminist theory and gender studies aiming to understand how
women in Brazil and Mozambique organize their experience and artic-
ulate their agency in communication using social media. The research
is methodologically oriented by the critical feminist hermeneutical per-
spective (Fiorenza, 2009) and does not have a comparative character.
Interviews and Facebook posts were analysed in an interpretive process

assessing or identifying synergies and specificities that allow us to deepen
knowledge about the reality of women in the two countries.
In this context, we recognize that these are still tentative practices,
born out of questions that we pose to ourselves as activists and research-
ers, trying to tread different paths in our research practices. In our study,
we are confronted with perplexity and made aware of the complexities
and challenges involved in choosing paths that diverge from modern
scientific practice. We understand that the practice of research is always
an opportunity for encounter among subjects, and that from the mod-
ern/Western perspective researchers are in a position of authority in the
knowledge production process. In communication studies, which is the
position from which we speak, we still have a long way to go when it
comes to questioning such hierarchies. In this sense, conducting research
in Mozambique provided an opportunity for us to experience solidarities
and conflicts and forced us to constantly review our repertoire of prac-
tices as researchers and activists. The conflicts that we describe here are
those developed reflexively in discussion between the two authors, as we
identify our pre-conceived understandings about the African continent
and its people, from our standpoint as white Brazilian scholars.
In this chapter, we develop three theoretical axes: the first pre-
sents decolonial thought as a denaturalization strategy which means to
acknowledge that the contexts of knowledge production are institu-
tional and political arrangements forged in and by colonial thought. In
the second axis, we reflect about feminist epistemologies and methodol-
ogies as a context from which competencies for another scientific prac-
tice emerge. In the third axis, we delve into the dialogical relations with
and among researching subjects (the researchers and the researched) and
propose practices that support justice and mutual recognition among the
agents involved in the research process.
Decolonial Thought—Towards Epistemic Insurgency

Decolonial thought is an insurgent theoretical-political articulation that
rejects modernity as a universal and global process and as the natural
culmination of socio-human evolution. Walter Mignolo (2010) calls this
process the neoliberal spell in which modernization and democracy are
sold as a ‘travel package to the promised land of happiness’ (Mignolo,
2010, p. 9).
The contours of this promised land are traced upon the various social
contexts in which ideals of modernity are reproduced, including science
and the spaces where knowledge is produced. A decolonial critical per-
spective sees modern Western knowledge as a colonizing instrument
and commits itself to the decolonization of knowing and being. This
approach focuses the reflections on knowledge production and on the
relations between producing subjects. Far from aspiring to consensus, it
proposes a suspicious outlook towards totalizing answers while also call-
ing into question the privileged position of asking questions. This suspi-
cious attitude is a methodological gesture that can emerge uniquely from
the lives and experiences of social movement actors and collectives that
have historically engaged in confronting inequalities.
Science and research are the legitimate spaces of knowledge produc-
tion and therefore must have their practices and methodological choices
problematized by decolonial thought. Alejandro Haber (2011) critiques
the role of knowledge production processes, including the researcher’s
position and relations constructed with research subjects, in the repro-
duction of colonial and hegemonic dynamics. Haber contends that
research means not only to know the world but also to gain agency from
the world, from the immediacy of what is present now and from the
absence of what is not. In modern science, there are many absent sub-
jects, because it is based on a colonial project characterized by a total-
ity that blurs differences and nuances, and denies and excludes certain
subjects from agency. Modern rationality is absorbent and, at the same
time, defensive and excluding (Mignolo, 2010, p. 13). This totality is
evidenced in a colonial way of being that reproduces exclusions when it
does not recognize the other as equal, therefore supporting the hierar-
chization of differences. These structures materialize in the construction
of a universalizing European rationality as human reference, valorization
of white people in relation to Black people, and of heterosexual cisgen-
der male subjectivity over other gender identities and sexualities. As a
result of colonial thought, this hierarchization produces and feeds off of
intersectional oppressions.
Haber (2011) makes such practices visible when he denaturalizes the
process through which research objects are problematized. He explains
that when we do not articulate the tensions in our relationship with the
research problem, we are taken to places already assigned in institutional-
ized science, with its roles, objectives, missions and language. We thereby
reproduce structures and enjoy our positions within them, stepping
on problems and social suffering that we treat as mere research prob-

lems. We must be conscious of the privilege to name the other as a mere
research problem in order to problematize the knowledge considered to
be so self-sufficient that it can attribute values to the world.
The questions posed by Haber (2011) concerning what we construct
as research problems are relevant for us to reflect on subject relations in
research, as they denaturalize the authority that modern science vests
in researchers. Haber suggests that by recognizing our subject posi-
tions and the subjective affect that motivates our investigations, we also
recognize these same aspects in other subjects involved in the process.
Moreover, importantly, we must include all those involved with and in
a project in decision-making processes that may affect them. Haber’s
thought is challenging because, while questioning the logic of mod-
ern science, he does not provide any pre-established ways, routes or
manuals. What is evident however is the call for an enduring dialogue
with research subjects that extrapolates the moment of data collection
through, for instance, systematic encounters that allow for all interloc-
utors to construct a complete understanding of the research process,
including the presentation of results.
Such recognition of other voices and knowledges disrupts the sep-
aration between one group dedicated to thinking (an isolated and
abstract act)—academia—and one group dedicated to action (devoid of
reflexivity)—social movements. It is possible then to problematize subjects
who call themselves researchers, as the ones with legitimacy to ask ques-
tions, speculate on ideas and, in the end, construct knowledge. Suspicion is
therefore the attitude that can lead us to transform critical reflections into a
host of competencies and practices. Such competencies can be theoretical—
when suspecting hegemonic views on what research practice entails it is
possible to initiate a critical dialogue within academic circles including in a
condition of equal authority, voices and approaches that are at the margins
of knowledge production such as, Indigenous and women’s knowledges.
This dialogical process can spark proposition of new research practices and
procedures because it brings forward new aspects to be considered in our
reading of reality. Haber (2011) points out that only when we suspect the
world and the position we occupy in it can we problematize the relation
between researcher/subject(s)/problem.
When we affirm that knowledge is a colonization instrument, one
of the urgent tasks that we have is to decolonize knowledge (Mignolo,
2010, p. 11). One of the ways to achieve this decolonization is to
undiscipline science, and as a radical measure, to undiscipline meth-

odology and its presuppositions. Departing from this proposition, an
undisciplined investigation must reflect on its attempts to objectivation
(construction of the object) in order to denaturalize and de-articulate
such attempts.
Beyond these linear routes that the modern research model has legit-
imated, without the binary pair researcher-researched, where the for-
mer has precedence over the latter, other trajectories become visible and
other possibilities for relations between subjects open up. In this sense,
Haber (2011, p. 23) proposes the construction of an investigative situ-
ation where the very conversations with subjects and popular collectives,
social movements, local communities and those with which enduring,
and mutually recognized, solidarities are formed constitute the investi-
gative situation. For him, in the undisciplined investigation, research
relations are not independent from social relations; on the contrary, they
are tied together in conversation and solidarity. He ponders however that
this critique of academia and its disciplinary practices cannot be diluted
in generalizations without concrete propositions, and suggests a number
of questions that aim to avoid empty critique: (1) How are the relations
with those whom I have named research objects constructed? (2) With
whom have I spoken? (3) How have I come to them? (4) What did I
have to surrender of myself? (5) What compelled me in the world that I
now treat as a research problem? If the modern paradigm encourages us
to research about, decolonial reason calls us to research with, integrating
as subjects those who had been understood as objects.
The questions posed by Haber (2011) relate to the fieldwork we have
conducted in Mozambique between August 2017 and July 2018 for
Vera Martins’ doctoral dissertation—including arrival in the country and
uncertainty about how to start the fieldwork. This discomfort lasted until
the convivial relations with the women we met helped us to trace possi-
ble paths for our research trajectory. As we opened ourselves to attentive
listening, to invitations to meetings and conversations, the Mozambican
women started sharing their histories of life and struggle. Without deny-
ing our position as researchers, we also shared our histories and academic
anxieties, our insecurities and discoveries about the country that hosted
us. It was only after six months of this conviviality that we started to
delimit our research procedures. We invested time, emotions and energy
in being with the women, knowing them and being known by them, and
establishing relations that would not be limited to research procedures.
We seek thus to follow Haber’s (2011, p. 18) reflection when he

affirms that undisciplined investigation transforms a research problem
into a research situation where we construct subjectivities from places
that will not take us to a position of epistemic privilege.
Together with the concept of ‘research situation’, Haber elaborates
on the notion of research domicile, posing the questions ‘Where do you
live? Where do you point your guns to?’ These questions can be con-
nected to other questions: What (non) materials are we (not) made of?
What are the footprints that constitute myself as a researcher and situ-
ate me in these research domiciles? How have I instrumentalized (disci-
plined) my instrument (discipline)? (Haber, 2011, p. 21). The answers to
these questions, he suggests, indicate where our research and writing are
housed, which may be far from where we have the most solid and lasting
solidarity ties. This happens because during our disciplinary education we
incorporate language that does not only domesticate the solidarity that
constitutes us, but also eases our impulses towards disquiet.
In the context of research and its methodological approaches, Haber
asserts that the decolonizing task is difficult, unstable and long-term
because it requires detaching ourselves from languages and dismantling
the artefacts and dispositives that operate inside colonial mechanisms.
The first step is to recognize that those who research are immersed in
and part of such mechanisms, because academic disciplines are among
the most powerful dispositives of post-capitalism; they establish language
that consolidates hegemonic views about difference, history and territory
(Haber, 2011, p. 35).
Haber returns to the concept of radically undisciplining methodolo-
gies, which consists of maintaining attention to what is happening at the
margins of our sight and that can only be seen if we divert our attention
to unexpected places, which he argues is one of the only possibilities for
finding ourselves in places where we never thought we would be. This
perspective reinforces the concept of a research situation, where knowl-
edge production is not an autonomous sphere of life, but is articulated
with and constituted in life itself.
In this context, decolonial reason in research does not necessarily push
us to struggle for a better world for those who suffer, but to fight against
the conditions that result in suffering for some, including those condi-
tions of which we are a part (Haber, 2011, p. 25). Undiscipline means
thus not only to know the other but to take them seriously, dislocating
the research domicile from the hegemonic place to the place of differ-
ence. This opens up possibilities that research protocols and methods
suppress, producing knowledge in a state of change through conver-
sation that, according to Haber (2011) must fulfil certain conditions.
Firstly, it must be a conversation with subalternized subjects, or with the
subaltern face of subjects. This conversation is not instrumental, limited
to the collection of information about how these subjects make sense
of reality, but a conversation open to other understandings of reality,
something that interrelates researching subjects and that at some point
touches them. Secondly, it is a conversation with social movements,
communities or collectives politically mobilized in order to confront the
hegemonic system. Thirdly, it is a broadened conversation, including
actors that would not be considered relevant by traditional methodologi-
cal protocols (Haber, 2011).
In dialogue with Mignolo (2010), we add that the decolonial per-
spective is a project of epistemic justice in order to let emerge the
competency to restitute what is erased, silenced and suppressed by the
totalizing ideas of modernity and rationality (Mignolo, 2010, p. 14).
The Place of the Subject

in Research—Exercising Disobedience
A common sexist manifestation in scholarly environments is to accuse

feminist researchers of doing social activism and not science. Such
judgement faced by feminist researchers is materialized in, for instance,
restrictions in access to financial resources and decision-making spaces in
universities.
In such a hostile environment, feminist researchers have developed
epistemological and methodological reflections that support the scien-
tific bases of their work, but also problematize what is understood as
science and its commitments within society. Thus, the feminist contribu-
tions that we bring to this debate are the result of women’s political posi-
tioning when they comprehend that knowledge production can foment
social resistance against inequalities and injustices, translating the pro-
duction of knowledge into a specific type of activism.
Haber’s (2011) proposes that research should happen as a conversation
with those subjects who have been traditionally objectified. It implies rec-
ognizing diverse subjectivities involved in the research without objectifying
them as ‘other’. It means to take these voices seriously as knowledge bear-

ers, capable of reflecting on ideas, thus (re)inventing subjects. These pro-
cedures are necessary to create the conditions for another kind of research.
Mignolo’s (2010, p. 15) concept of detachment instigates the dis-
connection of rationality/modernity from coloniality and from all forms
of power not deriving out of decisions freely taken by free people. This
notion of freedom asks us to, departing from a mentality of suspicion,
interrogate the conditions for the participation of subjects, in the rela-
tions unfolded in a research context within the scientific universe. On the
one side, we have individuals who propose projects from their institu-
tional places; on the other side we have people—in their own contexts—
who are conceived as objects susceptible to problematization. In order to
destabilize these relations, thinking with Mignolo (2010), we affirm that
to decolonize minds and imaginaries, we need to convert suspicion into a
propositional competency.
In the universe of science, one of the spaces where we can see the
mentality of suspicion translated into propositional competencies is in
feminist thought. In the same context as critiques of modernity, women
have been denouncing the persistent effects of coloniality that are repro-
duced by modern science and in scholarly spaces, questioning the rela-
tion between scientific apparatuses and women’s marginalized situations
and invisibility as subjects in scholarly environments. Such questions raise
ideas about feminist research and methodologies. Women in academia,
resonating with Mignolo’s thought (2010), insist that it is not enough
to denounce coloniality, we also need to unlearn and then re-learn,
investing in reflections that articulate a critique generative of a feminist
research practice.
Women, active in the margins of hegemonic institutional systems,
produce knowledge in dialogue with a marginalized social reality. The
feminist approach to research allows scholarly reflections to circulate
among autonomous women’s collectives, strengthening their work as
activists, considering that the knowledge they produce feeds s elf-reflexive
practices, conscientization and self-care among women facing social
inequality.
Feminist researcher Eli Bartra (2012) has focused on these kinds of
methodological questions and proposes a particular feminist methodol-
ogy. She asserts that there is a consensus around the existence of a fem-
inist methodology but recognizes the difficulty in identifying how it is
materialized during the research process. Still it is possible to speak about
feminist methodology, feminist epistemology and feminist standpoint.

According to Bartra (2012), researchers in the area agree that there are
specific ways to approach social reality that, because of their political
interests, can be considered feminist. A relevant question here is what
the specific features are that distinguish feminist research from other
methodological approaches. Bartra (2012) points out that research that
adopts a feminist standpoint utilizes specific concepts and categories such
as patriarchy, women’s oppression and/or exploitation, sexual discrimi-
nation, sex/gender system, woman and women, gender, gender relations
and empowerment.
Even though these are consolidated conceptual approaches in femi-
nist circles, it is necessary to recognize that they are not broadly utilized
in other research areas. In communication studies, for instance, even
when studies are sensitive to gender issues, we identify difficulties among
researchers in leaving a conceptual comfort zone and relating their reflec-
tions to what has been produced by feminist and gender studies.2 This
attitude renders fragile the emancipatory potential of knowledge produc-
tion and communication in contributing to the promotion of more equi-
table social relations between subjects in different contexts.
Another central question in Batra’s perspective is that denaturaliza-
tion—to take into account the social division of genders and its hierar-
chies—is an important endeavour in feminist research. Denaturalization
relates to the understanding shared by different feminist perspectives
that research methodologies can never be given or fixed, but are part of
a process constructed as research develops. Denaturalization also calls
for a meticulous analysis of what is published about the research subject
to identify sexist traces in order to address them (Bartra, 2012, p. 69).
The author also calls attention to a premise of feminist research: the
choice of certain problems that are always articulated with the contri-
bution that the studies can bring to the condition of subaltern women.
Thus, when reflecting on a research topic or formulating research prob-
lems we need to always ask: Where are the women in this context?
2 For an in-depth discussion, see (in Portuguese) Martins, Vera. Encontros potenciais: a
pesquisa em Comunicação e as abordagens feministas e sobre as mulheres, de 2005–2014.

Verso e Reverso, 32(79), 83–94, janeiro-abril 2018 Unisinos—https://doi.org/10.4013/
ver.2018.32.79.08. Available at: http://revistas.unisinos.br/index.php/versoereverso/arti-
cle/viewFile/ver.2018.32.79.08/60746092. Retrieved 15 April 2019.
Bartra (2012) also directs her attention to those who do research and
states that they must recognize the fact that whether the person who con-
ducts research identifies as a man, woman or non-binary (feminist or not)
will generate different interactions with the subjects involved. Therefore,
research with a feminist methodology can contribute new knowledge
about any reality, without ignoring the presence of men, but adding
questions about women and non-binary subjects to produce knowledge
that evidences relations (of conflict, power or solidarity) between genders.
In Bartra’s perspective, feminist research must consider its specific
categories in three phases: investigation, systematization and presenta-
tion. Each phase demands certain techniques. In the presentation, for
instance, it is important to write in first person instead of using the uni-
versal masculine plural.3 The practice of feminist methodologies does not
discriminate based on sex and/or gender, is not centered on male sub-
jectivity, and explicitly reveals the relation between politics and science
(2012, p. 68).
Maribel Ríos Everardo (2012) calls attention to the place of
quali-quantitative questions in the methodologies, recognizing that both
are useful, valid and complementary. In her view (p. 188), what requires
more attention is to have clarity about the theoretical paradigm, the
study object and the researcher’s positionality.
To contemplate a gender outlook, research that engages a feminist
methodology starts acknowledging that there is a conjunction of ideas,
representations and beliefs socially anchored on the concept of the gen-
der binary (male-female). Everardo (2012, p. 189) explains that this dis-
tinction between male and female results in differentiated, hierarchical
and unequal participation in social, political and economic institutions.
Gender studies is anchored in a relational view of research centred on
gender subjectivities and on the ways in which capitalist patriarchal cul-
ture expresses differences among them. In other words, gender studies
focuses on relations and on the construction of cultural and symbolic
subjective conditions that reproduce ideologies of power and oppres-
sion of certain social subjects. Such traces of gendered social construc-
tion permeate the social instances (and institutions) that transmit culture,
norms and values but also permeate the social sciences and humanities
as spaces of knowledge reproduction. Everardo’s reflection resonates
3 Translator’s note: in Latin languages, different from English, the third person plural is
also gendered.
with Mignolo’s (2010) thought, because when she introduces those who
have always been research objects as subjects, she allows us to under-
stand political partialities and limitations. She also points out that even
when research from the point of view of a feminist methodology adopts
a gender perspective, there is a difference, because it is guided by the
interlocution among subjects. Beyond the comprehension of phenom-
ena, feminist critical theories (as a standpoint) call for political postures
anchored in theoretical-practical questions as a fundamental basis for
social transformation.
Thus, feminist standpoint theory adopts a subject-subject perspective
as dialoguing parts who learn and transform reality together.
This reflection can be instantiated by a recurrent theme in our con-
versations and interviews with Mozambican women and in the social
media testimonies of many Brazilian women. When entering feminist dis-
cussions, they found out that the emotions, fears and perceptions about
the inequality and violence that they had suffered had names, concepts
and explanations. The significance of this recurrent observation points
on one hand to the exercise of self-reflection by the activist women sub-
jects, and on the other hand to the social effect of feminist research prac-
tices. We have here the interlocution between knowledges and practices
of women who are also political subjects.
Promoting Skills and Spaces for Self-Invention

When Riobaldo, Guimarães Rosa’s (2005) character, speaks about his
speculations on ideas and the joy he has experienced in inventing himself,
organizing his history in a narrative that gains new meanings when it is
shared with the listener, he speaks about the autonomy of the subject
that constructs themselves in relation with others. It is evident that this
autonomy is only possible in the context of the relation between narrator
and active listener.
It is thus possible to think that the efforts to transform reality emerge
from the gaps and fissures in coloniality, to the extent that researchers
and subjects participating in research re(create) the conditions for these
encounters, giving visibility to other practices, such as, feminist prac-
tices. According to Mignolo (2010, p. 13), today more than ever, the
conditions for (re)creation are present when research processes change
direction to delve into existing knowledge-producing experiences of
humiliation and marginalization generated by colonialism, through the
continuous actualisation of the colonial power matrix. This critique calls

attention to the understanding that, as a society, we delegate to struc-
tures and official institutions the power to name, construct and trans-
form reality, but they have been doing little more than continuously
updating the colonial project. In order to detach from this position,
which always takes us along the same knowledge paths, it is necessary to
give face and voice to those who have been rendered invisible under the
simplistic and generalizing label of researched objects.
Recognizing the place of otherness in research processes implies
rethinking research as an abstract and linear process to analyse and
describe reality. In order to disrupt the coloniality of knowledge,
researchers must make explicit their commitments, as political subjects,
to transforming reality. Even if we feel unsure about how to operation-
alize these new practices, feminist theorists point to a number of pos-
sibilities. One is the way we communicate research results which, first,
should be published in an inclusive and accessible language, and second,
should identify authors by first name and surname because surname-only
identification can bolster the assumption that the author is male. These
seemingly simple but disruptive measures are gestures that can be char-
acterized as social activism as they incorporate subtle yet significant
changes in academic environments.
Denaturalizing the research object position implies a re-evaluation
of practices that will make us capable of acting in a decolonial, dialog-
ical and inclusive perspective. In this sense, Paula Ripamonti (2017, p.
95) presents a host of approaches concerning what she calls research
through narrative, a methodology that aims to construct the competen-
cies needed to transform research practice. Ripamonti starts from a series
of questions: What can a narrative do? What does it allow us? What doors
does it open? What are its biases? What does it say? What does it silence?
What does it articulate? What does it engender? What does it question?
What does it decentre? To whom does it speak? How does it speak?
Can narratives constitute research materials? How? (Ripamonti, 2017,
p. 84). This series of questions speaks to the subject-subject perspective
proposed by Everardo (2012), horizontalizing the relations between
subjects involved in the practice of research. For Ripamonti (2017),
research through narrative has its foundations on critical and decolonial
epistemologies that advocate the involvement of researching subjects. In
this way, narrative text operates to question and destabilize aspects that
homogenize identities, allowing diverse subjectivities when it comes to
the production of meanings about who the author of particular experi-

ences may be.
Narrative as a possible research methodology carries with it a per-
spective that recognizes the diverse appropriations of language per-
formed by researching subjects. The universe of language has historically
served classifications, distributions, universalisms, dualisms and order.
Ripamonti (2017, p. 85) defines narrative in the research context as text
capable of articulating and expressing experience, with the potential to
intervene, inscribe and transmit from a position where diverse subjectiv-
ities are interrelated in a complex world permeated by a given tension or
conflict. The author thus stresses the ties between narrative and experi-
ence. The narrative is the text inhabited by subjects, it produces us and
tells us not only about constructions that act upon us but also, especially,
about emancipation strategies that we manage to operationalize in the
conditions that are given. Narratives are thus filled with political power
to the extent that they enable, circulate and provoke conversations.
When a narrative is made public, it is open to critique and allows the
accommodation of other perspectives, constituting a practice of resist-
ance to silence (Ripamonti, 2017, p. 85).
The proposition of research through narrative resonates with our
research aims because it considers both oral and written forms of expres-
sion. It therefore provides us with the foundations for an array of prac-
tices of attentive listening, systematization and visibility of knowledges
originating from various subjects and social contexts. Moreover, it relates
to decolonial reflections because it considers the conflicted construction
that takes place between the space of remembering and the present. It is
then possible to capture processes of knowledge construction in move-
ment because narratives are a (re)elaboration between what is brought
as marks of the past and the present, an unfinished process of learning
between what is named and what is open (Ripamonti, 2017, p. 87).
In this perspective, considering the denied history of subaltern groups
that are taken as research objects, this research practice brings with it
mechanisms that rescue collective memories that tell us about knowledge
and strategies of silenced populations when they confront violence and
socio-cognitive injustice. To rethink research practices and relations from
this methodological approach means to legitimate knowledge originat-
ing from lived life and to share with these subjects the social privilege
reserved by modern rationality for the researcher in their position as the
only legitimate producer of knowledge.
We turn again to our research practice during the doctoral research

to share our experiments in the construction of more just relations.
We worked with Elizabeth Fiorenza’s (2009) methodology of femi-
nist hermeneutics, structured around seven hermeneutic turns. One
of these turns is the critical assessment of all theories applied in a
study with a feminist perspective that must be validated by a scale of
emancipatory feminist values. Our methodology is not prescriptive,
it produces the conditions for free and creative constructions. In this
context, one of the challenges that we faced was exactly the construc-
tion of a validation scale. In this process, we turned our attention to
the testimonies of the Brazilian and Mozambican women who partic-
ipated in our study, in which we assumed a commitment to the social
transformation of the women’s realities. We decided then that this
scale of emancipatory feminist values would emerge from the experi-
ences narrated by the women.
This is a procedure in process and there is no guarantee of results,
but we understand that with this gesture we are constructing, with the
women, a more equitable relation of authority between relevant knowl-
edges. It is our specific way of doing activism, through recognition and
dialogue with other women’s activism.
This perspective is inclusive to the extent that it does not create hier-
archies between the subjects that participate in the process of knowledge
production and can therefore only be operationalized through critical
reflection by researchers. Ripamonti (2017) calls attention to this reflec-
tion emphasizing that social scientists today must realize that their dis-
courses and disciplines are organized from a pretension of knowing how
to speak about what others silence (Ripamonti, 2017, p. 89). Dislocating
this position (of knowing how to speak) is the necessary move to accom-
modate various inventive speculations from those who, in their testimo-
nies, give visibility to effects and counter-effects of institutional practices
they suffer, from their experiencing bodies that narrate historically situ-
ated events through wounds and scars. Ripamonti (2017, p. 90) under-
stands recollection and story as synonymous with narrative, the practice
of telling, recuperating, bringing back and communicating a lived event
in one’s own voice. She explains that narrative as research is particularly
attentive to specific modes of narrative, those that articulate experiences
departing from a critical incident, a problematic node that cuts through
oral and written communication, including that which relates to subjec-
tive ways of living and thinking about lived experience (p. 90).
Thus narrative centres on subjective ways of thinking about lived

experience and relates to the challenges of denaturalizing the position
of researching subjects because it admits the recognition of subjectivities
related to all those involved in a research process, providing arguments
to confront the borders and hierarchies naturalized between researched
and researcher. Testimonies impregnated with subjectivity carry the
potential to assess inherited meanings and to understand what and how
we perform research practices, and, as a consequence, to open up the
possibility of resignifying already-produced knowledge.
Narrative is therefore strongly connected with lived experience and is
not merely a methodology but also a way to construct and appropriate
reality and its particular and collective meanings as a legitimate form of
knowledge (2017, p. 94). Concerning research procedures, Ripamonti
argues that research through narrative can only systematize experiences
through a process of narrative documentation, using strategies that will
organize ways of obtaining, documenting and systematizing testimonies.
We return here to Haber’s (2011) reflections about problematization
processes to highlight how Ripamonti (2017) devises enquiry strategies.
Such strategies require knowledge about diverse textual registers in order
to generate the tension between technical and social categories to allow
for the production of constructed or intermediary categories (p. 97).
Beyond problematization processes, the author presents two analyti-
cal possibilities to assess collected narratives: paradigmatic and holistic.
The first approach develops analogies focused on common or transversal
categories in order to reach a degree of connection between testimonies
collected in research. Common themes, relations and problematizations
or solutions that arise from the narratives are assessed in this approach.
The second approach works with produced meanings, placing them in
the context in which they are produced and reproduced. Here we search
for singularities. The interpretive efforts turn to complexities, the density
and historicity of practices that produce different forms of knowledge.
Research through narrative makes visible more diverse dimensions of
experience than research carried out following the Western/modern par-
adigm, whose criteria do not take into account relevant aspects such as
the affect, goals and desires of those who participate in research, when
understood in their full subjectivities. This new way of producing knowl-
edge captures a rich spectrum of meanings from human affect such as
motivations, feelings, desires and objectives, which would otherwise be
invisible in abstract categories produced out of context.
Creating the Conditions to Rethink

Positions and Relations Between Subjects
in the Production of Knowledge
In this discussion, we have reconstructed the theoretical path that

problematizes the positions that research, and the relations articulated
between its actors, can occupy as a strategy to either reproduce or con-
front socio-cognitive oppression and subalterns position. We sought to
reflect on the elements that make the position of all subjects involved in
the process of co-production of knowledge more dialogic, fair, legitimate
and equal.
For this co-production of knowledge to become reality, it is necessary
to recognize the knowledges of all participant subjects as legitimate and
valid. Each group of social actors and subjects arrives at the research sit-
uation with their practices and experience, fundamental dimensions for
problematizing relations, denaturalizing procedures and resignifying
notions of authority in scientific practice.
We focused particularly on the relations between those who develop
research as a professional activity—academic researchers—and those peo-
ple related to what we call the corpus of our research and study, who also
contribute to unveiling the reality addressed by research. In this context,
it is necessary to give visibility to this corpus, identifying activists who
work within political projects for social transformation, and social move-
ments that work organizing demands and projects in order to include
these in the public arena where decisions are made. In this relation of
forces and contestation of hegemonic power, researchers can exercise a
specific type of activism when doing research with subjects, sharing the
discursive capabilities and techniques needed to confront oppressive situ-
ations and subaltern positions.
We align ourselves with a critical standpoint towards the Western/
modern model of science, as we depart from a colonial relation between
the sectors involved in the production of knowledge, where researchers
are in a position of social privilege. Within this condition of privilege,
scholarly professionals interrogate others from an analytical standpoint,
validating abstract presuppositions which do not contribute to creating
a relation of empathy between themselves and their researched subjects.
In our practice and experience in this new research methodology, we
have of course lived through moments of doubt and uncertainty about
our new paths. There were however moments of satisfaction when, for
instance, we followed the dialogues among the women who participated

in the research after the moments of data collection. We were able to
establish networks for theoretical exchange, solidarity and camarade-
rie, in other words, we shared lived life. We recognized ourselves and
each other, researchers and researched, in our subjectivities and political
positions.
We acknowledge decolonial thought’s political potential in these
reflexive, practical and self-critical efforts towards a critique of the
Western/modern model of knowledge production. In addition, in fem-
inist approaches we encountered a fruitful methodological framework to
propose and experiment with new competencies that envisage research
processes in a non-hierarchical way, in which decisions about why and
how in the research project are placed on the same level.
When we centre our reflections around the relations among the subjects
involved in research, we propose Mignolo’s (2010) notion of detachment
to articulate these relations, so that knowledge production can include
knowledges acquired through different epistemologies, narrated through
different grammars and experienced in different political economies.
The effort to denaturalize subject positions in the universe of knowl-
edge production challenges our practices, and introduces different
notions that allow for listening to the speculations developed by free
subjects when they narrate themselves in contexts of persistent inequality
and socio-cognitive injustices.
Notions such as recognition, learning and solidarity have the poten-
tial to destabilize modern science’s abstract protocols that, disguised as
neutrality and impartiality, reproduce injustice and produce invisibilities
and silences. For this reason, we put the above concepts and their mean-
ings into action to explore different courses in the production of knowl-
edge with more cognitive justice upon which, according to Souza Santos
(2017), social justice is dependent.
The notion of recognition compels us to approach the unknown, to
establish relations with people, languages and histories that are differ-
ent from our beliefs and learned protocols. The perspective of learning
conducts researchers to a touching conversation that resignifies our ver-
sions of ourselves in a relation of responsible solidarity with other sub-
jects. Moreover, it is solidarity that allows us recognize subjectivity’s role
in enlarging our perceptions of the world and establishing responsibil-
ity in research relations. It is a gesture that emerges from the fissures in
coloniality to promote inventive speculations among thinking subjects
who construct themselves in the narratives they share. To resignify

subject positions in research is therefore to promote the visibility of

subalternized others as co-producers of new ways of creating knowledge
grounded in solidarity that contributes to the emancipation of social sub-
jects in different roles and contexts of social struggle.
References
Bartra, E. (2012). Acerca de la investigación y la metodologia feminista [On
research and feminist methodology]. In N. B. Graf, et al. (Eds.), Investigación
feminista: epistemologia, metodologia y representaciones sociales [Feminist
research: Epistemology, methodology and social representations] (pp. 67–78).
México: UNAM.
Everardo, M. R. (2012). Metodolgia en las ciências sociales e perspectiva de
gênero. In N. B. Graf, et al. (Eds.), Investigación feminista: epistemologia,
metodologia y representaciones sociales [Feminist research: Epistemology, meth-
odology and social representations] (pp. 179–197). México: UNAM.
Fiorenza, E. S. (2009). Caminhos da Sabedoria: uma introdução à interpretação
bíblica feminista [Paths of knowledge: An introduction to feminist biblical
interpretation]. São Bernardo do Campo: Nhanduti Editora.
Haber, A. (2011). Nometodología Payanesa: Notas de metodología indisci-
plinada (con comentarios de Henry Tantalean, Francisco Gil García y Dante
Angelo) [Payanese Nomethodology—Notes of undisciplined methodology
(commented by Henry Tantalean, Francisco Gil García and Dante Angelo)].
Revista Chilena de Antropología, 23, 9–49.
Mignolo, W. (2010). Desobediência epistémica: retórica de la modernidade, lógica
de la colonialidad y gramática de la descolonialdiad. Buenos Aires: Ediciones
del Signo.
Ripamonti, P. (2017). Investigar a través de narrativas: notas epistémico-
metodológicas. In A. Deoto & M. Alvarado (Orgs.). Metodologias em con-
texto. Intervenciones em perspectiva feministas/poscolonial/latino-americana
[Methodologies in context—Interventions from a feminist/post-colonial/
Latin American perspective] (pp. 63–82). Buenos Aires: CLACSO.
Rosa, J. G. (2005). Grande sertão: veredas [The devil to pay in the backlands]
(19 ed.). São Paulo: Nova Fronteira.
Santos, B. S. (2017). Justicia entre Saberes: Epistemologías del Sur contra el
Epistemicidio [Epistemologies from the South—Justice against Epistemicide].
Madrid: Ediciones Morata.
CHAPTER 6
Disrupting Settler Colonialism

and Oppression in Media and Policy-
Making: A View from the Community
Media Advocacy Centre
Gretchen King and the Community Media Advocacy

Centre (CMAC)
Founded in the fall of 2015, CMAC supports the self-determination of

people who are racialized, Indigenous, or living with disAbilities1 in the
media through research, relationship-building, advocacy, and learning
(CMAC, 2018a). Our vision is a decolonized, participatory, representa-
tive, nonprofit, sustainable community and Indigenous media landscape.
Co-founding member and current vice-president of CMAC’s board
1 CMAC takes up the anti-oppressive practice used by some community media practition-
ers, like volunteer programmers with The Avalanche show that airs on CKUT Radio 90.3
FM in Montreal, to foreground the abilities of people who live with disAbilitites by capital-
izing the ‘A’ in disAbility, disAbilities, and disAbled.
G. King (*)
Lebanese American University, Beirut, Lebanon
e-mail: gretchen.king@lau.edu.lb

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4_6
110 G. KING
of directors Kristiana Clemens acknowledges, “We do not have all the

answers on how to get there” (Clemens & CMAC, 2017), but our work
to date has centered advocacy and support for nonprofit Indigenous-
and community-owned media organizations in their interactions with
the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission
(CRTC); engaging the CRTC on issues of racism and colonialism; and
participating in learning and skill-sharing events with Indigenous and
community broadcasters within Canada and internationally. Why does
this work matter in the colonial settler state of Canada?
CMAC’s founding members noted that there was not much advocacy
being done from the perspectives from which we operate. Indeed, there
are few lawyers who have intersectional expertise in the communication
rights of people who are racialized, Indigenous, or living with disAbilities
in Canada. This approach to media policy advocacy is informed by femi-
nist researchers and activists who analyze complex systems of power and
interlocking oppressions using multiple categories of analysis such as class,
race, nation, ethnicity, gender, and ability among others (Crenshaw, 1991;
Hill Collins, 2015). CMAC’s methodology also recognizes that within the
community media sector, and among media activists, policy advocacy and
communication rights are a marginal sphere of activism. For CMAC, this
is an oversight among media activists and researchers because not engaging
in policy advocacy and only making or researching media, ignores work-
ing in all sectors, and does not embrace a diversity of tactics ethos. Activists
working to advance social justice generally try to work in all sectors. For
example, environmental activists will organize among students, in rural
communities, reach out to workers, and work for change at the govern-
ment level. Activists also engage in legal battles in the courts, in defense
of charges or to push for rulings that support their causes. However, few
media activists and researchers in Canada engage the CRTC as the govern-
ment-appointed organization operating as a quasi-judicial body empowered
to regulate media and communications in Canada.
Diverse activists and researchers recognize media is a tool to dis-
rupt and create positive change (Dagron, 2001; Langlois & Dubois,
2005). CMAC recognizes that policy advocacy work may be perceived
as boring (Lentz, 2009) or not revolutionary in Canada (however, not
across the globe, see Segura & Waisbord, 2016), but it is part of our
holistic approach to achieving social change. Policy advocacy at the
CRTC is one way to advance systemic change and to challenge colo-
nialism and oppression in the media. However, CMAC observes that
6 DISRUPTING SETTLER COLONIALISM AND OPPRESSION … 111
policy processes produce multiple barriers that inhibit the meaningful

participation by people who are racialized, Indigenous, or living with
disAbilities. In part, this is due to the technocratic consultative process
(Raboy, 1995) that includes elitist and oppressive legal jargon and pro-
vides a lack of promotion of public processes and participation (largely
restricted to public notices posted on the CRTC’s website). In Canadian
communications policy scholarship, the need to resource non-elite par-
ticipants has been recognized (Abramson, Shtern, & Taylor, 2008;
McNally, Mowatt, & Pintos, 2014; Rajabiun & Middleton, 2013; Salter
& Odartey-Wellington, with Pavri-Garcia, 2008; Shepherd, Taylor,
& Middleton, 2014). For example, there is an absence of training and
knowledge-sharing opportunities on how to engage in policy advocacy
or CRTC processes available outside of law school. This is why CMAC
was created—to address the lack of representation that has produced a
policy and media landscape that is fragmented and segregated.
Importantly, CMAC’s media activist research methodology draws
knowledge from lived experiences together with communication rights
frameworks, academic research, and public scholarship. In this way,
CMAC foregrounds the communication rights of Indigenous and racial-
ized people as well as people living with disAbilities as guaranteed by
multiple international agreements to which Canada is signatory, such as
the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s
Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of
Cultural Expressions (UNCPPDCE), signed by Canada in 2005; the
United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
(UNCRPD), entered into force in Canada on April 12, 2010; as well
as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
(UNDRIP), signed by Canada in 2016. Advocating for and researching
these rights within Canada, CMAC’s work contributes to global commu-
nication rights scholarship (see various authors in Padovani & Calabrese,
2014) as well as global research on community and Indigenous media
practices (including, among others, Girard, 1992; Gumucio-Dagron,
2001, 2014; Gustafsson, 2012; Howley, 2010; Meadows, 2009;
Meadows, Forde, Ewart, & Foxwell, 2008; Olorunnisola, 2002; Rennie,
2006; Rodriguez, 2001; Zweiri, 2012). Within Canada, CMAC’s advo-
cacy responds to previous research (Abramson et al., 2008; McNally
et al., 2014; Rajabiun & Middleton, 2013; Salter et al., 2008; Shepherd
et al., 2014) and public scholarship (CMAC, 2019; FRPC, 2016) that
document the systemic lack of representation by diverse stakeholders,
112 G. KING
whose communication rights are protected by the above-mentioned

international conventions. The meaningful engagement of Indigenous,
racialized, and disAbled communities is required to support their
self-determination in the media system of the state of Canada and to
ensure that any new frameworks and policy decisions reflect their rights,
desires, aspirations, and accomplishments.
This chapter provides an overview of the ethics guiding CMAC’s
practices that seek to transform media research and governance in
Canada. First, this chapter situates the context and CMAC’s institu-
tional practices that inform this approach. Briefly identifying histories of
colonial and racist media and policy-making, this section then addresses
CMAC’s work to disrupt such practices by, for example, prioritizing a
women-only board that provides parity for Indigenous and racial-
ized directors. Second, this chapter discusses CMAC’s work alongside
of Indigenous broadcasters that seek to center sovereignty in CRTC
policy-making. Using a case-study approach, this part describes the

theoretical and methodological frameworks used to facilitate commu-
nity-based research that brought together, for the first time, over 200
Indigenous broadcasters in five regional events and a national conference
to share experiences and collect nearly 50 hours of open-access data in
French, English, and Indigenous languages. In conclusion, this chapter
offers a critical reflection on the ethics underpinning CMAC’s practices
to determine the challenges and opportunities for social movement and
media activist researchers.
Disrupting Colonial and Oppressive

Communications in Canada
The entrenchment of colonial and racist communication policies in
Canada has a long history. Nearly 150 years ago, Canadian settler
authorities implemented the Indian Act in 1876 under which prac-
tices included the reserve system that divided hundreds of nations and
later the pass system effectively cutting communication between rebel-
lious Indigenous people (Williams, 2015). These systems of passes and
reserves attempted to control movement and communication, and to
isolate Indigenous communities. In this way, the Indian Act can be
considered Canada’s first policy to regulate Indigenous communication
(King, 2017a). Following this, the first broadcasting law in Canada,
passed in 1968, makes no reference to Indigenous peoples (Clemens

& CMAC, 2017). In response to colonial and racist policies, mediated
resistance took to the FM dial in the 1960s when Indigenous commu-
nities began installing trail radio networks, or two-way radio communi-
cation channels, to link together nations dispersed by colonialism. Since
the 1960s, unlicensed radio broadcasting was used by First Nations,
Inuit, and Métis people in different parts of Canada as a tool of survival
(King & Rahemtullah, 2019). Throughout the 1970s, the broadcasting
practices of Indigenous nations, refugees, immigrants, and other groups
preceded the development of specific community broadcasting policies.
After more than a decade of media activism on the airwaves, the reg-
ulator, or CRTC, began to issue experimental community broadcasting
licenses. In 1974, the Nishnawbe Aski Nation set up the first licensed
Indigenous-owned radio station serving Pond Inlet in northern Ontario
while in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side (DES) and Montreal’s
St-Louis neighborhoods the first community-owned radio stations began
to broadcast to low-income audiences (King, 2017b). These experimen-
tal stations complemented unlicensed stations and unregulated media
activism that provided representation in the broadcasting system by pop-
ulations otherwise marginalized in media.
Today, there are hundreds of unlicensed Indigenous radio stations
operating on airwaves that many First Nations, Inuit, and Métis commu-
nities view as broadcasting on unceded radio spectrum (Szwarc, 2018).
This is because a large number of Indigenous nations never ceded land
and, therefore, their territory’s airwaves, to the state of Canada. Despite
this resistance on the FM dial to colonial rule, the state of Canada has
segregated community media into separate broadcasting policies. Today,
there are different policies for regulating community, Indigenous,
and ethnic media in Canada. The latter mandates broadcasters serving
racialized communities and linguistic minorities to operate as for-profit,
commercial stations (CRTC, 1999), a policy that some scholars have
observed serves to promote the “instrumentalization of ethnic media” or
the “strategic use of ethnic media as an instrument to serve the interests
of stakeholders rather than of the general public” (Yu, 2016).
Even with the licensing of Indigenous, ethnic, and disAbility media
as well as multiple frameworks provided by legislation, regulations, and
guidelines that target diversity in Canadian media (Bateman & Karim,
2009), protected groups who are guaranteed communication rights
remained siloed away from mainstream media audiences. This is evident
114 G. KING
in research posted under Broadcasting Public Notice CRTC 2005-24

that was prepared for a report issued by the Task Force for Cultural
Diversity on Television, and additional data posted under Broadcasting
Public Notice CRTC 2006-77 made available by the Canadian
Association of Broadcasters’ (CAB) final report on the presence, por-
trayal, and participation of persons with disAbilities in television pro-
gramming. Both studies are clear in their findings that television news
in Canada largely excludes protected groups. For example, regarding
the portrayal of persons with disAbilities in news and information pro-
gramming, CONNECTUS, a consulting firm hired by the CAB, notes
that there is an “overall lack of coverage of issues specific to persons with
disabilities in television news, public affairs and documentary program-
ming” (CRTC, 2006). Similarly, the 2005 report on Indigenous peoples
in television news programming concluded, “The under-representa-
tion of Aboriginal2 Peoples on Canadian television—they would be vir-
tually non-existent without the presence of APTN [Aboriginal Peoples
Television Network]—is of critical concern to the Task Force. Rectifying
this should be treated as a priority” (CRTC, 2005). More recently, the
Women in View “On Screen” report released in 2019 indicates that the
representation of Indigenous and racialized women in Canadian publicly
funded film and television has not improved since the release, over a dec-
ade ago, of the research mentioned above. Women in View document
that only 47 of the 3206 television contracts issued from 2014 to 2017
were given to racialized women, and only 22 television contracts went
to Indigenous women. And of the 24 television series created in 2017,
none had any Indigenous women on staff. Similar underrepresentation is
found in film contracts issued from 2015 to 2017, where only 29 of the
1637 film contracts issued went to racialized women and just 12 were
given to Indigenous women. Today, racialized and Indigenous women
represent less than 2% and less than 1%, respectively, of those contracted
to produce publicly funded film and television programming. Whether
in employment on screen or behind the camera, Indigenous and racial-
ized women are missing or dismally underrepresented (Women in View,
2019).
2 The government of Canada previously used the term Aboriginal or Native to refer to
First Nations, Métis, and Inuit people, whereas more recent state practice uses the term
Indigenous. CMAC uses First Nations, Métis, and Inuit as well as Indigenous, while recog-
nizing specific nation’s names where applicable.
Additionally, gaps in communications policy-making are indicative

of the perpetuation of systemic racism in media. For example, CMAC
reviewed the CRTC report titled “Harnessing Change: The Future of
Programming Distribution in Canada” released in 2018, observing
that racialized people were not mentioned once in the 146-page report
(CRTC, 2018b). Where racialized communities, along with community
media, were excluded by the CRTC’s report, CMAC hoped the Review
Panel appointed to consult the public before the upcoming review of
the Broadcasting, Telecommunications, and Radiocommunication Acts
(ISED, 2018) would bring the needs and interests of diverse commu-
nities to the table. After consulting the list of stakeholders that met
with the Review Panel, CMAC noted that the underrepresentation of
racialized groups is perpetuated by the consultation process. The Asian
Television Network was the only identifiable stakeholder from the
vibrant ethnic communications sector named in the list of meetings avail-
able on the Review Panel’s website.3 “Inviting only one group represent-
ing racialized broadcasters is,” according to media scholar and CMAC
consultant Felix Odartey-Wellington, “tokenistic” (CMAC, 2019).
Odartey-Wellington and CMAC ask, “How can we envision a place for
racialized and ethnic linguistic minorities, who represent 22% of the
population in Canada, if their needs and interests are not foregrounded
in official reports from the regulatory authority or by official bodies
appointed by the government of Canada?”
These exclusions are not oversights, but rather provide stark examples
of systemic racial disparities and ongoing colonialism inherent in com-
munications policy-making and broadcasting in Canada. Further, the
above data demonstrate that Canada is failing to uphold the communi-
cation and participation rights of people who are racialized, Indigenous,
or living with disAbilities and does not prioritize equitably the needs of
community media along with private and public media; despite guar-
antees made in the 1991 Broadcasting Act or rights enshrined in the
above-mentioned international agreements. The fragmentation of groups
who have protected communication rights along with their underrep-
resentation in media and policy-making was the motivation for founding
CMAC in 2015 with the goal of disrupting colonial and oppressive com-
munications in Canada.
3 See https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/110.nsf/eng/00009.html.
116 G. KING
Building the Community Media Advocacy Centre

from the Ground Up
Media activists and researchers must explore the boundaries and gaps
that impact the spaces within which we organize and struggle. CMAC
consciously questions our participation within colonial structures like
the CRTC that we oppose. This approach to policy advocacy recognizes
that our work operates within settler colonial structures of legal power.
However, through recognizing colonialism and systemic racism within
the practices and history of media and communications regulation in
Canada, CMAC co-founder Chris Albinati suggests, “we can further
the goal of decolonisation and anti-oppression by identifying the weak
points in the system and dismantling it” (CMAC, 2016). Colonial and
racist policy-making has enshrined policies and created processes that
benefit the privileged media elite of Canada. Albinati observes, “CMAC
works to disrupt these spaces of privilege” in media and communications
policy-making (CMAC, 2016).
As acknowledged above, the CRTC policy processes are open to the
public who are supposed to bring in the perspectives of those directly
impacted by policies. But who participates? Predictably, Canada’s big-
gest media conglomerates and their teams of lawyers are the most
resourced and dominate these public processes. There are a handful of
under-resourced and overworked advocacy groups who may participate,
but usually from their niche perspectives. For example, in the commu-
nity radio and community television sectors, there are advocacy organiza-
tions, such as the National Campus and Community Radio Association,
that serve the interests of their member stations, but not community
media as a whole. In addition, groups like the Public Interest Advocacy
Centre focus on the economic needs of media consumers. However,
Indigenous and ethnic media are largely unrepresented by any national
organization dedicated to broadcasting policy advocacy.
In addition to participation gaps, there are equity imbalances that
CMAC challenges, as an organization comprised of women, Indigenous,
and racialized people. Historically, the CRTC has been dominated by
white men and until recently was all white. In fact, since 1968 there
have been too few racialized and Indigenous commissioners (only three
racialized and one Indigenous) appointed to the CRTC (FPRC, 2016).
After many letters, including some from CMAC (see www.CMACentre.
ca), and calls for the Commission to be more reflective, the CRTC
recently announced the appointment of a commissioner of Indigenous

descent—only the second in the organization’s sixty-plus years of his-
tory (Thiessen, 2019). By visibly participating either in-person or
on-screen via videoconference, CMAC disrupts the history of exclusion
in CRTC policy conversations. Since 2015, CMAC has appeared mul-
tiple times in front of the CRTC and typically we are the only panel
made up of Indigenous and racialized presenters, with a majority of
women. The dominance of corporate, for-profit media as well as the
privilege of white men in media and communications policy-making in
Canada motivates the organizational priorities within CMAC to maintain
an all woman-identified board of directors that also provides parity for
Indigenous and racialized directors.
Further, CMAC brings a community engagement approach to policy
advocacy at the CRTC. All of CMAC’s board members and consultants
bring decades of experience in the community and Indigenous media
sectors. CMAC approaches media research and policy advocacy with the
goal of addressing broader systemic changes rather than seeking changes
that will benefit our organization’s members or the specific broadcasters
we engage. CMAC is not a big organization, but we operate strategically
by developing a three-year plan and organizing in-person retreats. We
also work together to produce research and develop our interventions at
the CRTC. In this way, CMAC disrupts the hierarchical nature of policy
advocacy work. There is no gatekeeping of legal information or policy
knowledge at CMAC as we are a learning organization.
Finally, as an advocacy group, CMAC has specific skills and knowledge
that inform our approach and tactics. Within public policy processes at
the CRTC, CMAC conducts research and prepares interventions that use
decolonization and anti-oppression frameworks to focus on the media
and communication rights of people who are racialized, Indigenous, or
living with disAbilities. We are usually the only group opening a space in
the public process from this perspective. CMAC also takes time during
public hearings to hear all of the presenters and review the transcripts
to highlight the problems and engage with the public record. Typically,
corporate media giants like Bell and Rogers present lawyers and audience
data that only promotes their self-serving views and they do not thor-
oughly examine the hearing transcripts. In this way, CMAC uniquely
engages with and contributes to the public process. Thus, beginning
with a community engagement approach rooted in decolonization
and anti-oppression frameworks, plus going to the CRTC as women,
118 G. KING
Indigenous, and racialized people, CMAC transforms the hearing pro-

cess. CMAC takes up policy advocacy as media activism and a form of
radical media research. With this approach, policy advocacy can be rev-
olutionary and uncompromising by taking space and prioritizing values
not necessarily reflected by the system.
Centering Indigenous Sovereignty in CRTC Policy-

Making
This next section provides a case-study of CMAC’s work in collab-
oration with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis broadcasters to disrupt
status-quo public policy-making in Canada. In order to advance the

agenda concerning media and reconciliation outlined in the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action (TRC, 2015),
CMAC recognizes that there is a need to mobilize and transfer knowl-
edge and practices from the Indigenous broadcasting sector to influence
official policy discourse with the goal of centering Indigenous sover-
eignty in media and communications policy. This consideration began
in the summer of 2015, at the same time as founding CMAC, because
the CRTC had announced its intention to review the thirty-plus-year-old
Native Broadcasting Policy (CRTC, 2015). Due to the above-mentioned
absence of a national advocacy body representing the Indigenous broad-
casting sector, CMAC recognized the need for capacity building to
facilitate Indigenous community participation in broadcasting policy
conversations, including the upcoming review of the Native Broadcasting
Policy and the ongoing review of the Broadcasting, Telecommunications,
and Radiocommunication Acts.
On July 12, 2015, several of CMAC’s founding members organized
and participated in a pre-conference event titled “Third & Indigenous
Language Communities on Air: A gathering of community broadcast-
ers,” held in Montreal on the evening of the opening of the International
Association for Media and Communication Research annual conference.
Two representatives from the Wawatay Radio Network also participated
in this pre-conference event. Wawatay serves the communication needs of
First Nations people and the communities of the Nishnawbe Aski Nation.
In 1974, Wawatay initiated a c ommunity-owned radio station mentioned
above and today provides radio programming to more than 30,000 lis-
teners daily, distributes a biweekly newspaper, offers television production
services, and maintains a multimedia website to preserve and enhance

Indigenous languages in northern Ontario. Meeting with Wawatay was
an opportunity for CMAC to discuss collaboration with the guidance
and leadership of the first licensed First Nations broadcaster in Canada.
Shortly thereafter, CMAC was officially founded as a nonprofit organiza-
tion and signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Wawatay
to pursue several goals, including securing funds to host a national con-
ference that would inform the upcoming review of the CRTC’s Native
Broadcasting Policy (CRTC, 2015).
With this goal, CMAC secured partners with the approval of Wawatay
from the academic sector to pursue funding through Canada’s Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) under the pro-
ject title, “The Future of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Broadcasting:
Conversation and Convergence.” After a successful application, the pro-
ject team, which included a representative from Wawatay, two members
from CMAC, and two academics, organized a series of public consulta-
tive events on the CRTC’s review process and the Native Broadcasting
Policy. CMAC members, along with the project team, reached out to
regional First Nations and Inuit communication societies; licensed and
unlicensed Indigenous radio stations and TV broadcasters; APTN; as
well as Indigenous media activists and audiences. From February to June
2017, more than 200 participants engaged in public gatherings held
in Winnipeg, Iqaluit, Edmonton, Homalco First Nation, and Halifax
to build up to a national conference convened in Ottawa. Importantly,
these events were held on and off university campuses. One of the events
was convened in the arctic region of Canada and another was held on
an Indigenous reserve in so-called British Columbia (Canada’s west coast
province on largely unceded First Nations lands), both sites where policy
makers rarely go.
Five guiding questions focused the conversations at these events on
changes needed to the Native Broadcasting Policy (CRTC, 1990), the
1991 Broadcasting Act, and CRTC policy and public engagement pro-
cesses (CRTC, 2010). The interdisciplinary theories guiding these events
focused on Indigenous sovereignty over spectrum (Szwarc, 2018) and cen-
tering self-determination and the expert knowledge of Indigenous broad-
casters in research (Tuck, 2009). CMAC members made presentations
on Indigenous sovereignty over spectrum and led workshops on partici-
pating in CRTC policy processes. Additionally, key concepts shaping the
methodology organizing “The Future of First Nations, Inuit and Métis
120 G. KING
Broadcasting” events were drawn from third-sector scholarship (Fischer,

2003) to identify deliberative practices and build a policy community.
Within communication policy research, deliberative approaches use meth-
ods that move policy-making beyond rules and procedures into more
accessible fora that bring diverse participants together as a policy commu-
nity. Such events use methods that “are inclusive, equitable, pluralistic,
reflexive and accountable” (Gasher et al., 2016, p. 269), enabling partici-
pants to work together to identify public policy solutions. These theoret-
ical and methodological frameworks illuminate the ways that deliberative
approaches can center equity and communication rights by:
• creating accessible political spaces for democratic participation that

is goal-oriented and decisional;
• bringing together diverse people who share concerns, but rarely talk
together;
• providing a collaborative planning and facilitation process, as well as
ways for participants to make it their own;
• clearly indicating where participants can speak and be heard (and
ethically cited);
• encouraging dissensus as much as consensus in identifying public
policy solutions;
• including measures of evaluation to assess deliberative practices and
engagement of the policy community, focusing on representation,
sovereignty, and inclusion.
For the project team, the appropriateness of this methodology was based
on the success of past deliberative policy-making events, such as the
“Journalism Strategies Conference held in Montreal (2012).”4
With this interdisciplinary methodology, “The Future of First Nations,
Inuit and Métis Broadcasting” project team gathered forty-seven hours
of data. The open-access archive of data collected is available online in
video and audio format featuring presentations in English, French, and
Indigenous languages.5 In addition, the outcomes of each event were dil-
igently summarized by the project team and made available to the next
event’s presenters and all participants via the website. These data have been
4 See https://web.archive.org/web/20181009170338/http://journalismstrategies.ca/en/
and https://utorontopress.com/ca/journalism-in-crisis-2.
5 See https://archive.org/details/FutureFNIMBroadcasting.
presented at the Canadian Communication Association annual conference

held in Toronto in 2017 and the International Association for Media and
Communication Research annual conference in Colombia (Wawatay et al.,
2017). A class project was also organized by CMAC at McGill University in
which seventeen undergraduate students engaged the open-access resources
and conference archive to draft a policy proposal based on the outcomes
of the gatherings (Awada et al., 2017). More recently, conference partic-
ipants and the project team facilitated a peer review on the gathered data
and event outcomes. This review generated a 28-page report offering
more than 40 recommendations for a new consultative process and policy
for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis broadcasting in Canada (Albinati et al.,
2019). In addition to producing regional event summaries and a final
report, the project team also built an open-access database of relevant ref-
erences, including legal literature, academic scholarship, and other sources.6
It is important to note that all publications produced by the pro-
ject team attributed the authorship of the ideas shared, through link-
ing names to ideas in quotes and footnotes, including in the final report
and recommendations mentioned above. For CMAC, attribution is
a necessary obligation given the colonial history of knowledge theft in
Canada perpetuated against Indigenous peoples. The production and
dissemination of information from each event throughout the regional
gatherings and after the national conference helped to ensure the con-
versation continued in a deliberative manner, where participants could
build on ideas shared before. This circulation of knowledge in report
form was an important complement to the audio and video archive, as
some participants only had time to review a summary of a few pages
rather than review the entire archive from an event. The outcomes of
these events demonstrate that it is possible to ensure that Indigenous
voices are meaningfully part of communications policy-making and that
this was a valuable exercise even though it was held before and outside
of the formal processes that will review the Native Broadcasting Policy
or the ongoing reviews of the Broadcasting, Telecommunications, and
Radiocommunication Acts.
During the final consultation session on the CRTC’s Native
Broadcasting Policy held at the national conference event in Ottawa, Les
Carpenter from the Native Communications Society of the Northwest
6 See https://web.archive.org/web/20180812100052/http://indigenousradio.ca/Open-
Access-Resources.php.
122 G. KING
Territories proposed and motivated the organization of another con-

ference. When asked if the deliberative process facilitated by the “The
Future of First Nations, Inuit and Métis Broadcasting” event was useful,
Les told those gathered:
It is in a number of different ways. I met members from Wawatay

Communication Society. I have been in Yellowknife for how long? I was
in Whitehorse since 2000. When you don’t get together, you don’t get to
exchange ideas and talk over issues … So, something like this should be
organized … at least once a year we should try to get together (Albinati
et al., 2019).
Unfortunately, Les passed away in the year after these events were held,
but not before collaborating with CMAC on other CRTC interventions
concerning the future of broadcasting (CMAC, 2018b), including join-
ing CMAC members as part of a delegation from Canada to an inter-
national conference for Indigenous and community radio convened in
Oaxaca, Mexico.
Globally, Indigenous peoples and marginalized communities have
communication rights guaranteed in several international agreements, as
mentioned above. With regard to Indigenous participation in communi-
cations policy-making, Szwarc (2018) concluded:
[M]edia affects the populations that it reaches, therefore it is within the

rights of Indigenous peoples to be considered when making decisions that
will affect their lives. Future consultations must respect the UN Principles,
and engage with Indigenous populations across Canada to determine what
communities need from future policies.
Additionally, the CRTC has also recently expressed interest in “creating

engagement opportunities and developing partnerships with academia
to encourage researchers to contribute new and diverse voices and per-
spectives to Canada’s public policy development” (CRTC, 2018a).
Therefore, policy makers and media activist researchers can do more to
advance decolonization and reconciliation by offering new ways of con-
ducting media research and facilitating policy conversations in meaning-
ful ways with Indigenous communities, building on the success of the
interdisciplinary methodology facilitated by Wawatay, CMAC, and the
rest of the project team.
Ethical Considerations in Challenging Colonial

and Oppressive Media and Policy-Making
CMAC recognizes that our work includes participating in colonial

and oppressive spaces that often exclude people who are racialized,
Indigenous, or living with disAbilities. However, we choose to engage
these spaces on our own terms. We have written multiple letters to the
Minister of Heritage about the lack of diversity in the leadership at the
CRTC (most recently on September 10, 2018, see CMAC, 2018c).
CMAC has argued that maintaining all-white decision makers, for most
of the CRTC’s history, has produced colonial and oppressive policy
spaces that result in an echo chamber, where only culturally dominant
voices are reflected and amplified by decisions. CMAC has also advocated
for anti-racism training at the CRTC. A recent reply to CMAC from the
Minister of Heritage indicated that training is in place. However, the
details provided are evidence that the CRTC is offering non-mandatory
training on cultural inclusiveness. CMAC believes this is not enough. In
addition to increasing diversity among Commissioners, the CRTC needs
to implement mandatory anti-racism education and anti-oppression
training for CRTC commissioners and staff (CMAC, 2019).
Additionally, CMAC works to facilitate the mobilization of knowl-
edge that will be more representative of diverse publics rather than just
well-resourced publics. In a recent presentation at the annual meeting
of the Canadian Communication Association, CMAC called for advo-
cacy training that is required for potential intervenors to meaning-
fully participate in policy hearings at the Commission (CMAC, 2019).
Public funding that supports advocacy training that targets CRTC
policy-making processes is nonexistent; thus, the policies being pro-

duced are built on exclusions as well as economic and participation bar-
riers. In the research realm, SSHRC provides funding, but the nature of
competition over funds inadvertently limits opportunities. To that end,
CMAC recommends that Heritage Canada and relevant agencies such as
the CRTC create special funding programs for public interest and non-
profit advocacy groups, with the appropriate vetting and accountability
regimes, so that these bodies can facilitate community-based research
and increase diverse participation in communications policy-making pro-
cesses (CMAC, 2019).
Finally, CMAC observes that policy-making spaces and mainstream
broadcasting spheres continue to operate as centers for white power. We are
124 G. KING
all impacted by the media and the policies that regulate them. Media policy
advocacy, like media activism, is a part of the diverse tactics that oppressed
and marginalized communities use to fight for and achieve systemic change,
equality, and social justice. Speaking at a conference organized by the Media
Action Research Group (MARG) at Lakehead University, Laith Marouf,
one of the founding members of CMAC, spoke about why policy advocacy
is fulfilling, even if ethically complicated. He explained:
I am half-Palestinian, half-Syrian. I did not get involved in community

media just to be on radio. My point of departure is that I wanted space for
my community, my issues and my rights. This is the only way to achieve
equality for my community. Palestinians said we will fight Zionism in any
venue anywhere in the world. Palestinians run a party in the Knesset, a set-
tler colonial venue, with the goal of disruption and subversion. Every day
the Palestinian elected members of the Knesset take a stand against Israel,
apartheid, Zionism, colonialism, theft of land, and every day they get heck-
led, receive death threats from the other members of the Knesset. That is
the choice, to make sure that your oppressor does not even have one space
that they can feel comfortable in. (CMAC, 2016)
This is a strategy that CMAC embraces to disrupt colonialism and

oppression in the media. We engage in the media policy-making sphere
where people who are racialized, Indigenous, or living with disAbili-
ties are underrepresented. CMAC works to advance the rights of pro-
tected groups to participate in media and have their voices heard in
policy forums, within and outside of the CRTC’s domain. We engage
in all spheres, as media makers, researchers, and policy advocates. We go
before the CRTC and challenge status-quo broadcasters by using decol-
onizing and anti-oppression frameworks, and by meaningfully engaging
marginalized communities who have unfulfilled communication rights,
with the goal of dismantling colonialism, racism, sexism, and ableism
in the media. Recognizing the ethical challenges and contradictions
mentioned above, CMAC mobilizes disruptive strategies as media activist
researchers and policy advocates.
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CHAPTER 7
Wearing Multiple Reflexive Hats:

The Ethical Complexities of Media-Oriented
Community Engaged Learning
Sandra Smeltzer
In this chapter, I discuss ethical, political, and logistical challenges

associated with both facilitating community engaged learning (CEL)

in higher education and conducting research on the topic. As a type of
experiential learning (EL), the overarching objective of CEL is for stu-
dents to engage in a project, developed collaboratively with a community
partner, that has mutually beneficial outcomes. These partners include
non-profit, non-governmental, and community-based organisations, as
well as coalitions, movements, and networks.
To contextualise this discussion, I open the chapter with an overview
of some of the key ethical issues at stake vis-à-vis EL, including a synop-
sis of the benefits and challenges related specifically to curricular CEL. I
contend that if CEL is facilitated in an ethical manner, is geared towards
the public interest, includes intentional and focused reflection, incorpo-
rates relevant curriculum, respects the needs and capacities of community
S. Smeltzer (*)
Western University, London, ON, Canada
e-mail: ssmeltze@uwo.ca

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4_7
132 S. SMELTZER
partners, and engages students in meaningful work, then it can be valua-

ble for all parties involved. However, many scholars have, quite rightfully,
raised concerns about the role CEL can play in the exploitation of student
labour; in burdening already stretched-to-the-limit community partners;
in cannibalising entry-level, paid positions in the non-profit sector; and
in training students to view themselves as precarious workers (for recent
examples, see Bodinger de Uriarte & Jacobson, 2018; Cai & Majumdar,
2018; Cohen & de Peuter, 2019; Dolgon, Mitchell, & Eatman, 2017;
Lund & Gain, 2018; Raddon & Harrison, 2015; Taylor, 2017; Taylor &
Kahlke, 2017; Van Styvendale, McDonald, & Buhler, 2018). I thus rec-
ognise the range of ethical issues associated with CEL while also champi-
oning its academic and sociopolitical merits.
My primary objective in the discussion that follows is to provide an
honest look into how I un/successfully negotiate my relationship with
CEL as an educator, as a researcher, and as a Teaching Fellow at my
institution’s Centre for Teaching and Learning. In occupying these var-
ious roles, I bear a trinal responsibility: to the students who participate
in CEL, to the people and issues at the heart of community-based activi-
ties, and to the principles undergirding the critical scholarship I produce
about this type of pedagogy. To navigate these positions, I must engage
in ongoing reflections about my intentions, perspectives, and actions. I
admit that I do not always get the balance right in my responsibilities
and can be quick to defend CEL in the face of critiques that paint all EL
with the same brush. Although my attention here is focused on commu-
nication and media studies-oriented CEL in the Canadian context, the
issues raised will be familiar to scholars in other disciplines and in other
locales around the world.
I conclude the chapter with a call to colleagues to pay greater atten-
tion to EL in this field; to consider the potential benefits and drawbacks
of EL, and especially CEL, with an open mind; and to be willing to
engage in conversations about CEL with the goal of developing our own
narratives about, and best practices for, its role in higher education.
Methodology: Situated Experience and Epistemology

I ground this chapter in my own situated experience as a faculty member
at Western University, a publicly assisted institution located in London,
Ontario, Canada. As the scholastic home to approximately 32,000 under-
graduate and 5300 graduate students, Western has proactively embraced
7 WEARING MULTIPLE REFLEXIVE HATS: THE ETHICAL COMPLEXITIES … 133
EL activities. In my academic appointment at the university, I have

engaged with this form of hands-on pedagogy in three different capacities.
First, in my capacity as a professor I have coordinated and supervised
approximately 150 placements with a wide range of local non-profit,
non-governmental, and community-based organisations, as well as
with a limited number of coalitions, movements, and networks. These
placements constitute the fourth-year, for-credit course in the Faculty
of Information and Media Studies’ Media and the Public Interest pro-
gramme. I have also organised more than 20 placements with various
freedom-of-expression organisations in Southeast Asia.
Second, I am a Western University Teaching Fellow with a focus
on EL. In this role, I have served on the university’s EL Taskforce
(2017–2019), as well as on the committee charged with creating
institution-wide EL principles and definitions (2018–2019). The

Taskforce developed a strategic EL framework, soliciting feedback from
across campus via town halls, faculty and departmental presentations,
and invitations to submit written comments. Through these experiences,
I have worked closely with non-academic staff members to develop EL
policies and resources while also responding to concerns raised by col-
leagues within and beyond my faculty about the expansion of EL in
higher education.
Third, I have undertaken two types of primary research about
EL, focusing specifically on CEL. The first consists of anonymous,
semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions conducted with
26 full-time and part-time faculty members, six mid-level staff mem-
bers, nine current or former undergraduate students who have com-
pleted local and/or international placements, and seven representatives
from local host community partners. The goal of these interviews,
which have taken place between 2014 and 2019 with participants from
12 Canadian communication and media studies programmes and their
partners,1 was to gain insight into the opinions and perspectives of indi-
viduals engaged in all elements of the CEL process. To supplement this
face-to-face research and create a more robust picture of the Canadian
EL landscape, myself and two doctoral research assistants—Darryl Pieber
and Mason Brooks—developed a Qualtrics-based survey about EL
1 Recent research on this topic is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada Insight Grant (2018–2021), titled “Ethical and effective expe-
riential learning for communication studies”.
134 S. SMELTZER
practices in the field. In Winter 2019, we sent the survey out (in both
French and English) to all 34 university-based, publicly assisted Canadian
programmes,2 garnering a 76% response rate. Most of the survey’s 133
nested questions were quantitative in nature, accompanied by a series of
open text boxes to gain additional qualitative information. Our analy-
sis of the results provides some contextual information for this chapter
and helped inform subsequent iterations of the semi-structured interview
questions that we will continue to use in our ongoing primary research.
Through these three roles, which span the teaching, research, and ser-
vice components of my job, I have encountered an array of ethical issues
associated with CEL while simultaneously endorsing its value to those
who have valid reservations about its role in the academy.
Curricular EL/CEL: Definitions

and the Canadian Landscape
Experiential Learning (EL)

Broadly speaking, EL is a pedagogical ‘approach that educators use to
intentionally connect learners with practical experiences that include
authentic and focused reflection’ (Western University, 2019). These
activities entail, but are not limited to, CEL, short- and long-term
internships, co-ops, exchanges, field experience, and practicum place-
ments both at home and abroad. Research about EL is timely given the
expansion of this form of pedagogy in communication and media stud-
ies and across disciplinary lines (de Peuter, Cohen, & Brophy, 2015;
Elliott, 2017; Universities Canada, 2017; Welch, 2016). In Canada, EL
is offered in 27 undergraduate programmes, 14 master’s programmes,
and seven doctoral programmes in the field.3 Using a five-point Likert
scale, respondents to our nation-wide survey were asked if they have
seen an increase in demand for EL over the past five years from different
stakeholders in their respective locales—provincial government, univer-
sity, faculty, home unit (i.e. department, school, programme) undergrad-
uate students, home unit graduate students, and external partners
2 The survey did not include stand-alone journalism schools nor information studies pro-
grams. Several of the home units included in the survey offer only undergraduate degrees
and some operate solely at the graduate level.
3 At the time of writing in November 2019.
(e.g. community partners, local businesses). Overall, the responses point

to a clear demand for more EL activities, but especially from universi-
ties, followed by undergraduate students, and then provincial govern-
ments. When asked if their home unit has concrete plans to increase EL
in the future beyond current offerings at the undergraduate level, 58%
of respondents answered ‘yes’ (23% said ‘no’ and 19% replied ‘do not
know’). Additionally, 22% of respondents with master’s programmes
replied ‘yes’ to the same question, and 25% of respondents with doctoral
programmes also replied in the affirmative.
These results are important because although there is a growing
body of academic literature pertaining to media-oriented internships
post-graduation—especially un/underpaid placements in the creative
and cultural sectors, which have become alarmingly more prevalent and
normalised (Cohen & de Peuter, 2018, 2019; Discenna, 2016; Frenette,
2013)—there is very little about curricular forms of EL. Yet, we know
EL is on the rise in the field of communication and media studies edu-
cation, which indicates a need for more proactive conversations about
its future. Our survey also revealed that CEL at the undergraduate level
is the foremost type of EL practised in Canadian communication and
media studies programmes—20 of the country’s 27 programmes offer
some type of CEL—mirroring its growth in other disciplines both at
home and abroad (Taylor, 2017, p. 253).
Community Engaged Learning (CEL)

As I have argued elsewhere (Smeltzer, 2015, 2018), there is tremen-
dous value in CEL that forefronts the public good, respects the edu-
cational and mentorship labour of community partners, integrates
germane curriculum, and ensures students engage in meaningful work.
Based on these principles, CEL can provide students with an opportu-
nity to put their theoretical training into practice, to engage with a local
or international community, and to develop skills that support their
post-graduation transition into an evolving society. Many have argued
that it also provides students with a chance to see what kinds of activ-
ities and jobs they may or may not be interested in, and can serve as a
conduit for personal development and social maturity. These experiences
can be especially advantageous for students experiencing marginalisa-
tion along a range of axes, including those without the financial means,
class privilege, or connections that can open doors to employment
136 S. SMELTZER
opportunities. In two separate interviews I conducted in Spring 2019,

a faculty and a staff member commented that many students at their
institution are first-generation university attendees. These students
are anxious about their future and are concerned about the loans they
are amassing to finish their degrees. Both interviewees noted that an
EL placement can help such students feel more optimistic about their
employment prospects and, in the process, may play a role in stymying
the mental health crisis.4
In addition to the personal, academic, and professional benefits that
may accrue to students participating in ethical CEL, community part-
ners, often struggling in the face of neoliberal austerity measures, can
also benefit from the support of students. However, a key criterion of
principled CEL is that students engage in a project that affords them an
opportunity to learn, grow, and contribute to a project in a meaning-
ful way, which requires community partners to play an active mentorship
role in their training and education. Further, students should not enter
into a placement as an ‘expert’ (e.g. managing an organisation’s social
media feeds); rather, they ought to have new experiences and a chance to
develop their skill set(s). At the same time, community partners should
not be expected to invest unreasonable human and financial resources
supporting students.
Achieving positive CEL outcomes for all parties involved is thus a
balancing act. Dan Butin’s (2010) four Rs approach serves as a v aluable
guide to getting this balance right: respect the community with whom
one works, forefront reciprocity to ensure students and community part-
ners proportionately benefit from the experience, integrate relevant
theory from the curriculum, and incorporate intentional and authentic
reflection throughout the process (2010, p. 5). As Mary Ryan (2013)
4 Mental health issues are on the rise throughout Canadian universities (as is the case
elsewhere around the world), with much of the concern revolving around students’
chronic and cumulative stress (Giamos, Lee, Suleiman, Stuart, & Chen, 2017; Kwan,
Arbour-Nicitopoulos, Duku, & Faulkner, 2016; Robinson, Jubenville, Renny, & Cairns,
2016). For many students, not knowing their employment path post-graduation can be
very stressful. An EL placement can augment their résumé and provide them with tangible
‘real world’ experience as well as networking opportunities. Moreover, engaging with com-
munity members to foment social justice can benefit students’ mental w ell-being if they
feel that they are making a positive difference (see Finley & Reason, 2016). Supporting
students’ agency also can help them manage the emotional and cognitive dissonance result-
ing from curriculum that focuses on the deleterious socio-political, economic, cultural, and
environmental impacts of contemporary hyper-capitalism.
describes, this type of reflection moves beyond the superficial and instead
encourages us to ‘reflect in deep, critical and transformative ways to
engender sustainable learning practices… that show evidence of new
ways of thinking and doing by both students and teachers’ (p. 145; see
also Ash, Clayton, & Atkinson, 2005; Dewey, 1933). When CEL is facil-
itated with respect, reciprocity, relevance, and this level of reflection, it
allows students to engage in a collaboratively determined project that
differs from a more traditional ‘service learning’ approach to commu-
nity engagement. This latter approach connotes a unidirectional flow of
labour and knowledge from students to the Others they ‘serve’ beyond
the campus, which both undermines and further burdens community
partners who support and educate students.
While there is important and reflexive work—much of it produced by
communication and media studies scholars—that speaks to the ethics of
conducting research with and about social movements (see, as examples,
Carragee & Frey, 2016; Gillan & Pickerill, 2016; Jeppesen, Hounslow,
Khan,& Petrick, 2017; Loperena, 2016; Milan, 2014), examinations of
community-oriented pedagogy are largely absent in the field. To this
end, this chapter highlights six issues pertinent to the ethics of conduct-
ing research about this pedagogical practice, which is intimately inter-
twined with community social change and student development, issues
that deserve greater examination by communication and media studies
scholars.
Issue #1: Community Labour Meets

Critical Scholarship
Community partners must be viewed as collaborators and c o-educators
in the CEL process. This requires a commitment to epistemologi-
cal pluralism—recognising and respecting that there are diverse forms
of knowledge and ways of knowing. However, as Goemans, Levkoe,
Andrée, Changfoot, and Christopherson-Cote (2018) lament, there
is a ‘tendency for campus-community engagement practices to privi-
lege postsecondary institutions by paying insufficient attention to the
needs, priorities, and expertise of the community partners involved’
(np). Undervaluing or disregarding community experience and expertise
downplays the central role these individuals play in the pedagogical pro-
cess. Moreover, their knowledge, opinions, and experience are often rele-
gated to anecdotal commentary in the CEL academic literature.
138 S. SMELTZER
To help fill in this gap, I received ethical clearance from my institu-

tion’s non-medical research ethics board to conduct semi-structured
interviews with representatives from various organisations that have
hosted communication and media studies students. Although these com-
munity voices should be an integral component of scholarly production
regarding CEL, the research has raised a series of ethical issues. First, I
must consider the ethical implications of asking busy individuals to give
of their time and energy to discuss and reflect upon CEL. As a professor,
I am paid to engage in research and to disseminate its results. I am for-
tunate to choose what types of research I wish to pursue and enjoy sig-
nificant autonomy in the process (notwithstanding ethics clearance and
funding availability). In contrast, not only are individuals working in the
community not remunerated for their involvement in my research but
doing so adds to their existing workload.
Second, as participatory action research scholars elucidate, even if
research is collaboratively co-designed alongside community partners
with the aim of fomenting social change, power and knowledge often
remain embedded in the university. In large part, this is because aca-
demics have the time, funding, and (hopefully) long-term employment
stability to engage in research projects (see, as examples, Banks et al.,
2013; Chevalier, & Buckles, 2019; Kemmis, McTaggart, & Nixon,
2013). Additionally, I must balance my role as an academic to generate
peer-reviewed material with a commitment not to use CEL experiences
for my own benefit (e.g. to strengthen my CV, to secure grant fund-
ing) or to appropriate the voices of others (see Dickson-Swift, James,
Kippen, & Liamputtong, 2007; Khasnabish & Haiven, 2015; Smeltzer
& Cantillon, 2015).
Third, although asking difficult questions is integral to my job as an
academic, it is remarkably unfair for me to engage in a critical analysis of
community activities that could be read as criticism rather than support
for community efforts. Given this tension, I carefully keep in mind what
Paul Routledge (2004) calls the dilemma of ‘criticality versus censor-
ship’. How do I produce critical work about CEL without undercutting
the people and the issues who are at the heart of this research, namely
the community (see Galis & Neumayer, 2016; Rodino-Colocino, 2012;
Smeltzer & Cantillon, 2015; Smeltzer, forthcoming)? Also, I live and
work in a medium-sized city (approximately 400,000 inhabitants) where
community members often know (or know of) one another. On a util-
itarian level, being able to place students with community partners for
their CEL experiences is contingent upon maintaining positive relation-

ships with representatives from myriad organisations. On a moral level,
I recognise that most community members labour in precarious positions
with limited financial remuneration. Therefore, if I produce material
that reads as unflattering, I risk jeopardising a range of relationships and
I may hurt those for whom I have significant respect. I find this balanc-
ing act taxing at times and the process requires honest reflection about
relationships and responsibilities. In the end, I tend to lean towards
censoring my scholarly dissemination to maintain positive community
connections.
Along similar lines, I know that problematic forms of EL/CEL take
place at my university, facilitated by faculty and staff members who may
or may not be aware of best practices. This occurs despite the work of
very competent and dedicated staff in centralised offices who pro-
vide support, guidance, and resources for EL activities across the disci-
plines, and despite an upper administration that has (so far) supported
a holistic, strategic EL framework for the university that is not solely
market-focused. Part of the problem is that, with the rapid expansion of
EL activities in higher education, many instructors and non-academic
staff members are relatively new to CEL5 and may not recognise its com-
plexities. For example, a faculty member may not be aware of the exten-
sive risk management involved in CEL or how to facilitate in-depth and
intentional reflection, while a staff member may not be able to make the
necessary connections to disciplinary curriculum or be attuned to lit-
erature critical of students’ unpaid labour and concerns regarding the
neoliberalisation of the academy. However, I feel uneasy writing about
the competency of staff offices and institutional administration, espe-
cially given that many of the individuals who work in these offices have
become not only colleagues, but personal friends. If I did not respect
their work, ethics, and professional abilities, I would not want to work so
closely with them (or entertain a friendship). However, if this were not
the case, I admit that I am not sure how far I would be willing to go in
my critique or how public I would be in its dissemination.
5 As a case in point, see the monies that were made available to Ontario universities and
colleges via the provincial government’s Career Reading Funding (http://www.tcu.gov.

on.ca/pepg/programs/careerreadyfund.html). The application process was fast and furi-
ous, and most institutions received financial support to quickly bring on board contract
staff to help expand institutional EL activities.
140 S. SMELTZER
Further, there is a significant difference between publishing an

obscure scholarly article with less-than-flattering content about my uni-
versity’s EL endeavours and writing an unfavourable op-ed piece for the
school newspaper. If my ultimate goal is to practice and help develop
ethical forms of CEL, publicly naming and shaming individuals or units
is counterproductive. Instead, I believe it most useful to work with indi-
viduals involved in policies and practices to help ensure that the interests
of students and community partners are supported and protected.
Issue #2: Knowledge Mobilisation

Correlated to Issue #1, a more unidirectional service learning approach
to CEL also downplays expectations that community members need or
want results from academic research. As we know, scholarly productiv-
ity is measured primarily according to peer-reviewed journal articles and
single-authored monographs, as well as book chapters, edited volumes,
conferences, grants, and the like. Given the expectations of my academic
appointment, it is difficult to resist prioritising the production of such
scholarly material over the needs of community partners. Consequently,
the audience for my CEL research is mostly other academics. I also relay
research results to academic and staff colleagues within and beyond
my university and encourage others to engage in ethical practices
through workshops, ‘lunch and learns’, taskforce and committee meet-
ings, and hallway chats. However, as many community members and
community-oriented scholars have rightfully argued, these venues for

scholarship dissemination typically do little to help our partners beyond
the ‘ivory tower’ (Anderson & McLachlin, 2016; Brem-Wilson, 2014;
Cahuas & Levkoe, 2017; Elliott, 2017, p. 21; Hale, 2006; Juris, 2012;
Khasnabish & Haiven, 2015; Luchies, 2015).
How, then, can research about CEL feed back into the community? I
offer results from my research to my CEL partners and engage in regu-
lar, informal discussions with friends in the local non-profit community.
Is that enough? The answer I think is no—my actions still follow what
Anderson and McLachlan (2016) refer to as a ‘linear knowledge transfer
paradigm’ (p. 265), which mirrors the traditional form of service learn-
ing that I actively try to resist. I also admit that I feel pulled in many
directions and often lose sight of priorities, especially with the ebbs and
flows of the university semester system, publication and grant deadlines,
graduate supervision, service commitments, my role as Assistant Dean
Research (Acting), and so on. This rhythmical pattern of academic life

is further complicated by health impediments and family obligations—
I am entering middle age with two small children at home—which sty-
mie my ability to fully engage in community activities and solidarity (see
Hardy et al., 2018; Rosewell & Ashwin, 2019; Toffoletti & Starr, 2016).
Despite generous invitations to attend evening events in the commu-
nity, to serve on organisational executives, and to fundraise for a cause
I want to champion, I say yes to a limited number of these requests. As
a result, I often feel unable to walk the walk that I talk, and, at a more
utilitarian level, I struggle to maintain the strong community relation-
ships that I value and believe are essential to ensuring a good match for
future students’ CEL placements. The pressure to do it all—and to do it
all well and ethically—takes a toll personally and professionally (see Berg,
Huijbens, & Larson, 2016; Ivancheva, Lynch, & Keating, 2019).
Issue #3: Unexpected Adventures

and Ethics in Practice
As part and parcel of the stress associated with balancing myriad com-
mitments, CEL experiences do not, for many reasons, always transpire as
expected. I have had both students and community partners communi-
cate to me frustration with their placement. It is not always clear who is
responsible for the breakdown in the relationship and how much of the
fault should be laid at my feet for a mismatch in goals, interests, and/or
skill sets. The situation can be further muddled by turnovers in an organ-
isation’s staff and volunteers or shifts in their priorities, often in response
to external funding or policy changes. On the other side of the equation,
a range of personal and academic pressures may impact a student’s ability
to complete a placement as originally anticipated.
I have several instructive examples of cases where placements went
awry that I believe would help others feel more comfortable in sharing
their own less-than-successful experiences, and, in the process, could
encourage greater reflexivity on the part of faculty and staff who facil-
itate CEL. However, talking or writing about particular examples can
be ethically loaded. Given the size of my city and its relatively limited
number of non-profit, non-governmental, and community-based organi-
sations, especially in comparison with large metropolises, I must be espe-
cially careful not to reveal any identifying information so as to protect
142 S. SMELTZER
the student and/or the community partner. Here, we see a distinction

between procedural ethics and ethics in practice. The former is bound
up in securing ethics approval from one’s institutional research ethics
board. The latter encompasses what Guillemin and Gillam (2004) refer
to as ‘the “ethically important moments” in doing research—the diffi-
cult, often subtle, and usually unpredictable situations that arise in the
practice of doing research’ (262). Ethics in practice requires a willingness
to be flexible in response to shifting relationships and situations that may
not have been anticipated during the preparation of a university ethics
protocol.
When I have conducted primary research about CEL I have obtained
official procedural ethics clearance. However, much of my work con-
stitutes ethics in practice. As a salient case in point, I conducted a
focus-group discussion with students that included an individual who
was quite critical of someone at their community-based placement. As
per my ethics protocol, these discussions are non-identifying and anon-
ymous; however, the student started to veer into a personal attack of
this individual in front of their peers. Given that the individual being
denounced is a full-time employee at the student’s host organisation but
not their direct supervisor, the student would not have known that the
person they were talking about is both a colleague and a personal friend
of mine. I quickly made the decision to redirect the conversation to
another topic but later wondered if I had silenced the student. I cut the
discussion short and hurriedly changed the topic without knowing who
or what exactly I was trying to protect—the reputation of someone the
other students in the focus group likely did not know? My own comfort
level? The ethical integrity of the research process? In retrospect, I think
I made the right decision, but I probably could have achieved the same
result with more diplomacy.
Issue #4: Resistance to EL

Many faculty members are worried about, or even fundamentally
opposed to, any type of EL, including placements with non-profit,
non-governmental, and community-based organisations. Growing con-
cerns about EL directly reflect its growth in institutions of higher edu-
cation, which have become increasingly corporatised, managerial, and
pressured to demonstrate ‘societal relevance’. Arguably, EL further
encourages marketisation of the academy, helping universities produce a
compliant labour force ready to plug into a capitalist society after grad-
uation. Even if a student receives credit for a CEL placement, concerns
have been raised that they pay their institution for the privilege of work-
ing in the community for free (see, for example, Perlin, 2012). Further,
CEL often plays a prominent role in university marketing strategies,
serving as the ‘kind face’ (Raddon & Harrison, 2015) of the institution
to attract external political and financial support (see also Taylor, 2017;
Bruce, 2018).
Equally concerning is the pressure exerted by a range of actors,
including parents, peers, universities, media, and the labour mar-
ket, driving students to ‘acquire more credentials and make them-
selves more marketable’ (Raddon & Harrison, 2015, p. 140; see
also Aujla & Hamm, 2018; Shade & Jacobson, 2015; Taylor, 2017).
A university-sanctioned internship or CEL placement manifests as a val-
uable line on one’s resume. Yet, by participating in any type of EL activ-
ity, students are also arguably being conditioned to view themselves as
precarious, unpaid, or underwaged workers. For placements that do not
provide any or enough financial remuneration, many contend that stu-
dents are being taught to accept that unpaid labour is a necessary step-
ping stone to ‘real’ employment (Urciuoli, 2018). Taking this mindset
with them when they graduate from university serves a capitalist regime
that benefits from labour precarity. Moreover, some types of CEL have
students replacing existing or would-be jobs in the non-profit sector for
which paying entry-level employment is already hard to attain. These
placements tend to benefit students from middle and upper socio-eco-
nomic classes who can afford a longer placement or an international
experience, including the ability to forgo paid employment in the short
term (Perlin, 2012). Numerous other factors and various forms of mar-
ginalisation can also pose a barrier to students’ ability to participate in
local and/or global CEL experiences. These include, but are not limited
to: gender, race, ethnicity, first-generation status, dis/ability, Indigeneity,
and LGBTQ2+ identity (see, as examples, Kim, Franco, & Rennick,
2016; Levac, 2020; Song, Furco, Lopez, & Maruyama, 2017).
These pressures can put CEL faculty or staff members in a difficult
position. Their directive is to facilitate ‘hands-on’ experiences, but they
must also oppose placements that could exploit the labour of students
or community partners, that might replace employees in the workforce,
or that fail to incorporate intentional reflection or relevant curriculum.
These multifarious expectations are also impacted by government and
144 S. SMELTZER
institutional policies. The Ontario provincial government, for example,

is likely to mandate utilitarian, market-oriented EL for the 22 publicly
assisted universities in the region, and upper institutional administrations
may acquiesce (or actively support) such policies to secure funding and
remain competitive with nearby universities.6
Given the context described above, faculty members cannot opt out
of the EL discussion entirely. We are at a critical juncture: we have an
opportunity to write our own narratives, plans, and policies about the
future of EL/CEL in our respective institutions and in the field. By
being proactive in this regard, we can better resist having a pre-packaged
formula foisted upon us by a government or university administration.
But this is not an easy sell for many of my colleagues, especially those
who would likely self-describe as active resistors. Some of my peers likely
view me as capitulating to the administrative logic of the corporatised
university by working with EL/CEL staff members on policies and prac-
tices. At times, I find it difficult to nuance the positives and negatives
of EL, arguing its value while also recognising challenges and potential
drawbacks. I can be especially protective of CEL and do not always pos-
sess the nuance to explain efficiently the grey areas that I have articulated
in this chapter.
Resistance and Institutional Labour

Every communication and media studies faculty member I have inter-
viewed thus far in my research has commented that most of their insti-
tution’s upper administration—and some of their colleagues—are not
aware of, or may not appreciate, the time commitment and the expertise
required to mount and sustain CEL. Faculty and staff members dedicate
significant time and energy to fulfil Butin’s four Rs criteria: it is remarka-
bly labour-intensive to develop relationships with community represent-
atives and with students; to ensure a well-suited match between partner
and student; to guide students through the CEL process emotionally,
6 Ontario’s Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities (MTCU) has clearly indi-
cated that higher education funding will be tied to institutions’ EL offerings. In 2017,
the Ministry produced six EL ‘guiding principles’ for colleges and universities (MTCU,
2017). These principles are focused on developing a labour force ready for the market-
place, which is to be expected, but they include hardly any acknowledgement of citizen-
ship, community-building, democracy, and broader societal needs.
professionally, and academically; to connect the hands-on learning with

relevant curricula; to incorporate intentional reflection activities; and
to sustain ongoing communication with everyone involved in the pro-
cess. Additional labour is required in cases where students bear witness
to and/or directly experience egregious forms of inequity and margin-
alisation. For many, a CEL placement is the first time they have seen up
close the deleterious impact of systematic and systemic injustice. For oth-
ers, their chosen placement can prove painful for its familiarity to their
own life experiences. Some students feel empowered by the experience,
while others feel disempowered and frustrated with the unfairness they
encounter. Some students discover or confirm their desire to continue
working within the non-profit sector in some capacity, while others real-
ise that their future will lead them elsewhere. As distinct individuals with
unique learning experiences, students require different levels and types
of care from their academic supervisor and, when necessary, from other
professionals on campus. The situation is further complicated by the
sheer number of students and community partners involved in the pro-
cess, each with their own agenda(s), personalities, and capacities.
However, higher education is, as we are all painfully aware, being gut-
ted financially. The push to expand EL is at odds with this financial real-
ity and, as a result, the pedagogical and logistical oversight needed to
ensure ethical practices is often not supported. While university admin-
istrations are usually keen to display a commitment to communities
beyond the campus (in part to maintain their alumni donor base), rhet-
oric commonly is not matched with the resources needed to sustain this
kind of pedagogy.
As a result, CEL can find itself in a catch-22: if others do not recog-
nise the potential value of CEL and/or do not acknowledge the labour
required to facilitate it, then appropriate levels of resources will not be
earmarked for it. Consequently, CEL can be placed in an even more
ethically charged position, and precariously employed individuals may
increasingly play a larger role in its facilitation. To this issue, the discus-
sion now turns in the final sections of the chapter.
Issue #5: Precarious Labour

As a tenured faculty member, I benefit from the security of a perma-
nent position. My employment status affords me the ability to chal-
lenge what I consider to be unethical policies and practices, to defend
146 S. SMELTZER
principled forms of CEL to colleagues who eschew EL, and to mount

placements with organisations and movements that may challenge the
status quo. Increasingly, many individuals do not enjoy similar protec-
tion in their university-based jobs. Unless they occupy senior positions,
administrative staff (especially junior and recently hired personnel) are
usually accountable to managers and thus have limited leeway to contest
questionable CEL undertakings or to defend positive ones to resistant
faculty members. Moreover, these staff members are often expected to
secure a certain quantity and type of placement, most notably internships
with the private sector over CEL with non-profit and community-based
organisations.
Precariously employed academics (e.g. part-time, pre-tenure,
contract-based) are in a comparable situation. As Claire Polster (2016)
encapsulates, a growing number of faculty in Canada—and elsewhere
around the world—experience ‘instability and uncertainty in relation
to their own, their units’, and/or their universities’ absolute and rela-
tive position’ (95; see also CAUT, 2018). Yet, as one tenured faculty
member commented in an interview I conducted, ‘precarious labour
has taken on the extra workload that needs to be done to make these
types of placements [CEL] actually work… and to seem even more “val-
uable” to the department… but they’re used by the department because
they are, quite frankly, cheaper… which clearly isn’t fair’. Academics
experiencing employment insecurity are therefore in a tenuous posi-
tion: depending on the political milieu of their home unit, they may be
unlikely to court disfavour that could ensue from challenging the sta-
tus quo while concurrently being expected to coordinate and supervise
placements that require a significant expenditure of labour.
Moreover, as Alan H. Bloomgarden (2017) observes, ‘faculty col-
leagues who undertake this work are often unrewarded or at least
under-valued for their efforts’ (p. 21). CEL work is not usually recog-
nised by traditional performance evaluations in the academy, which
makes it even tougher for those who do not have a permanent position
to want to dedicate their time and energy to these endeavours (Cooper,
2014; Wall, Giles, & Stanton, 2018). We must therefore ensure that
‘faculty and students who engage and excel in such activities are recog-
nized and rewarded’ (McShane, Usher, Steel, & Tandon, 2015, p. 160),
and that timelines for completion of research are flexible to account for
shifts in community capacities and needs (see also Doberneck, 2016;
Kajner, 2015). Moreover, given that non-academic staff members
are usually more beholden to managers and upper administration, it

is critical that those of us in secure employment positions vocalise the
labour-intensive nature of EL endeavours and demand that ethical prac-
tices be institutionalised to protect the well-being of all participants.
Issue #6: Moving Beyond Sanitised Placements

For many individuals who coordinate CEL, it may be difficult to facili-
tate (if they so choose) placements with activist-oriented partners who
overtly challenge the sociopolitical status quo (e.g. an environmental
organisation opposing a university’s fossil fuel research and investments).
University administrations usually prefer non-disruptive forms of com-
munity engagement that will not jeopardise the institution’s relationship
with sponsors and alumni donors. Placements with movements, coa-
litions, and networks (regardless of their political orientation) may be
especially hard to support if they have no bricks and mortar presence or
lack an established point person who can serve as a co-educator in the
pedagogical process.
However, I maintain that students should be allowed to engage in
CEL activities that go beyond incremental changes to the existing soci-
etal framework, and instead actively challenge social and political norms
(e.g. Bickford & Reynolds, 2002; Newson & Polster, 2019; Taylor &
Kahlke, 2017; Vogelgesang & Rhoads, 2003). I have placed students
with several local, national, and international movements and net-
works whose overarching objective is to directly challenge or disman-
tle the current political and economic framework. These kinds of social
justice-oriented placements afford interested students an opportunity to
see first-hand the work required to make fundamental changes in our
society. And for those students who already possess this kind of experi-
ence, these types of placements give them a chance to engage with new
groups of citizens on different issues.
Notwithstanding the value in these types of CEL experiences, it can
be especially challenging for precariously employed instructors to pro-
mote such placements in the face of administrative pressure from their
faculty and/or university administration. In my interviews, I asked indi-
viduals how their home unit would respond to a request from one of
their students for a more activist-oriented CEL placement. The tenured
faculty interviewees all responded positively, but none of them knew of
any placements in their respective home units that fit this description.
148 S. SMELTZER
A staff member expressed uncertainty regarding how they would pro-

ceed and who they would need to get ‘permission’ from to approve a
placement of this sort. More telling, a student commented that they
thought that their professor would not be ‘allowed’ to supervise a ‘politi-
cal internship’, and a contract-based faculty member expressed hesitation
in allowing a student to engage in CEL of this nature. While the latter
was not opposed to the idea, they expected their faculty administration
would not agree to it and were concerned whether the university would
support them if the placement somehow went awry.
If a precariously employed academic feels uncomfortable facilitating
a more politically oriented type of CEL placement, then they are—very
understandably—unlikely to engage in any sort of public or scholarly dis-
semination about it. Nor are they likely to want their identity revealed in
any of my scholarly production on the topic, which requires ethical dili-
gence on my behalf.
Reflexivity
The thread that ties together the six broad issues described above is
reflexivity, intentional and authentic reflexivity that allows scholars to be
open about the struggles they face in facilitating community-oriented
activities while also generating critical, community-engaged scholar-
ship. Indeed, it is not easy to cultivate transparent, ethical practices with
a range of actors both on and off campus while also attending to the
research component of one’s academic appointment.
I talk to my students about the importance of building recipro-
cal and respectful relationships with community partners, but do I
engage in similar ongoing processes myself? The answer: not always and
not enough. During the in-classroom component of my fourth-year
CEL course and in one-on-one meetings with students, we talk about
self-awareness, vulnerability, and positionality. The goal is to help prepare
students personally, professionally, and academically for their respective
CEL experiences. During their placements, which take place during a
13-week semester, we also engage in regular discussions about ethi-
cal issues, and about what role they think they can and should play in
their community/ies. However, when I apply the same expectations to
myself, I usually fall back into familiar patterns—I tend to assume that
I am well aware of my subjectivity and know my role(s) in my commu-
nity/ies based on years of experience. But ‘community’ is, of course,
never static, nor am I as an individual. The dynamics within and between

organisations are fluid and ever-changing, as are my relationships with
the people and issues at the heart of their work. Crucially, reflexivity
must underpin whatever scholarly work I create and disseminate based
on my multifaceted relationship with CEL: I facilitate it, I teach about
it, I conduct research on it, and I engage in discussions about CEL pol-
icies and practices on a range of bureaucratic levels. As Megan Welsh
(2018) contends, we must use ‘reflexivity as an ethical as well as analyti-
cal concept to ensure ethical practice in the research context’ (419). This
extends to our knowledge production: Who is the audience for my schol-
arly work? Who does it benefit other than me in the form of another line
on my CV? As I continue to move forward doing this community-based
research and practice, I must remember to always integrate reflexivity
into every aspect of the process. This includes being open and honest
in my academic and public-oriented dissemination of ideas and research
results.
At a broader level, I contend that communication and media stud-
ies scholars must proactively engage in conversations about the role
that EL/CEL can and should play in the field. Although faculty mem-
bers do not need to facilitate or be intimately involved in EL activities,
they cannot completely disengage from the conversation. EL is on the
rise in higher education, and its future will be decided by other actors
within and beyond the academy unless we choose to be part of the con-
versation. If the decision for some is to eschew all forms of EL, then that
decision should be made based on full understanding of the potential
benefits and drawbacks of different types of EL.
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PART III
Negotiating Power Dynamics Between

CHAPTER 8
The Ethics of Reciprocal Communication
Julia Velkova
During my second year as a doctoral student in a media and communication

studies department in Sweden, I stumbled upon a crowdfunding campaign
by a Dutch-based animation studio, the Blender Institute. The aim of the
campaign was to raise 1.5 million euros from the community of users of a
popular 3D animation software, Blender, in order to make ‘an open source
animation feature film’ and a ‘cloud’ platform on which the studio could
share tutorials, software development and assets from its future and earlier
open source films. The rewards for contributing to the crowdfunding of
this project were framed as more than material assets: ‘Do you think your
support is well rewarded by getting a lot of new development for Blender,
AND help a dozen of small indie Blender studios to be growing, AND get
all of the stuff they make for you free to use, AND get ways to get involved
or participate, AND even get a great movie in the end?’ (Blender Institute,
2014a).
Even though the campaign eventually failed to reach its financial goal
and the open film production turned into a smaller project, the idea
J. Velkova (*)
Research Fellow in Technology and Social Change,
Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
e-mail: julia.velkova@liu.se

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4_8
158 J. VELKOVA
behind it attracted my research attention as an unusual synthesis and

modulation of earlier ideas articulated by free and open source software
and open culture proponents of commons-based collaborative produc-
tion (Björgvinsson, 2014; Coleman, 2013; Fuster Morell, 2010; Kostakis
& Drechsler, 2015), but applied to the field of independent computer
animation production. The Blender Institute used the rhetoric of col-
lective film, technological and practical knowledge production which,
I hypothesised, could reflect a new form of ‘peer-production’ (Benkler,
2006) and a new empirical object through which it could be researched,
moving beyond the extensively studied Wikipedia and Linux movements.
Hence, I decided to make the work of the Blender Institute comprise
the core empirical material of my doctoral dissertation in which I would
study the ways in which ideas from the free software and free culture
movements were modulated and brought further into new forms of
organising the production and consumption of digital culture. With this
research, I hoped to contribute to the understanding of the politics of
participation and new modes of organising creative production that dig-
ital media enabled, and the ways in which computer graphic artists and
animators made use of them, possibly leading to new forms of creative
expression.
However, the empirical, ethnography-inspired work which I even-
tually pursued on the production of the then downscaled film project,
which the crowdfunding campaign initially aimed to fund, complicated
my understanding of the goals and politics of this practice, as well as of
the ethics of researching it. It soon became clear to me that the practices
of the Blender Institute were neither open for collaboration in a con-
ventional understanding of the term, nor inclusive, nor aiming to inno-
vate the form or narration strategies of computer animation or stimulate
sharing of digital content online. Instead, they reflected a libertarian
(Barbrook, 2005) project centred on the making of alternative digital
infrastructure through which small animation studios, starting with the
Blender Institute itself, tried to achieve technological independence to
produce Hollywood-style animation at a lower cost. As a consequence,
I shifted my research aims and focus away from understanding partic-
ipatory media production to the study of Blender as a project of infra-
structuring, and sought to examine its politics in relation to creating the
preconditions for independent digital visual culture production.
My fieldwork experience with Blender, and the shift in my focus as a
result of gaining deeper knowledge of their practices not only affected
8 THE ETHICS OF RECIPROCAL COMMUNICATION 159
my research aims, but also complicated my understanding of the ethics

of scholarly knowledge production about activist practices, as a process
of a contingent and not friction-free negotiation between the values of
scholars and those of activists. With this essay, I aim to complicate the
understanding of activist practices and scholarly research ethics by engag-
ing with the relationality and complexity of activist practices, and the
spectrum of ethical questions which their research gives rise to, starting
from questions of distance and proximity, and participation and exclu-
sion, to the implications of activist practices and the ethics of communi-
cating critiques. Engaging in symmetric fieldwork (Czarniawska, 2007,
p. 12) and reciprocal communication, the questions that arose in the
course of my research were: to what extent is it possible for scholars to
research activist practices without becoming activists themselves; who
decides on the form and object of scholarly activism; and when does reci-
procity reach its limits, including the question of whether scholars should
always be expected to reciprocate more than their activist informants? In
addressing these questions based on my experiences of doing fieldwork
at the Blender Institute in their production studio in Amsterdam, the
Netherlands, between 2014 and 2015, this essay presents a ‘thick ethical
description’ (Sayer, 2011, p. 144) that illuminates the complexity of eth-
ics and power dynamics that participation and reciprocity as a scholar in
activist practices may entail.
Arriving in the Field: Power and Positioning

Towards Activist Practices
When I began my research on the Blender Institute as a doctoral stu-
dent, I was not well prepared to handle the complexity of making
judgements about power, positioning and ethics when ‘in the field’. My
understanding of ethics was limited to the concern with the values and
power relations that govern the relationship between scholars and their
informants. Ethics in research practice, as I was trained, was about the
values that researchers are expected to adopt in relation to their inform-
ants, departing from the standpoint that as scholars, we have more power
over the relationship and thus more responsibilities in the relationship
with informants. The ways to practise such ethics included to pro-
tect individuals’ privacy and the right to individual autonomy through
informed consent, including the right to refuse to become a researched
160 J. VELKOVA
subject, as well as preventing harm (Deacon, Pickering, Golding, &

Murdock, 1999; Fisher & Anushko, 2008; Markham & Buchanan, n.d.;
Traianou, 2014). But arriving for the first time at the Blender Institute in
Amsterdam in the autumn of 2014, I had to rethink these assumptions,
alongside my initial idea of what my research would be about.
Entering the Blender Institute’s office, located in a popular gentrify-
ing district in Amsterdam, for the first time, I was welcomed by Ton,
the head of production and ‘benevolent dictator’ (O’Neil, 2014) of the
Blender software user community. In his private office, we sat to dis-
cuss my research interests and intentions as well as his own expectations
about my role as a researcher in their project. I introduced myself and
explained my hope to be allowed to be present on several occasions to
observe the ways in which the project and the community worked from
within their studio in Amsterdam in order to learn about their culture
of practice, goals and ambitions for change with their projects, as well
as about their alternative mode of organising cultural production. Ton
met my request positively, but put two conditions on it—I would be
allowed to become a participant-observer provided that I reported and
wrote about my research in progress and fieldwork observations contin-
uously on Blender’s production blog, and shared my research under an
open-access licence, ideally by starting my own blog. With this request,
he wanted to make sure that my presence and research would not just
benefit me, but also contribute to his own project by making me part of
it and by sharing the values of openness and mutual sharing which lay at
its core.
Ton’s request was legitimate in his expectation of reciprocity and rep-
resented a way to negotiate a symmetrical power position, ensuring that
my research would be useful to the Blender community and not just to
my academic career. However, it put me at unease as it simultaneously
collapsed several dominant assumptions of social research which I carried
with me—that the researcher has the power (and moral responsibility) to
choose her position (Markham & Buchanan, n.d.); that the researcher
should ideally work as a detached participant-observer in a fieldwork sit-
uation to maintain critical distance while becoming familiar with a cul-
ture of practice from within it (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007); and that
participatory research approaches are driven by scholars who search to
establish power symmetries and sometimes knowledge co-production
and solidarity strategies with their informants (Datta, 2018; Jeppesen,
Kruzynski, & Lakoff, 2014; Routledge & Derickson, 2015).
During my first visit to Blender I did not choose my position, I was

given a position. Classical handbooks on doing ethnographic fieldwork
elaborate extensively on how researchers should get access, including
by encouraging the use of impression-management tactics, and strate-
gies of disguise if considered necessary (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007,
pp. 65–68). But access is not gained by researchers, at least in contexts
of activist practices—it is given to them and its parameters are set by
the informants, as my first personal encounter with Blender suggested.
Moreover, recommendations about using disguise and other tactics dis-
regard the fact that we are not only researchers, but also sentient human
beings for whom social relations matter (Sayer, 2011). As such, the
arrival to a new research context and the social encounter with the peo-
ple whom one has never met requires emotional sensitivity, openness and
a desire to build a good social relation. This is a mutual process in which
the researcher cannot be assumed to be in a mighty power position—
it is a position in which power is negotiable, negotiated and established
continuously.
From my first day in Amsterdam, I was made into more than a
participant-observer through Blender Institute’s communicative prac-

tices. As I was interviewing and photographing the Blender open movie
participants, they were photographing and interviewing me. As I was
taking notes in my fieldwork diary, they made public notes about my
presence on their social media channels and website (Blender Institute,
2014b). Each Friday, the team would report on their YouTube chan-
nel about the progress of their work, and I was expected to join these
meetings and to report on my work and research as they had progressed
during the week. I felt as though I was both researching and being
researched, observant and being observed by the broader Blender com-
munity, members of which reacted and commented online on my pres-
ence and work, expressing both scepticism and enthusiasm. Czarniawska
calls this mode of ethnographic fieldwork ‘participative’, resulting in a
symmetric relation between researchers and informants, one in which
the researcher’s knowledge production and practices are laid open to
criticism: ‘A truly symmetric fieldwork consists not of “being nice to the
natives”, but of allowing oneself to be problematized in turn – at a cer-
tain cost to the researcher, of course’ (Czarniawska, 2007, p. 12).
The cost of my access to Blender’s everyday production practices was
to engage in public, online reciprocal communication about the process
of my knowledge production. My engagement in it was complicated by
162 J. VELKOVA
the fact that it was not me who chose the form or pace at which recipro-
cal communication would take place—it stemmed from and was aligned
with Blender Institute’s work framework and values. The weekly rhythm
of Blender’s production expected from me, like anyone else who was
part of the production, to create and communicate knowledge online
on a weekly basis while being immersed in the practice I studied. In my
position as an early-career scholar, I found it truly challenging to live up
to these expectations. I could not give form to and synthesise my knowl-
edge on a weekly basis, as I was also learning how to produce knowl-
edge, while juggling other obligations of graduate work such as teaching
and doing coursework.
Studying Blender was an important part of my research but it was
not all of it—I needed time to engage with theories, reflection and writ-
ing. The temporal re-orientation of my research which followed from
enacting a mode of symmetric fieldwork and reciprocal communication
as expected and practised by Blender would, unwittingly, also change
the premises of my research, subjecting it to the mode and temporality
of activist practice and film production which are very different from
those of scholarly work. My research would lose its scientific ground-
ing, I feared, and turn more into journalistic or creative work, becom-
ing a form of activism itself directed towards increasing transparency of
scholarly knowledge production which would take the form and mode of
Blender’s work, modulating it into another domain of practice.
Whether my fears were grounded or not could be debated, but the
broader question that they prompted is whether it is at all possible for
scholars not to be activists while researching activist practice, and who
decides on the form and object of this activism. What are the ethical and
epistemological consequences of making a specific form of activism into
a requirement for establishing a symmetric power relationship between
scholars and informants? And can or should we, as scholars, in turn expect
similar reciprocity from our informants, asking from them a deep, sym-
metric engagement with our scholarly work and our forms of knowledge
production? I believe so, if our relationship should be truly symmetric
and if it has to find expression through public communicative practice.
As activists care about their practice, so do we, as scholars care about our
work and hope that our knowledge production is socially relevant in help-
ing to bring about positive social change or understandings of change.
In coping with the expectations of the speed and form of my knowl-
edge production, I found myself willing to create distance that would
allow me space and time for reflection and critical thinking as a scholar,
and not as a participant immersed in an activist practice. I wanted to
erect boundaries between the categories of researcher, informant and
participant in the film production, despite the fact that the Blender com-
munity actively and persistently worked to erase and challenge these
boundaries with their own activism, which I initially had welcomed.
Eventually, I did so in my writings, which I oriented temporally, themat-
ically and media-wise towards different audiences—the researcher com-
munity and the Blender community, respectively.
In my first blog post after the first week in Amsterdam (Velkova,
2014), I decided to bring up mundane, everyday ‘behind-the-scenes’
activities which were not reported by the Blender participants them-
selves, such as cleaning, cooking and repairing, and my own feelings of
being there, without adding much reflection. I kept writing short blog
posts intermittently after each visit I made, while my first scholarly publi-
cation from this project came out almost ten months later and had a very
different focus, namely the relations of power and values of the Blender
community itself.
Writing at a different pace for different audiences, different kinds of
reflections had epistemological and ethical implications. To the extent
that my blog posts generated comments, questions and reactions from
the Blender community, I started treating them as more than mere brief
notes from my fieldwork experience—they became part of the research
material itself. The Blender community, in turn, interpreted my blog
posts as legitimising pieces of communication which proved the impor-
tance of their practice and increased its visibility, opening it to a broader
audience. On the other hand, my scholarly articles tried initially to
address and complicate the scholarly understandings about practices of
open cultural production departing from my fieldwork with Blender,
and later to explore tensions and potentially problematic implications for
independent cultural production practices, an aspect I discuss more in
detail in the next section.
The epistemological consequences of my approach were that the pro-
cess of knowledge production unfolded across multiple communicative
spaces and along different temporalities, in each of which the relation
between me and the Blender community had ultimately a different posi-
tioning and power configuration. On the Blender production blog and
my own blog, I maintained proximity and symmetry by reporting imme-
diate thoughts and reflections, mostly writing about the hidden aspects
164 J. VELKOVA
of production work which interested me and which I hoped to be of

interest to the broader Blender community too. Working on the schol-
arly articles in turn, I produced distance and re-affirmed my socio-critical
position as a scholar, and oriented my research to a different audience.
Expectedly, this different situatedness produced multiple, n on-mutually
exclusive forms of knowledge and understanding of the Blender com-
munity. These emphasised the relationality of my power position, which
was constantly shifting as I was navigating between the expectations
of Blender for my participation, and my training as a scholar which
demanded distance and time for reflection and learning.
In this context, the question about distance which the researcher
should or should not maintain must be expanded beyond ideas about the
degree of the researcher’s involvement in the activist or general, social
practices which she is studying. This distance is not at the level of expe-
rience, but at the level of temporal and intellectual detachment from
the field of practice which would allow the possibility for synthesis and
reflection in order to produce a critical understanding of the world.
Critique and Reciprocity
Navigating the ethics of reciprocal communication can become more
challenging as the research progresses, and as we get a more nuanced
understanding of the practices we study. When I began my research on
Blender’s practices, I came with my own assumptions about the nature of
their activism based on themes discussed in scholarly literature on hack-
tivism, peer-to-peer production and open culture movements. I expected
to see a volunteer-organised, technically savvy collective of self-trained
computer graphic artists who had a flat organisational structure and used
the Internet as a resource for working and organising film production in
a public way, working as ‘recursive publics’ (Kelty, 2008). I was excited
about this possibility and wanted to explore it further, by researching and
writing about it. Instead, during the fieldwork I observed how Blender
actively distanced themselves from open source and similar movements,
even though they used similar rhetoric and seemed to share similar values
such as the belief in the empowering potential of sharing resources such
as software, media and knowledge online, and in working collaboratively.
It became apparent to me that Blender sought to find ways to con-
front industrial cultures of secrecy in technological and media production
by way of aligning with the industry, and through establishing distance
from more radical communities such as the free software or free graph-
ics software movements, which were actively opposing industrial practice.
Blender participants went regularly to significant industry events, such
as Siggraph in Los Angeles, where they could meet Pixar, Dreamworks,
Autodesk and Adobe, and where they could show and discuss Blender
Institute’s public way of working based on sharing technologies and con-
tent under a Creative Commons licence.
However, this specific orientation of their practice also influenced
the organisation of film and technological production at the Blender
Institute. I noticed that in seeking alignment with the Hollywood com-
puter animation industry while distancing themselves from some of its
practices, Blender had internalised and replicated the gendered organi-
sation of labour common in US animation studios. There was only one
woman in a team of nearly twenty young, white, male participants in
Amsterdam, and I often heard sexist jokes at the lunch table which were
rarely reflected upon.
Another important difference from other commons-based,
open-source-oriented projects was that the core team of about fifteen
contributors working on Blender’s ongoing open film project were
not volunteers. Software developers, animators and film directors were
all professionals, who used to be volunteers but who were employed to
work on Blender’s new film project. Somewhat remarkably, the fund-
ing for the employees and participation in industrial events came from
Blender’s own software user community who provided economic sup-
port with the hope that it would lead to more technological features
being developed in their main work platform—the 3D animation suite
Blender provided in return for their donations (I have discussed these
dynamics extensively elsewhere, see Velkova, 2016a).
I further noticed that Blender’s practices of sharing software,
animation-related content and tutorials online were not merely benev-
olent, but strategic and their implications for the organisation of labour
internally led me to think of earlier accounts of ‘sweatshops’ in Silicon
Valley as documented by Andrew Ross (2004), where young, aspiring
and talented individuals were put to work under high time and produc-
tivity pressure with little economic compensation with the promise to
advance in their careers, reflecting the ‘spirit’ of late capitalism (Boltanski
& Chiapello, 2007). Team members admitted to me that sharing their
work online on a weekly basis caused them feelings of pressure, stress
and anxiety as they had to constantly demonstrate and prove their
166 J. VELKOVA
productivity and creativity, while almost all admitted that the salary they
got was much less than in a more traditional studio. They also felt that
as employees working on Blender’s latest film project, they could not
be critical or opt out from the intensity of their work, the productivity
demands and the exposure that their work got because it was encoded in
their work arrangement. Having become employees and not volunteers
anymore put conditions and pressure on their relation with Blender. In
effect, all participants in Amsterdam tended to work fourteen-hour work
days despite the official working hours being 8 am to 4 pm. Sandwich
lunches and ready-meals for dinner opened short time slots for a break.
Despite the pressure, the team members reasoned that working for
Blender was much better than for the industry, because it gave them more
creative autonomy and visibility through which they could build their
portfolios in a precarious freelance market for creative labour. For some of
the team members, this mode of work led them eventually to (temporary)
jobs in high-profile international productions, such as the Australian Lego
movie. Others eventually ended up suffering from depression.1
These observations made me question the extent to which Blender’s
practices, as I saw them in 2014 and 2015, represented a form of
activism at all and made me wonder about the nature of their politics.
Exposing the process of making software and animation films and shar-
ing technology and content as a media commons seemed to oppose
the practices of the Hollywood industry, making the case for activism.
Simultaneously, precisely this form of intense public communication of
work-in-progress also functioned as a mechanism for managerial control
of productivity. The rhetoric of openness was also used discursively as a
way for Blender to appeal to the benevolence of their practice, and use
it to raise economic resources for their own productions, participation in
which was highly selective, hierarchical and gendered. As one participant
commented, ‘the only thing that we do differently from them [Pixar] is
sharing’.
Blender’s practices appeared to me in a new light—not being about
empowering others, but about creating their own technological knowl-
edge and financial means which would allow them to align with indus-
try’s creative practice. My new understanding of their practices led me
1 I learned about these experiences in an informal follow-up which I did with some of the
Blender participants in 2018, two years after the official end of my research.
to the question of community ethics—how ethical was it for the Blender

Institute to regard the Blender user community as an asset whose mon-
etary and knowledge power could be mobilised and harvested for the
goals of one independent studio to gain more recognition within the
Hollywood industry? How ethical was it to skilfully use the language
of openness and sharing as a management technique, and as a strategy
to raise economic and cultural capital? And, to what extent could and
should I be critical of these ethics?
Some researchers have advocated that the study of activist practices
needs to be emancipatory and based on an ethics of knowledge
co-creation (Datta, 2018), underplaying the potential internal con-
tradictions and complexity of activist practices. At the same time, criti-
cal discourses related to activism may lead to its weakening as a political
practice in contexts where it is most efficient (Yang, 2016). Yet others
have instead taken contradictions and complexity as their point of depar-
ture to argue for the conflicting and mutually neutralising perspectives
of activist and scholarly practices even if they might be oriented towards
the same object (Lehtiniemi & Ruckenstein, 2019). Understanding
social practice implies learning about different values and meaning-mak-
ing practices, but it also includes their evaluation which adds a moral
and sentient dimension to the process. As Sayer (2011, p. 7) powerfully
states, ‘to understand someone is not necessarily to agree with them - it
opens up a space for public discussion’.
In trying to maintain reciprocal communication, I tried to open up a
communicative space in which to create a discussion about what I per-
ceived as problematic aspects of Blender’s practice. I began with synthe-
sising and explicating my concerns in two scholarly articles, the drafts of
which I shared with the Blender team in Amsterdam and asked them to
read and comment upon. In the first article, I reflected upon the history
of Blender, its commercial roots and orientation, and the use and pro-
duction of its own community as an economic and labour resource (see
Velkova & Jakobsson, 2017). I proposed to understand its practices as
shifting between multiple moral economies, those of the capitalist mar-
ket, the institutions of public funding and the commons, and also dis-
cussed how the project participants deliberately and unconsciously shift
between different, incommensurable regimes of values without noticing
the conflicts between them and their implications. In a second article,
I unpacked and problematised the transparency of Blender’s production
practices in relation to the organisation of labour, and its implications for
168 J. VELKOVA
producing power and difference within its own community of users and
supporters (Velkova, 2016b).
My intention with the articles was, on the one hand, to complicate
binary scholarly debates which disregarded the complexity of open cul-
ture and software practices, and, on the other hand, to complicate
and discuss Blender’s own understanding of their practices. Inspired
by Gabriella Coleman’s (2013) anthropological work on hackers and
techno-communities in which she asked key informants to read and com-
ment on her texts as a way to confirm or discuss her way of represent-
ing them, I was compelled by this approach to maintain symmetry with
informants and get their input on my scholarly writing. While I feared
that my texts might be perceived as too critical, I also hoped to open a
space for discussion through them, and a dialogue about my representa-
tion of Blender’s practices.
At least three participants in the Blender production in Amsterdam
read the articles, without much response. One of them commented that
the texts were very academic and acknowledged my need to be critical.
Another expressed a sense of general agreement with what I had written,
but we could not open up a discussion to elaborate more. I hypothe-
sised that perhaps, being used to visual forms of communication, for the
Blender team it might have been difficult to engage with scholarly forms
of communication, even though all of the team members had academic
training. Another possibility was that they simply were not interested in
debating or reflecting upon their practice, or were too busy under the
stress to produce creative output on a weekly basis.
I changed my approach and tried to have an informal discussion
with some of them in the office. I spoke to the only female partici-
pant about her experiences being the only woman there, but she did
not comment much and did not seem to find it problematic. I spoke
with others about the rhetoric of openness and its strategic uses, relat-
ing it to the experiences of Blender participants themselves. This form
of communication did not yield much either. It could have been that
we all experienced an unease to discuss such themes directly, or it could
indeed have been a simple lack of interest to engage in reflection. The
employer–employee relationship under which all Blender participants
in Amsterdam worked might have been an additional hindrance to
engaging in a more open discussion. I tried occasionally to have a criti-
cal discussion with the head of the project, but this too proved hard as
he was convinced that their practices were much better than those of
Hollywood, and that Blender’s mode of work should be seen as a model

which others could follow.
A third attempt that I made to have a public discussion about the
ethical aspects of Blender’s practices was to address them in front of
the broader Blender community. At multiple earlier occasions, I had
received hints by Blender Institute’s leader that it would be desirable if
I presented my work at the annual Blender conference, a yearly event in
Amsterdam during which about 250 software developers and computer
graphic artists who use Blender in their daily media production gathered
and showcased their work. I was reluctant to do so early in my fieldwork
as I wanted to have time for reflection and to form my understanding of
their practices. Today, I would have perhaps considered using the con-
ference to engage in more participatory forms of research through work-
shops with the Blender community, but back then, as a doctoral student
I was shy to experiment with community events. I prepared a proposal
for the 2016 annual Blender conference and presented my research in
front of an audience of about fifty people.
In my presentation I first situated Blender’s practices in a longer his-
torical context in order to emphasise continuities and differences from
earlier similar practices, after which I moved on to discuss their prac-
tices with reference to my arguments from the articles, concluding with
three areas of tensions and questions. The first tension I brought up was
between benevolent sharing of digital artefacts online and the uneven
power structures which were produced as a result, both wittingly and
unwittingly. The second tension concerned the lack of more film projects
who used the model of Blender, given that the software and the model
were available, which I discussed in terms of the hidden capital that
the Blender Institute possessed, including cultural and personal capital
within the technological and creative industries, which most other mem-
bers of the community did not have. The third tension was that, despite
all sharing online, few remixes or reuses of the creative works made by
Blender existed, in part because of the power and capital differences, but
also because in an artistic field of production original work is simply val-
ued more, and to make original work through remixing could be more
demanding than not doing so. I received no questions on my presenta-
tion, with only a brief comment afterwards by the Blender project leader
that I could have used more visual slides.
A few hours later one community member came to me to ask for
suggestions on how to address the gender imbalance in the Blender
170 J. VELKOVA
community. Another one came to express his appreciation of my

historical contextualisation. With a third one I had a heated discussion,
in which he claimed that Blender’s commitment to openness and shar-
ing software and media content was never intended to empower others
to make films or remixes—it was to develop a software platform for the
Blender Institute to make films. A fourth participant admitted that shar-
ing Blender’s films as a media commons had a mere branding effect, and
did little to produce digital remix cultures, because it was technologically
and artistically impossible for others to work with the content shared by
Blender. While these comments confirmed my criticisms, I felt that I had
failed to engage the community in a constructive discussion about some
problematic aspects of their practices.
I found this surprising in the light of Blender’s insistence on maintain-
ing reciprocal communication. It might have been that I did not have
the proper slides, the proper language, or the proper timing to address
criticisms with the Blender community. Yet, it could also have been that
nobody was interested in my socio-critical perspective which sought to
explain and discuss activist practices which, instead of producing spec-
tacular media content in an economically and organisationally efficient
way, also produced power and gender imbalances in the Blender com-
munity itself. The lack of response to or discussion of my work made our
reciprocal communication appear as a one-sided endeavour, in which I
seemed to unilaterally work to represent the complexity of their activist
practices, which in turn had no value for Blender.
The Ethics of Reciprocal Communication

Altogether, these experiences illuminate the complexity, temporality, and
spatial orientation of practising an ethics of reciprocal communication,
and the extent to which each of these dimensions impacts the power
relations between researchers and activists.
Reciprocal communication is at its core about negotiation of power
and striving to produce a symmetric relationship between researchers
and activists. It is a dynamic process which does not begin or end with
getting informed consent, or reaching a mutual agreement on the terms
of access and research. It is a social relation which is continuously pro-
duced, reproduced and contested by both researchers and participants
in activist practices. As a social relation, it also touches upon multiple
fields of social practice and is informed by the social and cultural capital
of both researchers and participants, as well as the values which guide

their practice. This in turn implies that the researcher does not have an
a priori powerful position when arriving to a field of activist practice, but
that this position emerges in the negotiation of symmetry, and in taking
a stance in questions of distance and proximity.
Decisions on such matters are not only ethical, but also epistemo-
logical and are likely to differ depending on the researcher’s position
as a scholar. As a junior, female researcher, I needed distance and time
away from my informants in the beginning of my research, which more
senior scholars might not find necessary or could find other ways to
address. Importantly, though, the balance between proximity and dis-
tance changed with the progress of the research. While at first it was the
Blender Institute that insisted on my proximity and communication of
knowledge-in-the-making, as I actually started to produce such knowl-
edge, I started pushing more for the involvement of Blender with my
work. As a consequence, we both struggled on different occasions with
engaging and disengaging from each other’s work.
Understanding and engaging in scholarly work is rarely a goal for
activists, but the lack of such engagement ultimately may lead to the
production of distance, and in producing the researcher as a detached,
distanced observer, even when there is a mutual desire for a symmetric
relationship and for the erasure of such distance. Reciprocity and sym-
metry need to be mutual, and should not vanish when disagreements or
criticisms appear. They should be taken as an opportunity to discuss both
the ethics of scholarly knowledge production and the ethics of activist
practices. How to open up such a discussion and make activists interested
in scholarly work emerges as an important question which researchers of
activist practice should seek to explore.
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CHAPTER 9
Researcher Ethics: Between Axiological

Reasoning and Scientific Discussion
Gökçe Tuncel
In 2011, two young men in Istanbul came up with the idea of a citizen
journalism news outlet which would operate mainly on Twitter (https://
140journos.com/). The idea was to challenge the politically biased
mainstream media in Turkey. The name of the outlet, 140journos, would
come from the previous 140-character limit for Twitter posts. Their aim
was to transform Turkish society through creative and inclusive journalis-
tic practices.
Until January 2017, more than 500 people, all unpaid citizen journal-
ists across Turkey, regularly sent them content. 140journos was filtering,
verifying, and then diffusing such content through its WhatsApp channel
and Twitter account. Beginning in January 2017, they have undergone
an editorial transformation and now focus on weekly documentary essays
and photojournalism (similar to Vice News1) rather than engaging in
1 https://www.vice.com/fr/topic/vice-news.
G. Tuncel (*)
Centre d’Études Sociologiques et Politiques Raymond Aron,
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4_9
176 G. TUNCEL
citizen journalism. The news outlet has 258,000 followers on Twitter,

114,490 subscribers on Facebook (as of 11 October 2019), and all its
content is free.
This chapter is based on an empirical research project that was carried
out in two different time periods. The first interviews and observations
took place between October 26–30, 2015, and January 4–5, 2016, with
the outlet’s two co-founders, its two editors, and two employees from
their subsidiary advertising agency (established to fund 140journos). The
second round of interviews was conducted in 2017 with one of the edi-
tors, one former employee of the 140journos’ advertising agency, and a
former editor. To protect their anonymity, the names of the interviewees
have been changed.
The objective of this chapter is to reflect upon the ways in which
a researcher can conduct scientifically rigorous research without
reproducing and complying with non-ethical practices disclosed by
participants. When I noticed a change in 140journos’ values and com-
mitments, I was no longer in the position of a researcher that works
with a group whose values I shared and respected. What were the
outcomes of this confrontation? What were my ethical dilemmas and
contradictions, as a researcher who is critical of one of the rare and
successful grassroots media outlets in the authoritarian political atmos-
phere of Turkey?
In recent years, the Turkish media, especially those who have tried
to remain more or less objective and critical, have been put under
serious government pressure resulting in financial reprisals for media
owners or jail time for journalists. Many of the journalists who dared
to criticize Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan were either
imprisoned or fired by agencies, asked to do so by the government.
140journos not only survived in this authoritarian climate but also
flourished. The main reason they avoided repression was that, even
though the founders may be personally extremely critical of the
government and are closer to the political left, they systematically
refused to choose sides, covering news from right-wing and Islamic
circles (traditionally ignored by the leftist or the Kemalist-nationalist
media), and avoiding the use of biased language when covering gov-
ernment policies. Instead, they adopted what they call a “radically
objective approach,” avoiding taking a position for or against the
government.
9 RESEARCHER ETHICS: BETWEEN AXIOLOGICAL REASONING … 177
From Citizen Media

to Audiovisual Content Producer
Clemencia Rodriguez defines “citizen media” as the medium through

which emancipatory practices and new world visions emerge (Rodriguez,
2001). In fact, citizen media imply a political auto-education since the
act of becoming a producer of information is in its own right an empow-
ering practice. The end product is less relevant than the production pro-
cess considering the fact that the use of media technologies to make films
as well as radio and television programs serves as the basis to establish
the capacity to challenge social issues. Citizen media becomes “the lived
experience of non-violent ways to manage conflict, deal with difference,
and interact with one another” (Rodriguez, 2011, p. 254).
On the other hand, Chris Atton defines “alternative media as much
by their capacity to generate non-standard, […] methods of creation,
production and distribution” enabling broader participation (Atton,
2002, p. 4). This illustrates that there are many different and contra-
dictory definitions of alternative media in the present scientific liter-
ature. Sandra Jeppesen points out that “to clarify our understanding
of alternative media and its potential challenges to power, we need to
examine the different theoretical foundations and underlying ideological
perspectives” (Jeppesen, 2016, p. 56). She identifies four key categories:
Do It Yourself media and culture, community and citizen media, criti-
cal media, and autonomous and radical media (social movement media).
Each category is then distinguished according to three criteria: content
(politics, goals), process (organization, structure), and social movement
actions and interactions (Jeppesen, 2016, p. 66). This categorization
allows us to avoid binary definitions when defining alternative media
such as professional journalists belonging to mainstream media versus
amateur or citizen journalists belonging to the field of alternative media.
It introduces a nuanced approach by giving importance to practices,
modes of organization, as well as ideological orientations. According to
this categorization, 140journos, before its editorial transformation in
2017, seemed to belong to the categories of critical media and citizen
media. Its content aimed to engage civil society through the representa-
tion of opinions and actions coming from different ideological perspec-
tives, which falls in the category of citizen media. At the same time, by
its ambition to be a solution for the highly polarized media space of
178 G. TUNCEL
Turkey it defied mainstream media and, thus, can also be considered

counter-hegemonic, which characterizes the content of critical media. In
terms of process, we find skill sharing and participatory media practices
(citizen media) as well as a vertical internal structure (critical media).
Lastly, when we look at the criteria of social movement and interactions,
although 140journos do not report on anti-capitalist social movements,
and thus cannot be considered fully aligned with critical media, they had
an organic link with the progressive and anti-governmental social move-
ment that took place in 2013 in Turkey (radical and critical media). At
the same time, it aims for community building by engaging citizens in
news production (citizen media).
In a repressive political context where it is nearly impossible for a
news outlet to oppose the politics of the government openly and pub-
licly, it is very difficult if not impossible for an alternative media out-
let to pursue their project without serious repercussions. For example,
Sendika.org, founded in 2001, is known for its coverage of Kurdish
issues and was among the first few dozen sites blocked by the Turkish
government after the armed conflict in July 2015 between the Turkish
government and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The government
controls access via Turk Telekom, the formerly state-owned Turkish tel-
ecommunication company. Upon receiving orders from the Information
and Communication Technologies Authority (ICTA), the national tele-
communications regulatory body, Turk Telekom blocked access of their
Domain Name System (DNS) and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
That is why it was possible to bypass the block by moving the site to
another address under a different name. This worked until Turk Telekom
and ICTA discovered the new domain and blocked access once again.
The blocked site appears in online searches but when clicked on, a mes-
sage appears saying that the site is out of access by court order. Sendika.
org responded to the access block by registering a sequence of names,
e.g. Sendika62.org as of December 2017, each of which has been
blocked in succession.
When we look at the 140journos case, we see a media project that was
originally founded in order to create news content by interacting with
the people on the ground who send reports and raw information. The
aim was to resist the increasing political polarization in Turkey by cov-
ering news not only coming from an educated elite but also from differ-
ent and opposing communities such as hard-line Islamists and LGBTI
communities.
The project had to adapt itself increasingly to the political conjuncture

by changing its editorial line altogether and becoming more professional
and less oriented to amateur and citizen media. A less citizen-oriented
and more professional editorial line meant that the outlet changed both
its content and process.
In terms of content, the project no longer aims to engage civil society
by interacting with people on the ground due to a decreasing number of
citizen journalists because of increasing political repression. In 2016, the
number of citizen journalists decreased from 750 to 500. Citizen journal-
ists, especially in the Kurdish region, were not able to cover events due to
the military curfew imposed by the Turkish authorities during the armed
conflict. After the military coup attempt on July 15, 2016, and the sub-
sequent declaration of a state of emergency, 140journos sources chose
to remain underground. Although their editors did not mention directly
the recently intensified repressive politics of the government, it is hard to
imagine that they transformed 140journos only because of the decreasing
number of citizen journalists. They no longer cover protests, and when
they create dossiers or mini videos on current political issues, they do it
in an artistically edited but neutral format without any political commen-
tary. For example, in the video called “Conservative Democrat,”2 while
briefly presenting public discourses which announce the introduction of
conservative practices to Turkish society, potential impacts on Turkish civil
society are not mentioned. In short, this artistic turn can be understood as
part of an editorial strategy to avoid possible government censorship while
enlarging the audience and optimizing product quality.
In terms of process, the outlet recruited a number of professionals such
as photojournalists, video editors and art directors; it no longer practices
skill sharing or participatory media practices directly with citizens on the
ground. This means that the editors do not interact with citizens in order
to collect, verify, and publish news sent by citizens. If they do events such
as “backstage,”3 where they present the production process of their docu-
mentaries, these do not include direct participation of citizens in the pro-
cess of production.
2 “Conservative Democrat,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=199&v=s-
reUi-ahVdw, 140journos, 25 August 2017.

3 “How to prepare a 140journos documentary?” https://www.facebook.com/140
journos/photos/a.495839613778499/3095246017171166/?type=3&theater,
140journos, 30 December, 2019
180 G. TUNCEL
I argue that on January 19, 2017, 140journos became an audiovisual

content producer and stopped functioning as citizen media aimed at
community building and social change. This political and editorial shift
has opened up a range of interrogations, contradictions, and ethical
dilemmas in regard to my relation, as a researcher, with the research sub-
ject. In order to comprehend how and in which stages of my research I
was confronted with ethical dilemmas, I will conduct an auto-analysis of
the research process. First, I will reflect on the choice of my research sub-
ject. What were the impacts of the sociopolitical context on this choice?
What were my motivations to study an activist media project? This reflec-
tion will be followed by a critical discussion of the first phase of my work
on 140journos (from October 2015 to January 2016). Were there any
normative orientations in this work? If so, how did I as a researcher
establish distance (or not) from my subject of study? This critical discus-
sion of my research process will serve as a tool to understand and ana-
lyze the contradictions and tensions that emerged when it was no longer
possible for me to share and respect the values of the subject of study.
Lastly, I will show the particular ethical difficulties when working on a
political subject of study whose ideological perspectives are or are not in
conformity with the researcher’s own political opinions.
140journos: Founders and Origins

The two co-founders (C. and E.) of 140journos decided to create an
alternative news outlet when they realized that news about the Roboski
Massacre was accessible only on Twitter and not in the mainstream
media. The massacre took place on December 28, 2011, when 36
Turkish citizens were killed by the Turkish armed forces who mistook
some smugglers for PKK fighters and carried out an airstrike. Fascinated
by the abundance of information on Twitter, one of the co-founders had
the idea to record events with a mobile phone to inform citizens by dif-
fusing raw information on Twitter without any commentary.
After quitting college in his senior year, C. started working as a
cultural and artistic project coordinator for the municipality of Şişli in
Istanbul. When he was organizing a flash mob for a municipality pro-
ject on social awareness of blindness, he contacted E., at the time a
university student, and 14 of his classmates, in order to engage them
in the project. They had co-founded in 2010, during their senior
year at the University of Bahçeşehir, the Institute of Creative Minds
(Yaratıcı Fikirler Enstitüsü4), a university project that organized events

such as flash mobs5 and other cultural events. Having previously organ-
ized a flash mob, the Institute participated in the municipality project.
Later C. quit his job to work with the Institute of Creative Minds.
Together they transformed the university project into a more institu-
tionalized organization that encompassed innovative projects such as
140journos as well as marketing and advertising projects such as the
advertising agency created in order to fund 140journos.
The two co-founders do not have a political activism background;
they define themselves as concerned citizens who are well informed
about the history of modern Turkey.
Choice of Subject: Normative Orientations

and Preconceptions of the Researcher
The Gezi movement, which 140Journos reported on, was initially

triggered by a core group of protesters from the Chamber of Architects
and environmentalists who organized concerts, sit-ins, and partly occupied
the park as of May 27, 2013. The park was one of the few remaining green
spaces in central Istanbul and a project was underway to build a shopping
mall on the land occupied by the park. After the first couple of days of
clashes between the police and the protestors, the police withdrew and left
the park and the neighboring Taksim Square, which had been occupied by
protestors for more than two weeks. The social and political outburst gen-
erated by the occupation spread to almost all of the cities in Turkey with at
least 3.6 million active protesters countrywide.6
The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) was
a defining feature of the repertoire of contention during the 2011 social
movements from Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring (Mattoni, 2013,
pp. 39–57). Coupled with face-to-face communication, such digital
tools and platforms as Twitter and Facebook helped to set the scene and
co-orchestrate actions by soft leaders who emerged as individuals capable
4 “YratıcıFikirler Enstitüsü,” https://enstitu.com.tr/.

5A flash mob is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an
unusual and seemingly pointless act for a brief time, and then quickly disperse, often for the
purposes of entertainment, satire, and artistic expression.
6 “Emniyete gore, Gezi Parkı şüphelilerinin yüzde 78’i Alevi!” T24, 25 November 2013,
http://t24.com.tr/haber/gezide-kac-eylem-gerceklesti-kac-kisi-goz-altina-alindi,244706.
182 G. TUNCEL
of directing increasing frustration and constructing an emotional space in

which collective action could unfold (Gerbaudo, 2012, p. 40). As public
square movements, such protests opened up new spaces within the pub-
lic sphere in which individuals could engage in new forms of citizenship
and democracy through humor, art, and performances (Göle, 2014).
ICTs were used to produce and broadcast a creative narrative, to make
the protesters and their demands visible, and in many cases to bypass
mainstream media censorship. Use of ICTs was also a crucial part of the
Gezi demonstrations. Although 140journos was founded in late 2011,
it was only after the Gezi protests in the summer of 2013 that it became
popular and reached a nation-wide audience, mainly due to the mobiliza-
tion of a mass number of citizens who became journalists by covering the
Gezi protests, primarily on Twitter.
Whereas international news channels such as the BBC or CNN were
covering the protests, CNN Türk, a franchise of CNN, chose to broad-
cast a documentary on penguins during the peak of the events on May
31, 2013. As the protests progressed, more or less everyone became
aware of mainstream media’s submission to government pressure as
either broadcasts were politically biased or outlets proactively resorted
to auto-censorship (Yüksek, 2015). The (lack of) interaction with main-
stream media reinforced moral and emotional indignation and con-
solidated the injustice (the identification of harm produced by human
actors) and identity (the identification of a specific adversary) compo-
nents of the movement (Gamson, 1992).7 Upset by the lack of media
attention and eager to make themselves and the movement nation-
ally and internationally visible, many protesters became news produc-
ers themselves. This tendency manifested itself through massive use of
social media platforms (mainly Twitter) and led to the emergence of
many activist news channels (blogs, tumblr, YouTube, etc.). These were
dedicated to reporting and facilitating communication and coordination
among activists as well as to documenting and archiving the protests.
Among these channels were: “Everywhere taksim”8 a website created
to record and denounce human rights violations during the Gezi move-
ment; the blog “Delilim var” (“I have proof”) created to expose the
7 Collective actions frames have three major components—injustice, identity, and agency.
The latter defines the belief in the possibility of changing conditions through collective
actions.
8 http://everywheretaksim.net/.
proof (photos) of crimes committed by police forces against protesters;

and “Parklar bizim,”9 (“the parks are ours”), a blog where one can find
debriefings of public general assemblies organized in almost every neigh-
borhood of Istanbul.
The importance of social media during the protests is also evi-
dent in statistics. The number of active Twitter users in Turkey
went from 1.8 million on May 20, 2013, to ten million less than one
month later. On May 29, 2013, more than seven million tweets were
tweeted, most of them carrying a hashtag10 related to Gezi. On the
following day, after disproportionate police intervention against the
protesters, the number of tweets skyrocketed to over 18 million
(Yüksek, 2015, p. 7).
The choice of 140journos as a subject of study is directly linked to the
Gezi movement. After getting my Bachelor’s degree in France, I partici-
pated as a protester in the Gezi park occupation in Istanbul. This was my
first participation in a political movement. The main reason I had never
participated in protests before Gezi was the traumatic left-wing politi-
cal heritage of my family. Just like most of the post-1980 military coup
generation, certain members of my family were extreme left-wing activ-
ists who had suffered greatly from violent state repression in the 1980s
(Cormier, 2017).11 The Gezi movement radically shifted my perception
and understanding of democratic political protest. Because of the move-
ment’s characteristics, it opened up a new field of possibility where it was
possible to be political without identifying myself or the modes of action
of the protesters with a radical left tradition, marked by the heavy col-
lective trauma in Turkey. Gezi Park was also particularly significant to
me as I spent more than four years of my life walking in the streets of
Beyoğlu (the neighborhood where the park is situated) where my high
school was located. I felt directly concerned with the urban development
plans for the park and decided to do my part to protect it by joining
the movement. The year that followed the Gezi movement, I decided to
apply for a graduate degree and write a dissertation on the political use
9 http://parklarbizim.blogspot.com/.
10 Hashtag is a type of tag used on social networks such as Twitter and other micro blog-
ging services, allowing users to apply dynamic, user-generated tagging that makes it possi-
ble for others to easily find messages with a specific theme or content.
11 Headed by Chief of the General Staff Kenan Evren, this coup d’état was carried out
under the pretext of stopping the violent conflict between far right and far left activist.
184 G. TUNCEL
of new ICTs. In my second year of graduate studies (2015), I decided to

conduct an empirical study on the activist media outlet, 140journos, that
I had first begun to follow on Twitter during the Gezi Park protests in
2013.
This biographical description of how I came to be interested in
140journos can be seen at first as anecdotal. However, it had a decisive
impact on the construction of my theoretical framework and how I per-
ceived and analyzed the actions of 140journos during my fieldwork. In
2015, when I started to put together the theoretical framework of my
empirical research on 140journos (the research questions, hypothesis,
and interview questions) I had an implicit and unconscious objective that
I did not acknowledge at the time. This objective was to ensure a form
of legitimation of the media outlet’s mode of organization and actions
by studying and eventually writing an article about it.
What were my illusions, normative orientations, and preconceptions
about 140journos and how were they reflected in my research? I will
respond to this question by explaining the construction of my study’s theo-
retical framework. Then, I will analyze the research methods that I applied
during my fieldwork. Finally, I will critically review my research results.
My first research question was as follows: How and by which process
did 140journos negotiate its identity and its activist media actions in
the Turkish media space in order to form an oppositional public space?
Developed by critical theory scholar Oskar Negt, the notion of opposi-
tional public space is a theoretical reply to Jürgen Habermas’s concept
of the bourgeois public sphere (Habermas, 1988). Negt’s objective was
to enrich the notion of public sphere by introducing the plebeian p ublic
sphere (Negt, 2007). Whereas Habermas pays attention to the liberal
model of the bourgeois public sphere and argues that reaching consensus
constitutes its basis, Negt reintroduces conflict as the core motor of the
plebeian, or oppositional public space. With Habermas, Negt acknowl-
edges the media also play a key role in the formation of the oppositional
public sphere. The media represent a “genre intended to increase the
possibility of public expression of interests and needs of human beings
who find few channels […] to make their voices, opinions and concep-
tions of the world heard” (Negt, 2007, p. 162). When the apparatuses of
state domination, political parties, or corporations appropriate this media
space, the bourgeois public space strengthens. This in turn makes it more
difficult, if not impossible, to hear the voices and perceive the lived expe-
riences of people who are not in the bourgeois public space. Media space
becomes a second reality that functions for the preservation of the sta-
tus quo and therefore merely duplicates and repeats established norms. A
functional and political media space would be based on “lived situations
and a political creativity that opens up perspectives, [to] enrich the field
of possibility for political actions” (Negt, 2007, p. 165).
Building on this notion, I argued in my dissertation that 140journos,
as an activist media outlet that found an audience and a reason to exist
through participation of a social movement (the Gezi Park movement),
were contributing to the ongoing formation of an oppositional public
space. At the time, according to my observations, one of the indications
of this contribution was how 140journos was aiming at building a media
space that expressed the perceptions and opinions of not only one part
of the population but all of Turkey. At this point of theoretical construc-
tion, I did not include in my research how I came to be interested with
140journos or the reasons behind my motivation.
When I was at 140journos conducting my fieldwork, I had very lit-
tle distance from my subject of study because of my personal history
in the Gezi Park movement, and therefore I had a tendency to idealize
the subject of study. After the Gezi movement, mainstream media was
criticized and citizens were investing in websites, blogs, and social net-
works, such as Twitter, for political use. In the context of high grassroots
political mobilization, I associated 140journos with the spirit of the Gezi
movement—progressive, democratic, innovative, horizontally structured,
anti-governmental, and capable of triggering social change. The impact
of this idealization on my work could have been minimized by integrat-
ing a self-reflection on my personal and political motivations on the sub-
ject of study. I had chosen, however, to adopt an ethnographic research
method for the field research precisely to overcome such difficulties and
take a certain distance from my subject. But access to the field appeared
to be particularly limited, making it difficult to apply an ethnographic
research method for this study.
Obstacles of Fieldwork
and Emerging Ethical Dilemmas
After completing my empirical research in 2016, as I was still in con-

tact with my interviewees, I learned that all the employees of the ad
agency had resigned after another employee who had resigned was una-
ble to get his last salary due to a late submission. The ad team defended
186 G. TUNCEL
their co-worker claiming that refusing to pay the salary was unprofes-
sional. Their criticism was met by a rather negative response. Being sub-
ject to work overload and frequent mobbing by one of the founders, the
team had decided to resign after this incident which proved to be the
final straw. According to my interviewees, this was not the first time that
employees, for similar reasons, resigned from 140journos or the adver-
tisement team.
I was deeply shocked and disappointed with this news because during
my fieldwork I had not observed any tensions between the ad agency,
co-founders, and editors of 140journos. The reasons behind this lack
of observation were my limited access to the field, and the fact that
I did not review or adapt my research methods during the fieldwork
when I encountered obstacles.
My first contact with 140journos was made through an employee of
its advertising agency. This employee was my high school friend, and
it was she who introduced me to the co-founders as well as to the edi-
tors of 140journos. Because I was friends with someone who worked
at 140journos, I was able to stay at the agency during the day when
conducting fieldwork. Nevertheless, I felt that my presence was only tol-
erated and I was not allowed to enter and exit the room of editors as
I wished, unlike the room of the ad team. The ad team was physically
separated from the 140journos editorial team. Each time the 140journos
editorial team had a meeting they closed the doors, and the ad team
was not allowed to enter. That is why my interaction with the employ-
ees of the ad agency was more frequent and informal compared to the
editors with whom interaction was less frequent and more formalized. It
was impossible to adopt a participant observer research method engag-
ing with the editorial team in this internal work configuration. Proposing
my participation in the work would have been unnatural since I was not
allowed to have a view on their processes of work and production such as
meetings, editorial discussions, and the like.
I learned from the co-founders that I was not the first researcher
who came to the 140journos to conduct interviews. This was particu-
larly evident during the interviews with the editors and co-founders.
Although the interviews lasted more than one hour, their responses were
highly constructed and formal, including theoretical perspectives on
140journos. They told me how the project was born, how they devel-
oped it, and what the novelties were compared to other alternative media
in Turkey. During the interviews, none of my interlocutors mentioned
what they thought, personally, of alternative media and of 140journos

and did not mention any criticism or difficulties with the outlet. In short,
the material collected from the interviews was superficial. The latter was
linked partially to the lack of confidence of my research interlocutors in
me: I was a Turkish researcher living abroad and producing academic
material in French or English, meaning that my work would not be
immediately accessible to them. Writing a critical article on 140journos
could damage the image of the news outlet which was just taking off,
gaining popularity in a context where the competition between alterna-
tive news outlets was very high due to the arrival of new actors in the
media space after 2013.
My fieldwork also included informal discussions with my friend on
her work experience at the ad agency. Except for small complaints about
workload, she did not broach any other criticism of the work environ-
ment at 140journos or the ad agency. After four days in the field, I
understood that it was not possible to have more access to the field by
directly observing or integrating with the editorial team by maintaining
the position of researcher. As with other researchers who had interviewed
them, I was expected to exit the premises of 140journos after finishing
my interviews. Since I was at 140journos during the entire day, after the
interviews, my presence was becoming more troubling and less tolerated.
That is why I ended my field research after completing my interviews and
only four days of observation.
Because I was sharing ideological inspirations and the editorial poli-
tics of 140journos, I did not include in my analysis, at this phase of my
research, my field notes about spatial organization of the work environ-
ment and its implications on production processes of either the adver-
tising agency or the editorial team. Furthermore, I did not critically
examine the limited access to the field provided, and the ways in which
the editorial team as well as the co-founders dealt with my presence, as a
researcher, during the four days of observation. Instead, I focused on the
analysis of their content and objectives, and how this alternative media
might (or might not) engender a substantial change in the media space
of Turkey.
At the time 140journos was undergoing its editorial transformation,
I contacted one of its editors and did a brief Skype interview, as it was
impossible for me to go to Turkey for another period of ethnographic
field research. I was planning to do further field research during the sum-
mer in order to understand the changes in 140journos and deepen my
188 G. TUNCEL
observations from the first empirical study. Once again, the editor was
highly formal in their responses during the Skype interview, which made
me understand that it might be necessary to adopt a more participatory
ethnographic method. After some time, another friend of mine became
interested in 140journos and applied for an editor position. During our
informal conversations, she talked about how 140journos was organizing
a data collection event. The event was open to everyone and consisted of
collecting information on, for example, a specific period of political his-
tory in Turkey. The participants would be trained on how to collect data
but would not be paid for the work they were producing for 140journos,
the work that would be used in the videos and documentary reporting
of 140journos. Another person present for this conversation commented
that the event of 140journos was in fact labor exploitation, thus highly
unethical. According to him, 140journos was obtaining substantial data
to be used in its content and was obtaining it for free under the pretext
of providing free training on data collection and research. The first friend
broached this subject with one of the co-founders during the event, sug-
gesting that maybe they should think about a form of payment for this
“free” data collection provided by the participants. Her proposal was not
only met by a negative response but the co-founder also told my friend
that I myself was banned from 140journos because, according to him,
I was accusing them of labor exploitation.
Because of this ban, my research methods were now limited to inter-
views with the friend who agreed to talk about her work experience at
140journos emphasizing the heavy workload and the pressure to finish
assignments by working overtime till very late as well as on weekends
without any extra compensation. However, she was highly anxious about
the publication of an article including her statements. She refused to give
me the contact information of interns who were, according to her, badly
treated. Internships were unpaid and neither meals nor transportation
were compensated. I also conducted a short interview with two former
ad agency employees. They asked me not to include their comments on
140journos in my work because they were afraid of possible repercus-
sions for their careers.
The numerous obstacles that I encountered during this second
attempt at fieldwork demonstrate particular difficulties of conducting
an empirical study on a news outlet that is born and has flourished in
a specific sociopolitical context. First, the circle of alternative media (as
opposed to established mainstream media) and of advertising agencies in
Istanbul is relatively small. More or less everyone knows each other. This
is because of the circulation of the employees. It is common that they
resign, change companies, and then return to the original company in
order to negotiate a higher salary or better position. One of the former
employees of the 140journos ad agency returned to the international ad
agency where she was employed before 140journos. This is no doubt
one of the reasons why my research interlocutors were very formal and
reserved during the interviews and asked me not to use their criticisms
in my publications—they were being careful to prevent potential rum-
ors that might affect their future integration into another news outlet or
advertising agency.
Second, the rapidly changing nature of the subject of study (a news
outlet operating on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and
YouTube) makes the research field hard to grasp and calls for a review
of research methods rather frequently, for example, during the field
research. The transformation from an idealistic grassroots news out-
let, inspired by a broad-based social movement, to an institutional-
ized audiovisual content producer was relatively rapid. I finished the
first phase of my research in January 2016 and exactly one year later
140journos was undergoing a total transformation in terms of both con-
tent and production processes.
Third, taking into account the obstacles encountered during the first
phase of field research, I might have done things otherwise. For exam-
ple, I might have waited before contacting the editor for a Skype inter-
view, and instead tried once again to do ethnographic field research. Or,
instead of contacting the editor of 140journos directly, I could have par-
ticipated in their events that are open to everyone outside of 140journos.
Additionally, depending on the evolution of my relationship with them,
I could have proposed to contribute to their work, while explaining how
I was conducting my research study with every step.
Fourth, the political context of Turkey adds another layer of difficulty
to the field. After the Gezi Park movement in 2013, the media space
underwent a reconfiguration by an explosion of alternative media, grass-
roots media platforms, and citizen journalism practices. This reconfigu-
ration created new alliances, rivalries, and political as well as economic
opportunities, such as international funding, substantially transforming
the relations of power of the media space. In this context, while I was
conducting my initial field research, editors, ad agency employees, and
the public all saw 140journos as a small, amateur, idealist and activist
190 G. TUNCEL
news outlet associated with the values and claims of the Gezi movement.
This vision was also valid for me, as a young politically engaged
researcher who saw at 140journos the promise of social change, a form
of continuation of the Gezi movement through revised media practices.
This idealized vision, and the rapid transformation of 140journos, cou-
pled with limited access to the field, made it difficult to go beyond the
surface of social phenomenon and thus resulted in a lack of observa-
tion of the tensions between the co-founders and employees at play at
140journos during the first phase of my research.
This rapid shift in values and organizational commitments at
140journos presented me with a contradiction. On the one hand, there
was this grassroots news outlet born from the Gezi movement that
produced high quality and original content. But on the other hand,
the same news outlet was engaged in unethical work practices such as
enforced heavy workloads, unpaid internships, and unpaid data produc-
tion labor, capitalist practices that one might find in almost any main-
stream media outlet or advertising agency. The fact that interviewees
were preoccupied by the possible career impacts of their criticism of
140journos if they were publicly exposed introduced a second ethical
dilemma.
Filled with these contradictions and dilemmas when I began writing
the first draft of this chapter, I could not bring myself to reflect on my
research process and the difficulties that I encountered during my field-
work. Writing a critical article on 140journos also meant that I was not
only jeopardizing the activist media project by exposing its unethical
practices but also potentially the careers of my interviewees. I felt as if
I were delegitimizing the actions of 140journos by the accusation of
not having adopted a radically democratic internal work structure, and
of engaging methods of production that reproduce the inequalities and
exploitation that we find in most media workplaces.
However, the argument according to which activist values had to
guide and shape both the end product and the mode of internal organi-
zation and methods of production was never claimed by the founders or
editors of 140journos. Instead of taking this argument as a research the-
sis to be confirmed or refuted during my fieldwork, I realized that this
was a value judgment that I myself had on an unconscious level, upon
which I had constructed my theoretical framework and guided my field-
work in studying 140journos.
Conclusion
My personal history and the sociopolitical context in which I was
carrying out this study were two key indications making this self-
reflective research process almost obligatory. The reason why the desire
to write critically about 140journos’s work practices and organization
introduced an ethical dilemma was partly linked with this idealization of
the subject of study. Seeing and analyzing 140journos from a political
perspective, as a group of activists who were trying to create sociopo-
litical change in the authoritarian political atmosphere of Turkey, does
not undermine scientific objectivity, nor does it contribute to an idealiza-
tion of the subject of study. However, to express or defend ideological or
political perspectives without identifying, indicating, and clarifying them
in the research can cause partial and biased academic work, confusing
the reader as well as the researcher. The solution is not, however, a com-
plete absence of the researcher’s value judgments in their work. Rather
it calls for clarifying and expressing them in order to avoid producing a
work that is implicitly guided by the researcher’s hidden assumptions and
values (Weber, 1992).
One way to overcome this dilemma is to identify and clarify in the
scientific work the difference between statements of fact and value judg-
ments. In other words, the researcher can avoid the confusion between
scientific discussion and axiological reasoning by stating directly the
value judgments and distinguishing them from the statements of facts.
For example, I did not examine, in the first phase of my research, the
difficulties that I had encountered in the field due to limited access. I
ignored the closed doors, the expression by editors of the problematic
presence of the researcher at 140journos, and their highly constructed
formal responses.
Furthermore, I could have tried to do a second round of field research
by adopting a more subtle and indirect approach, such as participating
in the public outdoor events of 140journos, building a relationship with
the co-founders and new editors slowly through these events, avoid-
ing any negative comments to the persons working in relation with the
co-founders (such as the statement regarding work exploitation that
got me banned from the field), and explaining, during this process,
my research goals and approach as transparently as possible to research
interlocutors.
192 G. TUNCEL
Instead, by making a value judgment, I took an ideological position

by ignoring the facts that were in contradiction with the idealized inter-
nal functioning of 140journos. During the second phase of the research,
this ideological position manifested itself by being associated with the
comment regarding practices of work exploitation, and my decision to
react to the field ban by interviewing the editor, and trying to reach for-
mer interns. I could have instead contacted the co-founders directly and
had a more open and transparent conversation with them.
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CHAPTER 10
Difficult Choices: Application of Feminist

Ethics of Care in Action Research
Ekaterina Kalinina
The story I tell in this chapter began in 2017 when I engaged in action
research by using a Swedish NGO as a platform for seeking funding for
cultural exchange projects in the Baltic Sea region. Through these pro-
jects, I came in contact with a Moscow-based NGO,1 which worked
with hip-hop as a tool for social change and was eager to try out new
practices of engaging young people and especially women in cultural
production.
Together we started to plan various activities: a series of network
meetings, workshops, seminars and festivals in North-West Russia and
Moscow. These events were supposed to inspire encounters and lead
to the development of independent cooperation between various cul-
tural actors in the region with the aim of “strengthening identity of
1 Due to the sensitivity of the issue, the names of both the organisations and the individuals
involved in the projects discussed in this chapter are anonymised.
E. Kalinina (*)
School of Education and Communication,
e-mail: ekaterina.kalinina@ju.se

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4_10
194 E. KALININA
the region in order to ensure political and socio-economic stability”

(Kalinina, 2017, p. 2). As a result of the project, professionals working
with youth from both countries were supposed to develop methodolo-
gies that would have led to the increased mobility and engagement of
young women in cultural production.
To be able to conduct research activities next to this development
project I also applied for and received additional funding from
Swedish Institute2. While the project initiated in collabora-
tion with the Moscow-based NGO was about youth and women’s
empowerment, the research project was focused on the analysis of
methodologies of working with sustainable social change through imple-
mentation of a feminist ethics of care. One of the important aspects
of both projects was to make the voices of youth communities heard,
which resulted in an attempt to ensure a certain horizontality of relation-
ships between participants.
Despite the agreements made prior to the start of the project, it soon
became clear that partners meant different things when they talked about
horizontality, care and empowerment. With time, the project that was
aimed at finding solutions to empower women and young community
leaders became a platform for the production of new forms of inequal-
ity, bullying and reproduction of stereotypes. In order to document these
developments, I have changed the focus of the research project from the
investigation of methodologies for empowerment to the study of abuses of
the feminist ethics of care, whose application in the project was intended to
strengthen relationships and a sense of community (Gilligan, 1982).
Being in the centre of the conflict and following the guidelines for
action research (Bradbury-Huang, 2015), I followed in the footsteps
of Sara Ahmed who writes that personal experiences are not only polit-
ical, but also ‘theoretical’ (2017, p. 10), as they pave the road for the
understanding of how structures and institutions work by actively engag-
ing with them (2017, p. 93). Hence, in this chapter I have decided to
tell my personal story of working with action research as well as the
failures I faced trying to introduce feminist ethics into community
work. Therefore, in this chapter I aim to contribute to the theoretical
discussion of the uses of feminist ethics of care and the perils of action
2 Swedish Institute is a public agency that sees interests of Sweden in the fields of culture,
science, education and business, promotes Swedish values and supports Sweden’s relation-
ships with other countries in the world (www.si.se).
10 DIFFICULT CHOICES: APPLICATION OF FEMINIST … 195
research. I want to focus on my first-hand experiences and to investigate

potential power struggles and vulnerabilities conditioned by the pressure
to stay empathetic and caring to the subject of study as one of the main
preconditions of action research (Bradbury-Huang, 2015). By drawing
on several conflicts that occurred during the course of the project, I want
to address issues such as leadership, power struggles, abuses and unex-
pected turns that action research projects can take.
Action Research and Its Challenges

For the last few decades, scholars and policy-makers alike have been argu-
ing for the need to hear voices of communities when it comes to making
important decisions regarding sustainable social change. One such partic-
ipatory method of knowledge production with people rather than about
people is participatory action research which is specifically concerned
with community development and community involvement (Bradbury-
Huang, 2015; Duke, MacGregor, & Smith, 1996; D. Henderson, 1995;
P. Henderson, 1995). According to scholars, it provides opportunities
for collective efforts to improve existing conditions, with experts and
community members uniting to produce new knowledge and practices
(Bradbury-Huang, 2015).
However, the method is not as easy and non-conflictual as it may seem
from first glance. Colin Todhunter (2001, 2003) points out that even if
participatory methodology produces feel-good feelings among partici-
pants caused by the hope that increased participation can bring change,
in the longer run, action research may leave a bitter aftertaste as the raised
expectations are not met. Such disappointments occur because action
research implies legitimisation of people’s voices in decision-making,
which sometimes can run counter to the objectives of the researchers
managing participatory projects or funding agencies needing quick, meas-
urable solutions. Todhunter notes that the funding bodies may (uncon-
sciously) seek to define the needs of the communities “according to their
specific remit, and attempt to set a research agenda accordingly - even
though they may label it as ‘action’ research” (Todhunter 2003, p. 8).
Meanwhile, members of communities express the desire to exercise more
direct power to “facilitate their identity and rights as citizens” and insist
on “equal participation” in the decision-making, which they feel is often
“slanted against the interests of local people in favour of statutory sector
and business interests” (Todhunter 2001, n.p.).
196 E. KALININA
As a result, it is the researchers who end up in vulnerable positions

being stuck in between. On the one side, they try to address the needs of
the funding agencies, who see researchers as instruments to bring forward
their agenda. On the other, they have to defend their status as legitimate
and trustworthy participants in knowledge production within the commu-
nities they are researching, while they often are seen as predators exploit-
ing communities to their own ends or/and unwanted whistle-blowers.
Trying to balance the needs of these two different actors on both sides,
researchers, who often find themselves in precarious working situations
by being dependent on the one hand on the funding, and on the other,
on the access to research data, are forced to tolerate unpleasant treatment
that can come both from the communities and the funders. They also face
the difficulty of communicating the results of their research, as revealing
the cracks in the system might have unfavourable consequences for future
access to research subjects and funding.
Despite causing difficulties for research outcomes and psychologi-
cal harm to the researchers’ well-being, such in-betweenness is exactly
the field where researchers should be in order to learn about practices
of abuse. Such real-life situations that are difficult and tricky provide
insights into how the structures of abuse function. As Sara Ahmed (2017,
p. 13) writes: “The task is to stay with the difficulty, to keep exploring
and exposing this difficulty” to be able to pave the road for theoretical
explorations and provide guidelines for those who are coming after us.
Therefore in the following sections, I will try to unfold the working
of these structures and the reasons that are behind various instances of
abuse. As this chapter will contain information about conflicts, the names
of the participants are anonymised and aliases are used to identify the key
actors. In order to illustrate communication between the project partic-
ipants, I will use extracts from the conversations that took place in the
Messenger and WhatsApp groups launched to communicate in the pro-
ject. All communication was carried out in Russian and later translated
into English.
Application of Feminist Ethics in Hip-Hop Culture

as a Tool for Social Change
As some of the underlying principles of action research—such as contin-

uous self-reflection on the consequences of beliefs and assumptions that
guide research practices as well as democratic processes of knowledge
production that allow for the voices of communities being heard (Fine,
2018)—resonate with feminist ethics of care, this method and theoretical
framework became closely intertwined in the project.
According to feminist ethics, women’s nurturing relationships are
taken as a model for care, where everyone has responsibilities and cares
for others (Gilligan, 1982). In practice, when it comes to communica-
tion and project management, it means that when making decisions,
the leader of the project ought to take into account the perspectives of
other people with different gender, education, social and economic back-
grounds and constantly engage in self-reflection, be open and accept the
proneness to errors and biases based on social and economic position, as
well as objectively listen to the viewpoints of others. By embracing, fol-
lowing Mary Daly’s (1979) suggestion, women’s capacities for care and
emotionality, the project leader is supposed to show by personal exam-
ple an alternative to the strictly hierarchical form of leadership, introduce
organisational structures and forms of partnership built on empathy,
relatedness and responsiveness, and enable decision-making processes
characterised by putting oneself in somebody else’s shoes. Virginia Held
(1993, 2006) suggested that an ethics of care provides conditions for
realisation of better societies and building relationships with distant oth-
ers. As the project I am writing about in this chapter was supposed to
improve the existing conditions of cultural workers, I followed a feminist
ethics of care to create new structures to ensure social change in hip-hop
communities and to bring forward young women by listening to the
needs of people and feeling empathic to their socio-economic situations.
Another reason why this approach has been taken is the belief that
feminist ethics of care and hip-hop’s widely promoted code of conduct
briefly described as ‘each one teach one’ have something in common.
This model means in practice that those in power, e.g. possessing some
kind of knowledge, have a responsibility to pass it on to others, usually
younger members of the community. This model also implies a certain
form of care, when one is given help despite class, ethnicity, gender or
economic background.
Such hip-hop philosophy has deep roots in the history of the subcul-
ture, which originated in economically depressed neighbourhoods of
New York in the 1970s–1980s and served as a means of expression for
young people “who lived under the shadow of civic neglect” (Patton,
Eschmann, & Butler, 2013, p. 58). As time passed, hip-hop artists
started to enjoy international stardom while hip-hop’s original dance
198 E. KALININA
style—breaking—has been accepted as a new sport for the international

Olympics, “yet at its core, hip-hop still remains an art form that tells the
stories of the urban poor” (Patton et al., 2013, p. 58) and often becomes
the platform for social action. Being the voices of the streets who com-
municate urban pathologies and the realities of the suburbs, many
hip-hop artists used the art form to communicate cultures of non-vi-
olence and solidarity in order to bring Black communities together.
During the past few decades, there have been numerous examples of hip-
hop being used as a tool for solving various societal issues: combating
violence (Washington, 2018), enabling integration (Low, 2010), ensur-
ing empowerment in social work (Travis & Deepak, 2011), protecting
diversity and nurturing a sense of belonging, and mobilising youth for
social change (Clay, 2006). Famous rappers have launched community
projects based on the social values of hip-hop culture to battle drug
abuse, violence and misogyny among urban youth.
Despite this evident social aspect, hip-hop and especially gangsta rap3
have significantly contributed to the romanticisation of gang violence, ille-
gal drug economies, and the sexual objectification and neglect of women,
that for decades have had negative impacts on urban youth (Rose, 2008).
Hence, despite the evident improvements, the very nature of the masculine
culture of hip-hop presented a field where much work is still to be done.
One of the burning issues that scholars have discussed during the past
decade was the question of gender politics and women’s absence from
hip-hop cultural production. However, this issue was mainly the subject
of debates within US research, despite the fact that hip-hop is a global
culture that has many followers all over the world. When it comes to
development work, projects that focus on the role of women and girls
in hip-hop are also usually geographically bound to the US. The body
of work on gender politics, e.g. ‘hip-hop feminism’ (Pough, Richardson,
Durham, & Raimist, 2007) mainly covers the US context (Pough, 2004;
Rabaka, 2011) and includes investigation of hip-hop’s possibilities for
feminist pedagogies and the role of motherhood (Brown & Kwakye,
2012; Motapanyane, 2012; Sharpley-Whiting, 2008), as well as practices
of resistance and reproduction of gender norms (Haugen, 2003; Rose,
1994; Skeggs, 1993; Thomas, 2009).
3 Gangsta rap is a style of hip-hop music characterised by lyrics that specifically emphasise
gangster lifestyle and even openly manifest connections with street gangs as a part of their
artistic identity. Initially being an underground form of hip hop, gangsta rap has become
one of the most commercially lucrative subgenres, which reached its peak in the 1990s.
When it comes to the Russian context, research on gender issues in

hip-hop culture is non-existent and there are almost no projects that try
to tackle persistent gender inequalities in the field. Similar to other coun-
tries in the Baltic Sea region (see Ganetz, 1997; Gavanas, 2009) albeit
known for its more gender-equal politics, women in Russian hip-hop are
often positioned as ‘the Other’ and seen as lacking either competence
and strength or femininity. Björck pointed out that in Sweden in the
projects aimed at empowering girls to participate in playing music, girls
often face an “invisibility vs. bitch dilemma” (Björck, 2011, p. 160) and
have to either accept music as “a masculine space which leads to invis-
ibility, or alternatively explicitly challenge such gender expectations by
becoming a ‘bitch’ who claims space’” (Berggren, 2014, p. 235). With
regard to dance culture, the attitudes towards women resembled the
ones in the music industry (Werner, 2009, p. 201), where many believe
that men are better suited to do breaking than women. Therefore, this
text aims at filling the gap in the existing literature and start a discussion
on the intersection between hip-hop culture, feminist ethics of care and
vulnerabilities of researchers working with street cultures. I will proceed
with giving a brief overview of the political and socio-economic context
of the action that in turn conditioned the organisational structure of the
project and the relationship between partner organisations.
Working in Russia: Inequalities and Constraints

There are several important external factors that affect relationships
between partner organisations that have to be taken into account when
studying international cooperation in Russia and the application of
care-ethics. These are: the rules of the grants, the precarious conditions
of cultural workers, and the political context of the action.
According to the rules of the SI grant, Swedish and Russian organi-
sations enter a collaborative partnership, with the Swedish organisation
being the main applicant. In practice, it means that the Swedish organisa-
tion is fully accountable to the funder and responsible for the completion
of the project. Meanwhile, the Russian organisation becomes the main
executor of the project as its experts have the knowledge, experience and
networks necessary to work in Russia. This condition of the grant also
defines which organisation has last say in financial matters and in prac-
tice means that the Swedish organisation has full control of the received
grant.
200 E. KALININA
Being supported by the state and various donors, Swedish organ-

isations usually have their own funding, which gives them and their
employees certain financial security. Meanwhile, Russian organisations
lack funding with people often working on a voluntary basis and there-
fore being dependent on international projects to improve their finances.
Nevertheless, collaboration does not necessarily mean that the Russian
organisation receives financial support from a Swedish donor. Grants are
usually given to cover direct costs of the project (travel, accommoda-
tion and artist honoraria), with about thirty per cent reserved for project
management, which usually stays in the hands of the Swedish organisa-
tion as the one that administers the grant. This distribution of financial
assets leaves people who carry out most of the work in the field—free-
lancers employed by Russian organisations—heavily underpaid and as a
result they feel frustrated (Kuleva, 2015).
On top of this, recently approved Russian Federal law FZ N 121- FZ
from 20 July 2012 made any collaborations that include financial trans-
actions between Russian and foreign organisations almost impossible.
According to this so-called foreign agents law, organisations carrying
out activities on the territory of the Russian Federation that the Russian
authorities consider political and receiving foreign funding should be
registered as foreign agents. Under political activity, the law mentions
any action aiming to change public opinion with a purpose of exert-
ing influence on state politics. In practice, it means that a workshop on
eco-friendly living might be seen as a political activity if the organisers
include a session on how citizens can communicate their concerns over
pollution to politicians. As receiving the status of foreign agent leads
to extensive reputation risks and extra surveillance by the Russian state,
many Russian and international organisations either abstain from coop-
eration completely, or avoid transfer of funds from one organisation to
another. They also keep away from certain areas of activities that can be
considered political, such as domestic violence, civic engagement and
media freedom.
This political context, the rules set by the funding organisations, and
highly precarious working conditions make Russian organisations more
dependent on their international partner organisations. Speaking in
terms of power, relatively powerful Swedish organisations have the abil-
ity to make relatively powerless Russian partners do what they might not
otherwise do, for instance, appoint more women to decision- making
positions, make the decision-making process more transparent and
collegial, or recruit artists based on an open call instead of nepotistic

relationships. The latter is a common trait in professional relationships
and often considered the norm.
Another important factor to keep in mind when working with youth
in Russia is that youth politics is considered by the Russian government
as one of the priority areas for governmental control and is regulated and
governed by the whole set of institutions including the State Programme
for Patriotic Upbringing, the State Committee of the Russian Federation
on Youth Politics, the Ministry of Culture, the Ministry of Sport and
the State Committee of International Relations. Despite the endeavour,
proclaimed by the government, to attend to the needs of the youth, the
majority of the programs have little to do with the real demands of young
people. In practice, it means that it is the state authorities that organise
various events of their own devising, forcing young people to attend to be
able to account later on for the spent budgets. In practice, it means that
young people (usually students of higher education institutions or young
employees of municipal centres for youth) are often threatened by salary
cuts or university expulsion if they do not attend organised events.
Conversely, the project I was leading was supposed to cater to the
needs of young people, giving them an opportunity to organise events
to their liking and to raise the issues that they find important. At the
same time, such interest of the state in youth politics makes this area
quite problematic for international and foreign organisations to work
in, as any interference with youth upbringing can be seen as a political
action and have legal consequences for the organisations involved. In
order to avoid potential problems, international organisations choose
forms of partnership that allow them to stay on the safe side. One such
strategy is to operate from a foreign country and avoid transfer of funds
to the Russian organisation, which in turn may result in internal con-
flicts if the members of the Russian organisation refuse to understand
the danger.
Organisational Structure and Project Roles

Following the rules of the grant, the relationships between the two
partners were regulated by a Memorandum of Understanding and the
Application document that both partner organisations signed prior to the
start of the project. This document reflects the inequalities described in
the previous section and secures the position of the applicant organisation
202 E. KALININA
as the one controlling the whole project. According to the application,

the organisational structure of the partnership was the following:
The Swedish organisation is responsible for the overall concept develop-

ment, administration, internal and external communication, and manage-
ment of the project. The Swedish organisation ensures the collaboration
and team building between different partners of the project. The Swedish
organisation is responsible for finding and recruiting Swedish participants
as well as the development of the concept of promotion of Swedish Urban
Culture in Russia. The Russian organisation is responsible for the con-
tacts with regional group members, enabling the participation of Russian
urban culture members, children and youth in the organised events, inter-
nal and external PR, organisation, administration, PR and management
of the events in St. Petersburg, Rostov, Arkhangelsk, Petrozavodsk and
Murmansk. (Kalinina, 2017, p. 4)
In practice, the organisational structure looks as visualised in Fig. 10.1.

The Researcher (Manager of the Swedish organisation) assumed the
overall coordination of the project, accounting and communication with
Fig. 10.1 Organisational structure according to the project application

external partners. Members of the Russian partner organisation were each

responsible for specific tasks: Alex coordinated the work of the Russian
partner and contacts with Russian authorities; Max and Dan were the
organisers of the events; while merchandising, design and visual communi-
cation was assigned to Fred, and logistics to Ina.
Recognising the precarious situation of the employees in the Russian
partner organisation, my colleagues from the Swedish partner organisa-
tion and I decided to fairly distribute financial assets so that the organis-
ers of the events in Russia could get reimbursement for their work. This
in practice meant that I as a project manager would not get reimbursed
from the project funding for my managerial hours, but work voluntarily,
and only receive salary for the research activities on the project.
The tasks in the project were collectively discussed and distributed
based on the skills and interests of the project participants. It was also
collectively decided to implement a horizontal power structure, which
would allow more freedom to the Russian partner organisation as an
expert in the field of youth culture to choose invited artists and the con-
tent of the organised events. In this situation, I was prepared to listen
to the project participants’ needs in order to create the most fair work-
ing conditions and provide infrastructure for the participants to do their
jobs. However, it soon became clear that the horizontal logic came to
conflict with power ambitions.
Community Logics of Horizontalism vs.

Organisational Logics of Hierarchy
Despite the fact that the roles in the project had been established before
the application was even submitted, one of the project participants, Max,
expressed his dissatisfaction with the organisational structure. Max’s
argument against my position as a project manager was built around
the importance of the community being in charge of the projects that
affect the life of the community and my presumed lack of knowledge of
hip-hop culture’s dynamics.
He had a valid argument regarding my position as an outsider to the
community I was researching and the importance of key community
members’ involvement in the decision-making process that concerned the
well-being of the community. In that sense, his claims went hand in hand
with Todhunter who wrote about the growing frustration of community
members involved in action-based research over not getting opportu-
nities to influence the project to the degree they had expected (2001).
204 E. KALININA
Nevertheless, being committed to the goals of the project and the

agreement that we had prior to the project start on the maximum inclu-
sion of community members in the collegial structure, I had a hard time
understanding at what exactly his criticism was directed. He was indeed
the one coordinating the project whose needs and demands were met on
every occasion. For example, following complaints of project members
on missing regulations in the work contracts regarding intellectual prop-
erty rights, the contracts were revised and the necessary paragraphs that
secure the rights of the cultural workers were included. When it came
to the size of honoraria for the artists and organisers, the policy was to
satisfy the demands if they corresponded to the level of salaries on the
same positions in other international projects and were usually discussed
openly for each individual artist.
With time, it became clear that Max was campaigning not for the
benefit of the community, but for securing his own position as a pro-
ject leader with full control over the financial assets of the project. This
became evident from personal correspondence where he stated his vision
of the organisational structure: “Dan and I will also become heads [of
the project]. This is how we can achieve correct distribution of [finan-
cial] flows” (Max, personal correspondence with author, 2017). He pro-
moted Dan, his closest friend, claiming that he was fighting for the rights
of community members: “Key decisions on the project, the form, the
writing of the applications and finding key contractors is our common
responsibility. That is why Dan and I are also heads [of the project]”
(Max, personal correspondence with author, 2017). He also disregarded
any accusation of nepotism, claiming that promotion of community
members to higher positions is empowerment and he will continue to
involve them in the project even without my approval.
When looking closer at his follow-up arguments and the project’s
organisational structure that he suggested, it became clear that he was
trying to use Dan to secure full control over the project, bypassing
the head of the Russian NGO who gave them the opportunity to get
involved. According to Max, the head of the Russian partner organisa-
tion, Alex, should be removed from the decision-making process and
strong hierarchical relationships between the project heads and the rest
of the project participants should be implemented. Any participant apart
from the members of the troika, the decision-making board that should
have consisted of Max, Dan and myself, could be easily fired. Max, Dan
and I were to share control of the project on a thirty-three per cent basis
and make decisions based on voting among the three of us. This strict
hierarchy would have been cemented in the official document that would
have guided the relationship and would have conditioned how money
earned in the project in the future would be spent. Meanwhile, my posi-
tion, even if nominally I was included in the troika, would be reduced to
the position of an accountant whose task would have been to demand
financial documents for the spent assets, but not to decide on how the
money can be spent. Max explained such strict hierarchy by the need to
“increase the effectiveness of the project” and smoothly remove peo-
ple who express any disrespect to the heads of the project: “Dan and I
already have effective routines […]. If everybody agrees [we start work-
ing], if somebody does not agree, he needs to give some constructive
feedback, if there is no feedback, then we continue working. If one failed
a few times or did not show respect to the leaders then he is fired” (Max,
personal correspondence with author, 2017). Hence, his strict organisa-
tional logic of hierarchy was justified by the claims of effectiveness, which
could be disabled by more democratic community logics of horizontal-
ism, which assumes equal participation of all members and often rather
long processes of decision-making as they involve taking into considera-
tion the often-conflicting interests of different community members.
Fearing that the drastic change of the project’s ethics and working
structure would deepen already existing inequalities (such as underrep-
resentation of women among cultural producers) and cement an unfair
hierarchy, I expressed my concerns, insisting that such changes went
against the project’s goals and the working ethics of the Swedish organ-
isation. At the same time, I feared losing control over the project for
which I had full legal responsibility and accountability for the funds.
If such an organisational change had been made, I would have ended
up in a vulnerable position as I would have been fully dependent on
the decisions of two people with legal status as contractors, while still
being bound by the contract with Swedish Institute as the project man-
ager with subsequent legal consequences. At the same time, still being a
researcher, I was dependent on access to the community, because in the
event of failing to complete the project and not accomplishing the goals
set for the research I feared that I would have to pay back the funds I
was already spending.
Another alarming aspect of this suggestion was Max’s demand to keep
the conversation confidential. He believed that when necessary steps
206 E. KALININA
are taken, the information about the changes should be communicated

downwards:
E: I need to talk to the director of my organisation to see if this idea that

you suggest is at all compatible with the rules of the grant and the rules
of our organisation.
M: Yes, of course. But everything will depend on how you present this
idea to your director. This is not a revolution. Basically, nothing will
change. Of course this suggestion [of organisational structure] hardly
downgrades you or implies for you a worse position. But for us it is a
key moment. I would think that for your director it is just a formality
of our work. For example, not so many people know that the Russian
organisation is only a partner in the project application. Moreover, your
director is not a director of our project.
[…]
E: I will have to discuss this with my colleagues.
M: I do not understand why you need to discuss it with colleagues. This
is our project, our relationship, and our history. I think your personal
opinion is more important as you are informed about the situation
more [than your colleagues].
E: I must repeat that this project is under the jurisdiction of the Swedish
organisation. The decision regarding the organisational structure of the
project must be taken by me and my boss. According to the statute of
the organisation such questions must be discussed on a collegial level.
This is what I will do.
M: I must repeat that this is the project of the people who came up with
the idea, and this is us three. […]. I will keep arguing that this is not
the project of the Swedish organisation. Even though during this phase
the project might legally belong to the Swedish organisation. But the
project will continue even after the money runs out. (Max, Personal
correspondence with author, 2017)
In this situation, I decided to go against Max’s demands and made

the negotiations known both to my Swedish organisation, the head of
the Russian organisation and the other project participants by writing an
open letter, where I had to make clear that the rules of the grant have
to be respected while the claims of equality of the project participants
should count for all project participants rather than only benefit two of
them. By doing that I immediately gained the reputation of a foreign
‘space invader’ (Puwar, 2004), who instead of empowering community
by providing a platform for action, uses foreign funding and a position of

power to exploit this very community for my own ends.
This situation reveals the general contradiction that exists between
participatory community-led research and hierarchical funding struc-
tures which include certain legal aspects and labour practices. By mak-
ing a researcher the only one legally accountable for the directions the
project may take, as well as for the spending of the grant money, the
funding bodies make it impossible for the researcher to let go in the
project and observe what happens, being open for failures. Ultimately,
it is the researcher that ends up in the vulnerable position, and in order
to avoid it, she has to take the difficult decision of keeping power in her
own hands. Meanwhile, by assuming the full power to be able to finish
the project, the researcher can be seen as the one betraying her research
interlocutors and instead of opening up for democratic practices, hiding
behind the rules of the grant to keep her position safe. At the same time,
this situation also reveals another underlying issue, namely the power the
key community members have over researchers. By being the gatekeep-
ers, community members can deny access to research participants and
therefore manipulate the researcher.
Care-Focused Feminism and the Production

of New Vulnerabilities
Having chosen to adhere to care-focused feminism (Tong, 1989,

pp. 162–165), which regards women’s capacity to care as a human
strength, the project was supposed to show the benefits that could
emerge with more female community leaders rising to power. By using
the role-modelling principle, I intended to provide an example of a
‘good woman leader’ and of a new type of leadership. The decisions
were to be taken collegially with a ‘caring’ project manager attend-
ing to the needs of the project members and subcultural community.
Other initiatives included: putting women cultural workers into the
spotlight during events; ensuring comfortable working hours and travel
conditions for the project members and artists, and meeting demands
for remuneration. In other words, the working conditions that the
Swedish organisation considered necessary for healthy working rela-
tionships were to be transferred into the precarious and badly funded
field of subcultural artistic production.
208 E. KALININA
These forms of care, as well as my perception of hip-hop activists, were

to a certain extent predefined by the frames of the grant that was sup-
posed to be spent on the actions that improve the social and political con-
ditions of marginalised groups. The members of the hip-hop community
in Russia were defined from the beginning as people who find themselves
in a vulnerable position without having access to grants, struggling to find
venues for events and constantly fighting the stereotype of being drug
addicts. This was true to a certain extent as funding in the sphere of youth
politics and grassroots cultural production is limited and only accessible to
the few, while people who are engaged in h ip-hop often come from less
fortunate social and economic backgrounds. Nevertheless, it hardly means
that they consider themselves as such. On the contrary, they often define
themselves in opposition to existing social norms of consumerist neolib-
eral society, and choose a strategy of playing the system to their own ben-
efit. Understanding well that international organisations and governments
keen to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals4 needed
to reach out to younger audiences and knowing where to find these audi-
ences and how to talk to them, hip-hop community members felt them-
selves entitled to negotiate on their own terms.
Being committed to the project and believing that I shared the same
values and objectives as the other participants from the partner organi-
sation, the conflict regarding power positions in the project caught me
off guard. The response from the project participants that followed the
conflict signalled the problem of perceiving vulnerabilities and the poten-
tial for abuse and manipulation of care-giving systems and of individu-
als providing care. By its nature, care is concerned with conditions of
vulnerability and inequality, hence by entering the project from a posi-
tion of care-giver I, on one side, further marginalised the community as
one that is incapable of caring for itself, and on the other, provided an
opportunity for some of the community members to use their position
of power, that was perceived by me as vulnerable, to their own advantage
in order to start slowly taking over the project by using the arguments
about equality, justice, vulnerability and democracy that I myself had
used when writing the application for funding.
4 “The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals were
adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015 as a universal call to action to end
poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030”
(UNDP, official website).
Max, for example, pointed on several occasions to free-labour per-

formed by him and his crew members: “most of the communication and
work is done by the three of us. This is enormous work and is not paid”
(Max, personal correspondence with author, 2017). In fact, Max omit-
ted several important aspects of labour practices. One of them concerned
the honoraria the project participants received. Contrary to what Max
said, the financial reimbursement corresponded to the level of events
they organised, their competence, as well as the average salary for such
organisational work in St. Petersburg. Moreover, bound by the rules of
the contract, the Russian organisation agreed to contribute in-kind with
the volunteer work of its members as other forms of contribution (mon-
etary) were not an option. As one of the official partners of the pro-
ject said about this argument: “The fact that you do this work for less
money than other contractors does not make you our partners. It means
that you give us a discount so we choose to work with you. But it does
not mean that we contribute equally to the project” (Official partner,
2018). What he meant is that in order to be considered a partner one
had to contribute substantially either with monetary or non-monetary
resources, but if one partner has to do both and even pay another part-
ner for some of the services, the partnership should not be considered
equal and the one who contributes less cannot demand to have an upper
hand on the project.
This comment illustrates the situation in which communities,
who do not have a possibility to equally contribute with monetary or
non-monetary assets to the project, have very little to say about how it
should be run. From the very beginning, they are dependent on their
more powerful and resource-rich international partners. At the same
time, I could agree with the idea that organisations that receive fund-
ing and are led into collaborations with unfunded organisations have to
demand the upper hand as it is they who are accountable for the budg-
ets spent. It is a catch-22 in which organisations receiving funding are
forced to give greater decision-making power to the partner organisation
who neither legally nor financially has any responsibility for the money
spent, while at the same time being accountable for the possible mistakes
or abuses of the system made by their partner organisations.
These discussions regarding the structure of the project and roles
also revealed attempts to manipulate the system of care by using
the same vocabulary of democracy and participation that femi-
nist care-givers use in development projects. Max used references to
210 E. KALININA
‘horizontal power structures’, ‘decentralisation of governance’, and

‘democratic principles of governance’, especially when it came to shar-
ing control over the project between the three of us: “Everything should
be equally shared between the three of us from the beginning, especially
when it comes to the key decisions […]. I also suggest the only right
and honest method — open voting for the model” (Max, personal cor-
respondence with the author, 2017). However, when it came to assum-
ing a power position he no longer saw the need to adhere to horizontal
and democratic structures that he himself was fighting so eagerly for:
“In a complex situation the heads of the project can even fire a manager.
Subordination gives them this right. I do not want to be in such a posi-
tion of a manager in my own project. Meanwhile heads cannot fire each
other. In case of conflict between the heads we will vote and restructure
the project administration on equal grounds […]” (Max, personal corre-
spondence with author, 2017).
When it comes to claims about ensuring equality in the project, for
example, Max’s suggestion to implement open voting could hardly
ensure democracy and more resembled nepotism. First, in the case of
voting between Max, Dan and me, I would have always been in a more
vulnerable position as they would always vote me out with the two of
them having the majority vote. Second, he slowly started to involve
other contractors in the project against my will, whom he actively pro-
moted as members of the project with equal voice as the members of the
original team. In any conflicting situation he tried to use their voices to
force me to do what I otherwise would not do, claiming that this was the
will of the community. Democracy talk quickly faded when other mem-
bers of the project tried to suggest ideas different from Max and Dan’s.
In such cases, he tried very hard to get rid of such people by using his
position as a leader: “We do not think that other members of the project
have an equal status with us and it is important for us that our and their
status will be secured at this early stage […]” (Max, personal correspond-
ence with author 2017).
It might seem that Max and Dan tried to protect and empower the
community by ensuring that the community’s values and desires were
respected by a third party who possesses the power to change the life
of this community. However, looking closer it revealed that instead they
fought hard to ensure their own positions of control. By doing this, they
worked towards reproduction of traditional power hierarchies, which also
meant more men holding power positions than women. Their constant
refusal to try out new forms of cooperation such as attracting more skil-
ful people to the project, working with new venues and new partners,
in other words to use the grant money for development spoke to their
desire to get paid for what they usually do instead of doing something
new. It was also clear that they saw me as one of the abusers rather than a
care-giver, who is to be controlled to ensure their own stable position in
the power hierarchy. Interestingly enough, they addressed issues of gen-
der imbalance over time when they needed to push for their own candi-
date, for example, next to their own friend they would always suggest a
female candidate, hence justifying the choice of both candidates.
Such nepotism went against the goals of the project and also deep-
ened the conflict as I was against such practices seeing in them the rea-
son for inequalities. Instances of nepotism were also to be reported back
to the funder, which I did eventually when the project was over. The
reasons for not doing it while the project was ongoing were manifold:
I felt an obligation to work through them instead of backing off and,
as a researcher, was interested in observing the reaction of the commu-
nity members on different methods of combating nepotism. As Max and
Dan could not fire me as the project manager, they turned to a different,
more partisan tactic, which in turn resulted in the omission of a range of
participatory principles in the project.
24/7 Bullying and the End of Democracy

Bachrach and Baratz (1970) argued that the hidden face of power is
about keeping issues and actors from getting to positions of influence
and knowledge production in the first place. In Russian hip-hop cul-
ture, it is only a handful of people who work for major festivals and have
access to networks and resources, while the majority hardly have such
opportunities. That is why non-participation in cultural production and
youth politics can hardly be interpreted as the result of people’s apathy
or inefficacy, but rather as a result of exclusion from the cultural and
political process. Financial resources are scarce with the government
either underfunding youth projects or prioritising projects with a clear
patriotic agenda and little freedom for independent action, which leaves
little room for young people to try something new. As one of the objec-
tives of the project was to help the young and talented who have not yet
212 E. KALININA
had the resources to develop their local youth communities, we aimed at

working with young people, who needed a little push to become known
and as a result get contracts from other organisations or companies.
From day one, the members of the Russian NGO and hip-hop com-
munity gained access to the Swedish organisation’s networks and
attended network and capacity building meetings. But as the project was
supposed to be beneficial for both parties, I expected a reciprocal rela-
tionship and sought contacts and opportunities for capacity building in
Russia. However, after the first conflict regarding the roles in the project,
I noticed that I and other project members who were critical of Max’s
and Dan’s actions were kept away from new opportunities that emerged
thanks to the project. Important information and contacts were with-
held, while some of the members of the team were prevented from tak-
ing part in meetings or even travelling to other cities while such travels
were budgeted and planned for all project participants.
In other words, having had access to exclusive groups and networks,
which put them in a position of power, Max and Dan acted as gatekeep-
ers attempting to shift the power balance in the project to their favour
by denying myself and others access to networks and information about
opportunities for future cooperation. Trying very hard to secure their
position of power, they used strategies which they usually fell victims
of and instead of breaking the vicious cycle they deepened the inequal-
ities they claimed to fight. By not allowing me access to networks and
information they also tried to prevent me not only from managing the
collaborative project but also from conducting research and taking part
in knowledge production.
Denying access could also be seen as a form of bullying, a system-
atic psychological abuse aimed at causing harm to individuals (Rayner
& Keashley, 2005), which was gradually escalating after the initial con-
flict over leadership reached its peak a month before the final event in
May 2018. Other forms of bullying, such as verbal abuse and humiliation
directed towards me and other project members, who dared to suggest
their own ideas, were also common closer to the end of the project. It
became clear that Max and Dan held rather patriarchal gender views and
openly mocked my attempts to encourage young women to take part
and actively participate in events, backing it up with arguments of tradi-
tional gender roles and women’s natural shyness.
Observing other team members being bullied was emotionally
exhausting, resulting in my severe depression and fear of confrontation.
If in the beginning disciplinary talks had an effect, close to the end of

the project, when I became the victim of continuous bullying, nothing
worked. Aggressive messages came continuously any time of the day and
intensified in the night, which resulted in my social media phobia and
total disconnection from communication apart from a couple of hours
per day, which I had to set up. Ignoring messages and phone calls only
intensified the bullying and often led to open confrontation. One of the
examples of bullying directed towards me took place during a discussion
regarding the employment of a graphic designer. As the project was to
spark new collaborations and give chances to several talented people,
my intention was to find a new graphic designer who would rework the
visual presentation of the project lifting it from an amateur to a more
professional level in order to make the project attractive to grant givers
and sponsors. Dan, Max and Ina actively opposed the idea, instead try-
ing to promote their friend who had previously designed posters for the
project. Max and Dan interpreted the situation as my attempt to com-
mercialise the subculture forcing the activists to play according to the
rules of the commercial game. I, however, saw an example of nepotism
where the project members tried to promote their own friend instead
of following the project’s goals of making the initiative sustainable and
involving more people in cultural production. When my arguments did
not suffice, Dan started to verbally attack me by pointing to my lack of
expertise:
Dan: Well, I actually understood that you are one of those who is not get-
ting it at all. You ask the same thing ten times and forget what you have
been asking. The middle range [the price for design] is a rather vague
definition. So I am writing to you for the fifth time. I need to know
how much you want to pay. By the way, the choice of the designer
should be done not to please you, but to satisfy the needs of the team
of the project, because you understand NOTHING about street art and
your opinion is not important here.
E: Dan, I would recommend you to cool down. You are welcome to talk
in such manner with your community bros but I would recommend
you not to talk to me this way.
Dan: […] Do not become a victim of your emotions and everything will
be fine. (Official correspondence between project participants, 2017)
Apart from the fact that such tone should not be tolerated in a profes-
sional community and caused me a considerable amount of anger and
214 E. KALININA
frustration, Dan’s words pointed to several important themes: style of

leadership, the role of the researcher and who is considered an expert,
but even my gender. The very idea of feminist leadership which was built
on the ideals of care and respect, listening to others before letting one-
self speak were not only questioned, but used against me as evidence of
weakness and the inability to exercise strong leadership. My position as
a researcher even deepened this understanding among some of the pro-
ject members. Asking rather than saying, listening rather than talking,
allowing for the greater freedom of the research subjects to act and find
their own solutions that are common in action research as well as in lib-
eral forms of governance, were all seen as signs of weakness. The project
members often misinterpreted practices of asking rather than speaking
from the expert position, understanding questions as a sign of ignorance
about the matter rather than as my attempts to get their side of the story.
This also led to different interpretations of expertise: while I considered
them experts in their field and therefore wanted to know their side of the
story, they saw me as someone who does not have any knowledge about
the field.
What the project has shown is that when a project manager allowed
greater freedom for contractors to suggest ideas, concepts and inde-
pendently run their tasks, the project members were more inclined
to follow commands rather than suggestions. In this project, where I
assumed the double role of a project manager and a researcher studying
my own practice, my role of researcher defined my style of leadership,
which was not accepted by the project members.
Conclusion
The application of a feminist ethics of care revealed some structural
issues that persist both in international cooperation and in the use of
action research for material collection and change of social practices. It
also became clear that researchers who assume a double role as project
managers end up in difficult situations being stuck between the grant
givers who demand the completion of the projects and innovative meth-
odologies that include communities and the communities, key members
who find ways of using international research projects to secure their
positions in highly precarious neoliberal economies.
I was often asked why I did not stop the project and withstood abuse
and disrespect from fellow project participants. The reason is that being
a project manager and working on a development project, one has to

work with people and in situations that might have little to do with the
professional community where one is used to working. Urban youth
communities and subcultures might be an example. There are underly-
ing reasons why some communities and subcultures are characterised by
violence, drug abuse and neglect of women. When working with such
communities trying to promote social change, one has to be prepared
to face these hardships because this is what the work is about. At the
same time, bringing change, reforming practices and attitudes does not
always imply success and one has to be prepared to experience situations
that are not ripe and the fact that some teams can be more challenging
to work with than others. However, being dependent on the success of
the projects to receive funding in the future, project managers often have
to consider the risks of stopping the project before completion instead
of working until the end despite uncomfortable conditions. The metrics
of success of such projects, focused on how many people have got access
to the means of production and how many women became empowered,
forces researchers and project managers to work with the communities
where they can enter through the open doors instead of going for more
challenging working conditions. Working with communities that resist
change, that feel protective of their position fearing any transformation
as it will stop them from receiving funding is harder and often results in
failures and production of new vulnerabilities.
Being put in a vulnerable situation by being forced to complete the
project, was seen as a lesser evil than giving up and risking not being
able to continue with other projects. At the same time, my position as
a researcher who had to listen rather than speak in situations where my
knowledge of the conditions was more profound than my research sub-
jects’ for the sake of learning and for the sake of showing respect, was
also challenging. On the one hand, having a chance to experience power
struggles in a development project and learning about ways of overcom-
ing vulnerability is a gift. But on the other, this gift comes with a price,
which in my case meant anxiety, panic attacks, lowered self-esteem and a
handful of other projects that I had to sacrifice to finish this one.
During the last few months of the project in order to complete the
action, I also felt forced to change the style of leadership from more par-
ticipatory to more authoritarian. No longer able to tolerate verbal abuse
and lengthy discussions regarding content, I had to make difficult deci-
sions single-handedly. In my position, I felt stuck between the funder
216 E. KALININA
and the completed project as well as the prospects of actually making

change, as the initiatives that we managed were received by the com-
munity in general as positive. I felt that I had no choice but to see the
project through even if it meant that I would be considered a ‘killjoy’
(Ahmed, 2017, p. 37) who did not live up to the expectations and just
made the life of people more difficult. And I was considered one because
I started by talking about implementation of horizontal organisation, but
finished by ostracising some of the project participants and doing what I
considered right.
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PART IV
Media Activist Research in the Context

of Global Crises
CHAPTER 11
The Ethics of Media Research with Refugees
Eugenia Siapera and Sara Creta
In June 2019, the UK Charity Commission published the findings of

its inquiry into Oxfam GB and its abuses of vulnerable people in Haiti,
which revealed not only the abuse and sexual exploitation of women
and children by Oxfam employees, but also a cover-up of these serious
offences (BBC, 2019). In April 2018, UNICEF terminated its con-
tract with its branch in Greece due to financial irregularities, while two
months earlier, in February 2018, UNICEF’s deputy director Justin
Forsyth resigned over allegations of sexual misconduct (France24,
2018). These serious cases reveal an ethical deficit in the centre of the
aid sector. While, however, it is easy to identify a deficit in these clear
instances of misconduct, ethical matters are much more complex when it
E. Siapera (*)
Information and Communication Studies, University College Dublin,
Dublin, Ireland
e-mail: eugenia.siapera@ucd.ie
S. Creta
Institute for Future Media and Journalism, School of Communications,
Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland
e-mail: sara.creta@dcu.ie

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4_11
222 E. SIAPERA AND S. CRETA
comes to the media. This is because, despite a long history of ethical and
deontological codes in journalism, there is no widely agreed-upon ethical
approach to representations of vulnerable others.
Additionally, notwithstanding important exceptions regarding hate
speech and libel, there are tensions that arise from the way in which free-
dom of expression is mobilised as a norm guiding media publishing. A
parallel issue concerns the journalistic norms of objectivity and impar-
tiality, enshrined in most deontological codes in journalism, that feed
into representational practices through introducing a distance between
those who are represented and those who do the representing. The
same distance is introduced between researchers and the subjects they
are researching. So, the question remains: How best to represent vul-
nerable others? While this question concerns, in the first instance, media
workers and journalists, it is also emerging in the context of activists
working with vulnerable others, whose cases they have to represent and
write reports about, as well as in the work of researchers who look to
produce knowledge about vulnerable others. As media workers, activ-
ists, and researchers professionalize, developing procedures, codes of
conduct, reporting mechanisms, and the relevant apparatus of a profes-
sion, the gap that separates them from vulnerable others increases. But
at the centre of their relationship with vulnerable others, the impor-
tant question of how best to represent vulnerable others and their
suffering remains.
In seeking to address this question, an important and fruitful line
of thought has focused on ethico-moral obligations that emerge when
witnessing the suffering of others (Boltanski, 1999; Chouliaraki, 2006;
Silverstone, 2006). Focusing on the question of what media produc-
ers should convey and how audiences should respond to the medi-
ated suffering of others, this body of work has directed our attention
to a m uch-needed critique of existing representations and developed
an approach that takes into account the ‘Other’, especially the racial-
ised ‘Other’ in Said’s use of the term (Said, 1979). However, this work
revolves around the perspective of the spectator and the producer of
the representations of ‘distant suffering’. The role and voices of the
racialised ‘Others’ and any demands they articulate are not taken into
account because this body of work is focused on the production of rep-
resentations and their reception by audiences/readers in the West. It
remains oblivious to the voices and demands articulated by those who
are deemed as others. Additionally, this body of work is focusing on
11 THE ETHICS OF MEDIA RESEARCH WITH REFUGEES 223
the formal need to develop ethical and moral codes which can then be
encoded in representation. However, this involves a shift from looking
at the political question of social inequality and power differentials that
produce suffering to looking at the ethical question of what kind of rep-
resentation of suffering is constituted as good and right. We therefore
argue that if the question of ethics—how should suffering others be rep-
resented in and by the media—is turned into a political question con-
cerning struggles over representation and power inequalities between
those represented and those that do the representing, the focus is recast
more clearly on the chasm between the sufferers and the mediators and
spectators of the suffering and hence on the need to identify and address
this. While the work of Boltanski, Chouliaraki and Silverstone is con-
cerned with media producers of representations, it is also applicable to
researchers who produce representations and knowledge about racialised
‘Others’. When these representations are published as expert knowledge,
they are subject to the same issues and critiques as media representations.
These abstract questions and issues can be examined more concretely
through a discussion of what the media has problematically named the
European ‘refugee crisis’. A focus on media workers, researchers and
activists is important as these groups tend to be involved in more or less
direct relationships with refugees, and they are tasked with creating and
circulating representations and stories about them to broader publics.
In their necessary and important work, media workers, journalists and
activists focusing on refugees in, or trying to come to, Europe, oper-
ate within a set of tensions: firstly, a tension that is produced out of the
power differential between themselves and the refugees; and secondly,
a tension that is produced out of the objective of their work which is
mainly oriented towards European publics, whom they look to mobilise
to action, rather than refugees themselves. At the same time, the distinc-
tion between these categories of people overlooks those media workers,
researchers and activists who emerge out of the communities that suf-
fer, and who seek to find and articulate their own and their communi-
ties’ voices. But tensions exist here as well, as prominent activists may not
necessarily speak for all parts of the community. These tensions generate
clear ethical questions: How should media workers, researchers and activ-
ists act so that they both meet the needs of refugees and mobilise others
to action? What is the most effective representation of the suffering of
refugees that respects and conveys their humanity? We contend here that
these questions cannot be addressed only through ethics and a focus on
what is the ‘right’ thing to do that is cut off from interrogation of the
conditions under which some human beings become refugees. Rather, we
can address these issues through politicising them: in concrete steps, this
entails a closer examination of how refugee and migrant activists position
themselves vis-à-vis these questions. We use the term media activists to
refer to those activists who use the media in order to support and help
refugees, and who have direct and ongoing links with the communities
that suffer, and to exclude correspondents who rely on stringers or fixers
to access the community and then leave after their report is done.
This chapter pursues these arguments in three parts. The first part
critically examines works that deal with media ethics using three key
texts: Boltanski’s Distant Suffering (1999), Silverstone’s concept
of proper distance in Media and Morality (2006) and Chouliaraki’s
Spectatorship of Suffering (2006). The second part focuses on the media
actions taken by refugees and those looking to support them; the final
part pulls these threads together and develops an argument as to the
kinds of mediated practices that can resolve ethical dilemmas in political
terms. We conclude by proposing that research ethics require a similarly
political resolution.
Media Ethics: Proximity and Distance

While media and research ethics subsume several questions and lines of
inquiry, ranging from best practices to profound philosophical questions
of the ‘Other’, in this context we use the twin notions of proximity and
distance as an entry point to these complex discussions. Rather than
focusing on what should be shown, how and to whom, the discussion
in this section engages with proximity and distance because they engage
important issues at the core of these debates: Who and what are deemed
too distant and hence irrelevant? Who and what are found to be close
enough in media and research representations to merit action? Ethics
is taken to represent practical approaches to the good life, as Aristotle
argued in Nicomachean Ethics (2013), meaning that ethics refers to the
search to find or generate everyday practices which then lead to a virtu-
ous or good life. If we take this to be the case, then ethics is, in the first
instance, determined by what the polis or the community understands
the good life to be, and secondly, determined by the practices and habits
this community is already engaged in. So, the physical proximity of citi-
zens in the polis and symbolic proximity of being members of the same/
similar community constitute important determinants of ethics. And

it is precisely for this reason that media ethics1 poses such a challenge:
because it mediates distance.
Media can both act as bridges, bringing closer distant others, as for
example argued by Benedict Anderson (2006 [1987]) and as separators,
re-arranging visibility and through this, importance and worthiness. In a
striking metaphor, Jean Seaton (1999) referred to the media as employ-
ing a kind of inverted Medusa gaze, giving life to those on whom they
focus and condemning to death those they ignore. How do media deter-
mine proximity (value and worthiness) and distance (‘othering’ and
unworthiness)? And from an ethical point of view, how should they con-
vey distance, if at all? This section will examine these issues focusing on
three key works that have set the parameters of relevant debates in this
area: Boltanski’s (1999) Distant Suffering, Silverstone’s (2006) Media
and Morality, and Chouliaraki’s (2006) The Spectatorship of Suffering. All
three works engage with Arendt and her ‘politics of pity’ and the sepa-
ration it enforces between those who suffer and those who do not. All
three works then propose slightly different ways to address this gap or
distance: Boltanski through a focus on moral action including speech
acts; Silverstone by negating distance in moral terms; and Chouliaraki
by seeking to co-articulate pity with justice. Despite the important
contributions of these works, distance and separation re-emerge: as a
separation between those who can act and those acted upon; as a sepa-
ration between moral agents and non-agents; and, as further discussed in
Chouliaraki’s more recent work (2013), in action turned towards the self
and therefore looping around but ultimately ignoring and separating the
self from other. We hope that this discussion will bring to the fore issues
that concern not only the practices and positions of media workers, but
those of researchers as well, and anyone who is tasked with representing
vulnerable others.
It is in Arendt’s (1962) Social Question that the distinction between a
politics of pity and a politics of justice emerges through an analysis of the
French and American revolutions. While violence and necessity repre-
sented by les misérables that turned into les enragés triggered the French
Revolution, they also brought its collapse to Terror, the period after the
1 While we refer here to media and media ethics, the argument is taken to extend to
research ethics at least insofar as this research leads to published outcomes, which then con-
stitute forms of media.
Revolution that saw extensive prosecutions and public executions. This

is because, according to Arendt, in the politics of pity, the social body is
split and can only come together through eradicating those who caused
the separation. In contrast, in the politics of justice, symbolised by the
American Revolution, political action is not triggered by compassion,
but by pointing to injustice. Arendt (1962) makes a distinction between
compassion which she considers a feeling triggered by specific instances
of suffering and pity which she sees as referring to a group or class of
people. For Arendt (1962, p. 86), because compassion requires an iden-
tification between those who experience suffering and those who seek
to help, it abolishes the distance required for politics. For this reason,
Arendt considers it politically irrelevant. The political processes of nego-
tiation, persuasion and compromise, argues Arendt, are drowned by
the pressing calls for immediate action associated with compassion. The
alternative to the pity that arouses compassion is that of pity that leads to
solidarity: here, pity mobilises people to act in a dispassionate manner in
order to form a community of interest with the oppressed and exploited:
this “common interest would then be ‘the grandeur of man’, or ‘the
honour of the human race’, or the dignity of man [sic]” (Arendt, 1962,
p. 88). Pity is the sentiment that underlies both compassion and solidar-
ity, but while in the former distance it is negated, in the latter it is upheld
and difference is respected.
It is these understandings of pity and compassion that underpin
Boltanski’s work on Distant Suffering. Boltanski sought to identify what
the moral response to mediated images of distant suffering may be. In
his reading, two main positions emerge. One is that of abstract universal-
ism, which leads to a too-close identification with those who suffer. The
second is that of local particularism, which constructs those who suffer
as far too remote to be relevant. Neither of these two positions, taken
to correspond to compassion and apathy, are satisfactory. Boltanski fol-
lows Arendt in arguing that, on the one hand, compassion is unsatisfac-
tory because the close identification means we are only guided to action
towards specific instances and do not generalise, for example, giving
money to an individual beggar without questioning the circumstances
that allow for beggars to exist. On the other hand, apathy leads to no
action at all, which is equally unsatisfactory. To eschew the dilemma of
these two positions, that is, to act only towards individual cases or not
act at all, Boltanski returns to Arendt’s distinction between the politics of
pity and justice. Focusing on justice, he argues that while pity demands
immediate action to alleviate the suffering, justice requires the appli-

cation of common frames of fairness, and any action has to be justified
through reference to these frames. Those who suffer must then be por-
trayed as victims of an injustice to ensure proper action that addresses the
injustice beyond the mere alleviation of suffering. For this to happen, the
claims and counterclaims have to be made public, to appear in the space
of appearance that constitutes the public domain, which is the space of
the media. In presenting their claims, those who suffer and those rep-
resenting their suffering must reconcile several contradictory elements:
the presentation of the facts; the way in which those suffering have been
affected; to avoid impassivity; and to avoid exaggeration and hypocrisy.
Three possibilities then emerge, summarised by Boltanski as topics: the
topic of denunciation; the topic of sentiment; and the aesthetic topic. In
the former two, spectators are called to denounce or sympathise with the
sufferers and therefore act upon the suffering, but in the aesthetic topic
they are only called to contemplate and reflect.2 For Boltanski, the ethi-
cal representation by the media and other forms of public representation
can therefore be one that calls to action, and the moral response by spec-
tators is again a form of action, which also includes speech.
Boltanski’s attempt to reconcile the politics of pity and justice
and focus on action is echoed in Chouliaraki’s (2006) work on how
news reports should construct suffering from an ethical point of view.
Chouliaraki reconstructs three ‘regimes of pity’ concerning those suffer-
ing found in the news: adventure, emergency and ecstatic. ‘Adventure’
news, which refers to news presented as concerning distant others in
distant places, for example, through long shots and other distancing
mechanisms, separates sufferers from spectators and precludes the pos-
sibility of action, as the distance is too large and the possibility of con-
tact too remote. ‘Emergency’ news uses more complex ways of rendering
a story, placing sufferers closer to the spectators, making their suffering
more relevant, and in this manner allows for action to be taken. Finally,
‘ecstatic’ news uses modalities such as live reporting, witnessing, and
other means by which any distance between sufferers and spectators
2 This does not mean that no aesthetic tropes are to be used in representing. Rather,
Boltanski refers here to representations that sublimate suffering, turning it into a source of
artistic contemplation, and thereby leading to a further differentiation between the spec-
tators and the sufferers. Boltanski refers to de Sade’s works as an example of the pain of
others turned into an occasion of aesthetic contemplation.
is negated, allowing identification and hence action. Chouliaraki is care-

ful to criticise all three positions because of their exclusive focus on pity.
It is important to note that for Chouliaraki (2006, p. 13) pity is primar-
ily a narcissistic sentiment turned to the self. She argues that pity works
only when we imagine ourselves in the position of the sufferer; this may
explain why it is the position where spectators can identify with suffer-
ers that is most closely linked to action. Hence, Chouliaraki argues that
there has to be a shift from the intimacy imposed by pity to an ethics of
care and responsibility. This can be done through the difficult but neces-
sary move to combine pity with detached reflection on suffering.
While Chouliaraki speaks specifically of the news genre and brings
some empirical clarity to the discussion, Silverstone (2006) returns to
the crucial ethical and philosophical challenges involved in the media-
tion of suffering and more broadly of the ‘Other’. Like Boltanski and
Chouliaraki, he looks to Arendt, but this time focusing on her work
on the polis as the space of appearance, where public words and deeds
are articulated, deliberated and defended. In Silverstone’s mediapolis,
this space of appearance is continuously reconstructed by the media as
industries, technologies, texts and representations. The mediapolis is
a crucial component of current socio-political life, and as such it both
articulates and reinforces particular ethical principles and moral values,
primarily through boundary work in which the boundaries between self
and other, identity and difference, are drawn and redrawn. How then
should the mediapolis operate in a moral way? For Silverstone the key
lies in identifying what is proper distance, opposed to both the immo-
rality of identity-sameness and to the immorality of othering and dis-
tancing. In proper distance, the self is able imaginatively to assume the
position of the Other, while distancing from its own position. This allows
media workers and spectators effectively to overcome distance but with-
out negating difference. It is not because the suffering other is the same
as oneself that we are compelled to act, argues Silverstone (2006), but
because imagining ourselves as others enables us to assume responsibility
towards them. But, he posits, responsibility can only be assumed when
we have acquired our proper distance.
Through their discussions of proximity and distance, these theorists
have thematised the ethical responsibilities of media workers who rep-
resent suffering and the moral responsibilities of spectators who receive
these representations. The dialectics of distance that disables action
(Boltanski), of too much proximity that is narcissistic and concerns only

the self (Chouliaraki), and of proper distance that leads to the assump-
tion of responsibility towards suffering others (Silverstone) are valuable
contributions to our understanding of how the media might fall short
of what is required. However, none of these accounts seriously considers
those who suffer as speaking agents, with any say in the process. While
they all refer to the need for voice and pluralism, while they all point
to inequalities and power asymmetries between the sufferers, the media,
and the spectators, the voices and actions of those who suffer only exist
as representations constructed in the media. Through a focus on the eth-
ics and morality of the media, the substantive political demands made
by the voices of others are not taken literally but seen as a question of
how they can be made public appropriately. This is due to a prioritisation
of ethical and moral questions (how ought we act in order to be good)
over political questions (how do we organise the world and how should
we regulate and govern the affairs of the world, and in more substan-
tive terms, what is the good life—Aristotle’s ‘eu zein’?). While there are
several overlapping threads that bind ethics to politics and vice versa, to
speak of media ethics places the accent on the oughts and values of the
media rather than on their political and ideological role in legitimating or
conversely delegitimising voices, ideas and narratives. But perhaps more
centrally, the issue is that media ethics cannot be separated from politics:
in this reading, for the media to attain their ethical position of combin-
ing pity with justice and assuming a proper distance, we need to address
their politics.
This is not to devalue media ethics approaches but rather to enrich
them through a consideration of their political role. Two issues are
involved here: one concerns the pragmatic question of how media
ethics can be implemented; and the second concerns the implied idea
of what is good, right and appropriate that underpins media ethics.
In the first case, what needs to be taken into account is the boundary
work undertaken by media ethics (Abbot, 2014 [1988]). As media
organisations are increasingly called to develop clear ethical proce-
dures and guidelines, these are called to perform their own kind of
boundary work, drawing new boundaries between professional, reg-
ulated and ethical media organisations and amateur, unregulated,
citizen-based media work, witnessing and/or unethical, and unpro-
fessional journalism and media work. Here, the function of a media
or journalistic code of ethics is to legitimise certain media content by
dint of its mere existence. In doing so, it masks its political dimen-
sions especially when it comes to the ‘unprocessed’ images and voices
of those coming from communities that suffer. Codes of ethics in
this sense reinsert another form of distance that may end up disal-
lowing unmediated voices and images of, and from, those who suf-
fer. Secondly, however, the ideological role of the media in liberal
democracies is to legitimate the status quo and mainstream consen-
sus, often through holding to account certain kinds of ‘bad actors’
but also more broadly through diffusing a particular version of the
world (Hall, 2001 [1980]; Althusser, 2020 [1967]). Media produc-
tion routines, genres and representations, as well as relationships with
audiences/publics cannot be understood outside this political and
ideological role. If media functions are determined by the material
interests of the social class that the media primarily serve, how can
media ethics purport to any kind of universality? We cannot there-
fore look to the media to uphold ethics that effectively conflict with
and undermine their role. It may be that different efforts to media-
tise suffering, coming directly from communities themselves, are able
to combine an ethical stance with a political position that can address
some of the root causes of suffering.
Three conclusions can be drawn from this discussion: first, that the
issue of media ethics can be posed as a question concerning degrees of
proximity and distance; second, that ethical positions cannot be sep-
arated from political questions of power imbalances and struggles; and
third, that media ethics separated from their political dimensions can-
not lead to effective action towards suffering. We must therefore look
for a new ethico-political position emerging from the bottom up which
looks to identify and bridge the gaps between those who suffer and those
tasked with representing the suffering.
In actions that seek both to make the community visible to others and
to alleviate its suffering, media activists look to establish a new commu-
nity that revolves around what Arendt has described as solidarity: the for-
mation of bonds based on common interests. Unlike Arendt’s account,
however, these common interests are not generic, such as the ‘grandeur
of man’ [sic] as Arendt put it, but specific in thematising the suffering
as a condition of exploitation, and forging links with the class of the
oppressed and exploited.
Media Activist Practices: Visibility and Voice

One of the main concerns of communities that suffer and those who
represent them is to render this suffering visible. But it is precisely the
terms of this visibility that are the subject of critique because, on the one
hand existing media representations tend to objectify communities, turn-
ing them into objects of pity, and on the other, such pitiful portrayals
divert attention from a serious consideration of the underlying causes of
suffering. This is especially the case with refugees. Research has found,
for example, that while the shocking photograph of the toddler Aylan
Kurdi—a three-year-old Syrian whose image made global headlines after
he drowned in the Mediterranean Sea—changed the reporting on the
refugee issue (Vis & Goriunova, 2015), this was short-lived, and media
coverage shifted towards suspicion and hostility, with refugee voices
almost completely absent (Georgiou & Zaborowski, 2017). Chouliaraki
and Zaborowski (2017) looked specifically into how refugees ‘spoke’ in
media coverage and found that even when they are given voice, this was
managed in ways that effectively silenced them anew. This was accom-
plished through representing the refugee issue within two dominant nar-
ratives in tension: the narrative of care, which focused almost exclusively
on human needs; and the narrative of safety and security, which focused
on questions of possible threats posed by refugees. In none of these were
refugees actually understood as political and historical actors (Malkki,
1996, cited in Chouliaraki & Zaborowski, 2017).
From an ethical point of view therefore, the issue of media visibility
is not enough; this visibility has to properly recognise refugees as polit-
ical actors with complex personal and political trajectories. Indeed, our
analysis shows that this is part of the strategies of self-representation pur-
sued by refugees themselves. To identify these strategies, we have stud-
ied three examples: first, communications coming from Libyan detention
centres; second, activist practices associated with the movement of Gilet
Noir—the undocumented migrant collective in Paris who are exposing
the conditions under which they are forced to live i.e. precarious employ-
ment, homelessness and police repression; and third, the case of LGBTQ
refugees in Athens who reclaimed their voices from those ostensibly
speaking on their behalf. In focusing on these cases, we hope to under-
stand how refugees and migrants represent and articulate their demands
publicly. A clear demand they make is to have their voices heard rather
than to let others speak for them. A second clear demand is to denounce
the emptiness and hypocrisy of humanitarianism, which removes agency
from people while trapping them in inhuman positions in detention cen-
tres and camps. Through these examples, we argue that an alternative
politicised ethics can only emerge when the voices of refugees become
co-articulated with the voices of others (citizens, activists, researchers)
who amplify and reinforce these voices and their demands, and who par-
ticipate in common struggles for justice and equality.
In addressing the question of self-representation, we consider and
explore the importance of collective action and the use of media visibility
(Meikle, 2018) in generating a new form of existence, that is, in active
contestation to that which Agamben (2004) refers to as ‘bare life’. Bare
life, for Agamben, is the kind of life that people stripped of rights are
condemned to live, a life reduced to mere biology without the possibil-
ity of full and equal participation in social and political life. For these
activists, therefore, to formulate and articulate demands for rights brings
to the fore and creates a new kind of existence that refugees and undoc-
umented migrants are instituting themselves, indicating a strong desire
of being visible on their own terms. Acts of protest and resistance per-
formed in detention, or anti-deportation and regularisation campaigns to
challenge the European order of things, are still at the margins of media
theoretical approaches to migration. However, by appearing in public,
migrants and refugees are rewriting the rules of ‘a borderless world’.
Despite accelerated globalisation, national boundaries still matter and the
neoliberal dream of a borderless world for capital has been exchanged
with one focusing on security.
But this has not gone unchallenged. As Achille Mbembe writes “the
capacity to decide who can move, who can settle, where and under
what conditions is increasingly becoming the core of political strug-
gles”(Mbembe, 2018, np). In contesting borders, the No Border move-
ment, on the one hand, contests the right of the state to determine the
political community through exclusion, and on the other, makes visible
the various borders and separations imposed on people (Walters, 2006)
as well as the ‘topographies of cruelty’ (Balibar, 2001), such as camps
and other means by which states enact population and migration control.
Posting demands and human rights claims online from a detention
centre in Libya, a centre that represents the antithesis of movement and
freedom of movement, leads us to think about the dramatic opposition
to the idea of movement that is the detention centre. The detention
centres in Libya are a key feature of the EU border regime and the land-
scape of EU border control of our time.
While for the most part, research into the mediatisation of the ref-
ugee issue has focused on Europe and its media (e.g. Georgiou &
Zaborowski, 2017; Vis & Goriunova, 2015), the externalisation of
border control in unstable environments has created new issues and
ethico-political dilemmas.3 What are the implications of making people
visible in the context of, for example, migrant detention centres in Libya?
Mobile devices are shaping the forms this visibility takes but also make
clear the dangers it entails. Having a phone inside a detention centre
in Libya can allow asylum seekers and migrants to expose rights viola-
tions with the aim to mobilise activist networks of support, but it can
also expose the phone holder to more violence and abuses by guards and
armed groups for the mere attempt to speak out. With the act of appeal-
ing to a common humanity by showing their wounds (Fassin, 2005),
refugees and migrants in detention, through the process of ‘becoming
visible’ and countering political invisibility, are re-producing a particular
configuration of power. Migrants and asylum seekers in Libya are able
to gain a mediatised visibility through the network of media activists
who are supporting their claim to be visible, sharing forms of self-rep-
resentations of suffering, exposing human rights abuses and document-
ing their suffering. With the act of self-representation and through
documentation of human rights violations and abuses, a process of jus-
tice-seeking leads to a continuous effort to be visible. Given the circum-
stances, this appears to be one of the strategies to deal with deep-rooted
structural oppressions and the reduction of human rights to biopoliti-
cal humanitarianism—a series of ostensibly humanitarian interventions
by NGOs which effectively sustain control over refugees and migrants
3 The unwillingness of the European Union and its member states to accept migrants
and refugees led to the political decision to ‘externalise’ border controls, or in other words,
to effectively ask third countries to control migratory flows to Europe. This was formally
instituted through agreements such as the EU-Turkey agreement of March 2016, and the
agreement with Libya in 2018. In the former, the EU agreed with Turkey to return all
migrants arriving through the Greek islands in exchange for €3 billion (see here for full
details: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-towards-a-new-policy-
on-migration/file-eu-turkey-statement-action-plan). In the case of Libya, the EU paid
€286 million, ostensibly to strengthen local communities in order to deal with migrants,
and to assist ‘voluntary repatriation’ (see here for more details: https://eeas.europa.eu/
headquarters/headquarters-homepage_en/19163/EU-Libya%20relations).
without restoring full rights (Rozakou, 2012). This visibility typically

constitutes part of a communicative process managed by those who are
‘stealing the pain of others’ as suggested by Sherene Razack (2007, p.
375). Following the logic of EU policies in Libya, refugees exist in what
Peter Nyers (2006, p. xiii) calls a ‘depoliticized humanitarian space’,
where their movement and their appearance is controlled by UN bodies,
who are in charge of finding a ‘durable solution’ to the refugee ‘prob-
lem’—like resettlement or integration programs. In response, refugees
trapped in detention in Libya demonstrate and protest against the logic
of detention and control. Through the few pictures that make it out, the
acts of self-representation that emerge, together with the will of produc-
ing an alternative act of visibility from the margins, seek to challenge and
interrogate the dominant narrative of international bodies, creating an
‘interruption in the monopoly’ of the UNHCR narrative (Moulin &
Nyers, 2007, p. 363).
Such acts of self-representation constitute demands for justice and a
restoration of the humanity denied to those detained in camps. These
justice claims are becoming acts of resistance that materialise online, little
pieces of activist raw material that try to challenge the system of con-
trol, and personalise calls for recognition, trying to exercise some influ-
ence on those institutions that should protect refugees rather than detain
and ‘manage’ them. A case that clearly illustrates the dynamic at play
here is the grassroots campaign created to ask the UN Refugee Agency,
International Organization of Migration (IOM) and UN Migration to
urgently #evacuaterefugeesfromlibya! Using the slogan ‘with the knowl-
edge of the international community, innocent individuals continue to
be subject to the most inhumane treatment’, hundreds of refugees in
Libya have connected with the diaspora and others and have used digital
media for this campaign. For example, during a demonstration organised
by Eritrean activists in front of the United Nations in Geneva one of the
protesters was shouting: “We must open humanitarian pathways to save
people trapped in Libya”. This activist was part of a group of refugees
who organised the protest in coordination with fellow Eritrean refugees
held in detention in Libya. The campaign, a cyber grassroots movement,
has gathered Eritreans all around the world to express their indignation
in the face of the grave abuses perpetrated by traffickers in Libya.
This campaign was not without tensions. Refugees and migrants liv-
ing in detention in Libya are afraid to talk, but they are also desperate
to let the world know what they are facing. Protesting the inhumane
living conditions inside Libyan detention centres and sharing via social
media is aimed at reaffirming the need for a response or action from the
world. In other words, their filmed performances are strategically look-
ing for visibility, not only to alleviate the feeling of ‘being unseen’, but
also to claim the right to witness an injustice and share it (so that the
world may know and act), in a communicative process seeking accounta-
bility. A young man from Darfur detained in Libya for the last two years
wrote on Τwitter: “behind those steel bars and dark places where noth-
ing is called human rights. Only despair, violence, torture and violations.
Can you see us? We always have pain, our lives are less happy, and dreams
are abstract”. While these messages in some instances can reach main-
stream news media, they are still distributed horizontally within the com-
municative architecture of support (activist, civil society, support pages).
Nonetheless, the act of tweeting and making rights claims point to the
deeply felt need to be able to articulate the injustice, even when there
is little hope for any immediate change: “No hope. No life. No human-
ity. Just torturing and suffering from being in the hands of Militias in
Tripoli. Libya is not a country for refugees and migrants, I know it very
well, I’ve been in five different detention centres in Tripoli. Please share
my story with UNHCR”. In these posts, refugees are looking to accom-
plish two things: first, to address directly audiences, social media users
as well as activists and powerful NGOs; second, to leave a digital trace
of their existence, trajectories and suffering. In a context where refugees
in detention are reduced to ‘bare life’, these acts of self-representation
are radically reclaiming the individuality and humanity they have been
stripped of.
In the same way, these acts constitute what Isin and Ruppert (2015)
refer to as political and ethical acts (p. 140); these acts perform citizen-
ship even when it does not exist. Refugees seeking asylum and undoc-
umented migrants do not have any rights in Europe; they do not have
the right to work, to education, or to health services, let alone the right
to vote. When they act as if they were already citizens with rights, they
perform a move aimed to attain this status and to question the clear
lack of rights for them. In so doing, they actively contest the border
regime and the logic of control that seeks to ‘manage’ and contain ref-
ugee lives in detention. Can these acts of addressing various audiences
directly and the liberating process of leaving digital traces—when several
forces conspire to remove the humanity of refugees—enable a process of
‘reclaiming narratives’ for rights under conditions of oppression? What
is being claimed here? Does the performative act of resisting control and
exposing violations help in constructing a durable network of support,
which deals with tensions between those who suffer and those tasked
with representing the suffering? How do refugee media activists them-
selves confront and deal with these tensions?
There is no clear answer here. On the one hand, the network of com-
munication involving asylum seekers and migrants in detention and
activists or journalists on the ‘outside’ can bridge the ethical responsi-
bility of exposing suffering, as a direct claim made by those affected by
the violations. Activists and journalists act as the conduit for publishing
this suffering. This represents the kind of proper distance discussed by
Silverstone but also constitutes the kind of speech acts referred to by
Boltanski, as well as an attempt to combine ethics with justice as called
for by Chouliaraki. On the other hand, however, the process of making
people visible may lead to punitive effects on those still in detention.
Ethically speaking, where is the limit between creating a virtual space of
support and enhancing strategies of visibility, while refugees are still arbi-
trarily detained? What are the implications of opening spaces for alterna-
tive narratives created from the margins, while a logic of exclusion still
exists and is geo-spatially performed? These performative claims in the
dark of detention centres in Libya are invoking a form of activism from
the margins, trying to challenge the logic of control and confinement,
but at the same time they are exposing a greater risk to those refugees
who ask distant audiences to mobilise for action. Ethical positions alone
are not adequately equipped to address the problems that refugees in
detention are facing. For us, the authors of this chapter, occupying the
positions of media workers, activists and researchers at the same time
involves contradictions that we are unable to address in purely ethical
and moral terms, by invoking vague ethical principles such as ‘do no
harm’ or ‘protect vulnerable people’.
To compound matters even more, refugees can feel pressure from
this relationship. “We are sources for journalists. They earn a lot from
us, and at the end, they marginalised us. Then, we became the victims
of journalists”. This message was posted on Facebook by a Darfuri refu-
gee in Tripoli, while feeling stressed that one of his friends was tortured
because he was caught revealing abuses and violations, to journalists.
He describes his feelings as their condition has not been improving:
“Journalists are celebrating with awards and gifts, while the sources that
have been informing them are getting awards and gifts of suffering”. In
reflecting upon this, if we use the words and posts of these refugees for
the present chapter, what do we gain and what do they gain? This dispar-
ity, and the need to bridge it, motivates our work as researchers. But it is
also evident that we cannot bridge it by referring to ethical codes alone.
We have to ask, what does the present chapter contribute towards help-
ing refugees attain the rights they need?
As discussed above, we cannot think of media ethics outside political
change that addresses the structural factors that lead to human or other
suffering. However, how can the process of self-representation and doc-
umentation of human rights violations overcome the deep-rooted struc-
tural oppressions that exist? Questioning refugee rights points out
growing difficulties in taking part in such debates, especially considering
the securitisation and surveillance of borders, the dynamics of control and
the inability to gain refugee status. Is it really enough to gain visibility in
the public sphere to allow a new form of political engagement? Is it possi-
ble to challenge the violence of border and migration control and ask for
the ‘right to have rights’? While mainstream news media are constrained
or limited from accessing detention centres in Libya, as mentioned above,
some detainees have adopted social media as a platform to communicate
their everyday acts of resistance to a wider audience and diverse media
networks. The process of documenting and sharing the traces of suffer-
ing can also perform the additional function of exposing the hypocrisy at
the heart of the externalisation of migration controls by the EU, which
in formal documents is always couched in humanitarian terms. If on the
one hand the EU has been promoting discourses that supposedly drive
the protection of human rights, the harsh reality of detention centres
in Libya, and the histories and trajectories shared and documented by
migrants and refugees in Libya, show the real human cost of externalisa-
tion of European policies on people’s lives. With the flagship of tackling
the ‘root causes of irregular migration and of the phenomenon of dis-
placed people in Africa’, the EU’s magic wand vision to contain migration
flows has in fact been a policy of externalisation, pressuring govern-
ments in Africa and the Middle East to ‘manage’ and detain refugees in
exchange for aid: outsourcing EU migration policies beyond EU borders
(Bonnici Bennett, 2018). How are these lives responding to this, beyond
seeking to make visible the injustice and discrimination encountered?
Last June, a group of refugees escaping Libya and now living in
Tunisia organised an autonomous peaceful march in the southern
Tunisian city of Medenine, to mark World Refugee Day and demand
protection. Due to the lack of a domestic asylum law and an unplanned

system of reception and protection, in Tunisia asylum seekers are reg-
ularly subjected to violations of their fundamental rights. An Eritrean
living in the south of Tunisia, protesting in the streets of Medenine dur-
ing the #WorldRefugeeDay in a march organised by refugees and asylum
seekers living in appalling conditions, tweeted: “Can we have the right
to live a decent life? For the #WorldRefugeeDay, we have the right to
ask about our future”. Warning shots were fired skyward by the Tunisian
police and tear gas was used to stop the peaceful demonstration, with
reports of refugees being detained overnight in a Medenine police sta-
tion. The space of exclusion outside of the EU has become the new
arena where refugees are enacting new scripts, not only through contes-
tation but also through a search for solidarity (Isin & Nielsen, 2008),
for new political subjects to emerge. The same refugee in Tunisia com-
mented: “We want our future back. We don’t have the right to speak.
We only have one option left: the world needs to see us”. It is in this
space, where strategies of visibility and invisibility are emerging, that
refugees and activists are exploring a new dimension for the voice of
justice-seekers to be heard. Technology has facilitated a more immediate
sharing of information in real time, connecting people inside detention
centres with the world outside, in a battlefield where visibility, voice and
recognition are emerging though always in a context where, as Georgiou
(2018, p. 49) has argued, “not everyone speaks and is heard in the same
way; not everyone is equally represented, even if most are digitally pres-
ent”. In these terms, a crucial task for media activists and researchers is
to help amplify these voices and ensure that they make it through the
noise. If refugees and migrants have their own voice already, then media
activists and researchers can no longer claim to speak on their behalf:
rather they have to listen to these voices and if possible amplify them.
This discussion has outlined the difficulties and tensions in seek-
ing visibility. From an ethical point of view, it is difficult to offset the
potential dangers faced by refugees in becoming visible by positing
a future resolution for all. It is clear that this resolution requires more
than making the suffering visible. It is at this level that we must look
for the explicitly political shift in refugee strategies of visibility and
self-representation. In stories and material published online by refugees
and migrants held in detention in Libya, the sense of frustration regard-
ing the usefulness of continuously articulating demands to the host
nation or the international community is explicitly debated. Other posts
however insist on discussing issues of belonging, and access to social

rights. In these terms, they are concerned with political campaigns such
as the anti-deportation and regularisation campaigns, or with protests
in several cities, marches, migrant caravans, online campaigns, and peti-
tions. These coordinated actions and movements share a significant and
common condition: that of precarity, referring to a tenuous presence,
uncertain conditions of existence, and a generalised sense of risk and
uncertainty. Precarity signals a vulnerability attached to the disintegration
of the bonds between territory, identity and citizen rights. This precar-
ity therefore becomes a political condition that leads to mobilisation: the
identity that can connect and create the united action of solidarity within
and across borders, as people (citizens and non-citizens) increasingly live
precariously following years of austerity policies across Europe.4
In this context, political mobilisations in common between refu-
gees/migrants and anti-austerity and anti-capitalist protesters signal
a shift towards a clear politicisation of asylum which is seen as an issue
of humanitarianism and human rights. Since the 1970s, for example,
occupations of buildings, hunger strikes and demonstrations to high-
light the situation of those residing ‘illegally’ in France have marked
the struggle of the French ‘Sans-Papiers’ movement (Freedman, 2008).
Since then, a series of mobilisations of a similar nature have continued
to put pressure on the government to regularise their residence situa-
tion in France and to resist government attempts to expel so-called ‘ille-
gal’ residents. Elsewhere in Europe, the Wij Zijn Hier [We Are Here]
group in Amsterdam (Dadusc, 2019), the organising of Top Mantas in
Madrid (undocumented migrants selling their goods from the streets; see
Agustín, 2013), the City Plaza refugee occupation in Athens, and other
4 Austerity refers to the policy of cutting the budget of the state (Blyth, 2013). This in
turn creates various pressures and intense competition for jobs and wages as budget cuts
lead to job losses and lower wages. In Europe, where policies revolved around welfare pro-
vision, the competition for jobs and access to the more limited welfare available under aus-
terity led to a rise of xenophobia and racism as only those considered as ‘belonging’ were
seen as deserving access to jobs and welfare (Giglioli, 2016). For some (e.g. Bhattacharyya,
2018; Carastathis, 2015), racism is a technique of austerity that justifies and supports
intense competition. The externalisation of border controls following the 2015 ‘crisis’ can
be read as a European response that continues along the same lines: using belongingness
and exclusion to justify austerity and the intensification of competition for access to basic
rights, such as the right to work, health services, housing and so on.
initiatives are part of a wave of migrant-led activism developed by politi-

cal groups and collectives (Caraus & Paris, 2018).
In addition to the occupation of buildings, another migrant-led polit-
ical mobilisation takes the form of anti-deportation campaigns. Here
we can observe the connection of struggles and the move from appeals
to common humanity towards clear demands for rights and against the
limits to these rights imposed by nation-state belonging. This artic-
ulation of political demands by migrants and their allies signals a shift
from thinking of migration within ethical registers—which remove voice
and agency—to understanding it from a political perspective. To illus-
trate this with an example, in May 2019, a group of around 500 people
gathered in Terminal 2 of Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris demand-
ing to speak to Prime Minister Édouard Philippe in a demonstration
against deportations and in favour of legalized papers for all. The pro-
test was organised by the collective Gilets Noirs (Black Vests), a group
of sans-papiers in the Ile-de-France region, and the pro-migrant activ-
ist group la Chapelle debout!. The protesters were carrying signs and
banners, and were shouting “France does not belong to the French!
Everyone has a right to be here”. The place had not been chosen ran-
domly: the airport is located next to one of the biggest migrant deten-
tion centres in France, the Centre de Rétention Administrative (CRA)
of Mesnil-Amelot. In 2018, more than 1000 people were deported
from there. The Gilets Noirs demanded that Air France “stop any finan-
cial, material, logistical or political participation in deportations” and
denounced the company’s collaboration in deportations from France. In
their manifesto, the Gilets Noirs wrote: “We are here because this airport
belongs to those who scrub its toilets all day long, who pack and trans-
port suitcases for customers with red passports”. Responses are mixed.
While some passengers are walking, unconcerned, waiting to board their
plane, others refuse to sit down if a deportation is on their flight, or
some pilots refuse to take off.
Merging the anti-racist agenda with the anti-capitalist one, opposing
the policies of detention, deportation and deterrence that characterise
the treatment of asylum seekers and refugees, No Borders activism has
been calling for direct action against immigration controls in the name
of free movement for all. In France, the action in Charles de Gaulle air-
port was organised according to the same logic and was not the first
one led by la Chapelle debout!. At the end of December 2018, around
700 undocumented migrants had tried to enter the historic Comedie
Francaise theatre in Paris, while ‘Lucrezia Borgia’ by Victor Hugo was

in full swing, in order to obtain their regularisation. Their stated objec-
tive was to get the theatre director Eric Ruf to intervene on their behalf.
Behind this immediate objective was the move to denounce the condi-
tions in which refugees and migrants are held but also the empty ges-
tures of humanitarianism. As they put it in a Facebook post:
Theatres are for some time considered the privileged scenes of ‘pledges of
hospitality’. So here we are […] responding with actions to those who are
content to make great humanistic tirades.
WE AFFIRM:
We are all in revolt! With yellow vests and all those who stand against the
exploitation of the poor by the state and the bosses. They are the ones who
club us and gas us, harrass the workers and denounce the undocumented.
Let’s face it!
French State = Racist State. Stop the collaboration between Western states
and their former colonies that sign international treaties in Marrakech,
Khartoum, Dublin to better deport us!
We demand papers, housing and freedom of movement and settlement!
To those who claim a better “welcome policy”, we answer: it is the racist
and colonial code of entry and stay of foreigners and the right of asylum
(CESEDA) it is necessary to attack.
To those who are struggling to improve the conditions of confinement, by
scheduling educational workshops in the Administrative Retention Centers
(ARC) or by throwing footballs, we answer: these are the prisons for for-
eigners and others that we will close. (Collectif La Chapelle Debout!, 16
December 2018, original in French, post. https://www.facebook.com/
CollectifLaChapelleDebout/posts/796230130709926?__tn__=K-R)
This excerpt shows the articulation of clear political demands rather than
appeals to a common humanity or ethics of hospitality and the creation
of a common front against those who profit from this situation. In so
doing, and in developing a political subjectivity, refugee and migrant
activism demands that researchers and other activists side with them
politically by showing the untenable position of humanitarianism: the
objective is not to have more humane prisons or detention centres but to
abolish them altogether.
The calls ‘I’m here to tell you that for them we are commodities!’ and
the ‘right to remain’ are not only survival struggles, but significant ways
in which to resist power relations. Both anti-deportation and regulari-
sation strategies carry a dual purpose: on the one hand, they are trying
to stop deportations of the sans-papiers, while on the other hand they
expose the deportation regime that uproots and exiles refugees for a
second time. Denouncing the precarity of the lives of the unregularised
involves posing the question: who bears responsibility for the treatment
of non-white lives? A demand to speak and be heard is commonly found
in the slogans of this refugee activism: ‘immigrants have a voice and they
are using it!’ or “We are the freedom to move, to settle down to act. We
will take it as our right”.5
Under the slogan “France, we are tired of you! You sleep and eat
thanks to us”, the movement was able to mobilise a large number of
undocumented migrants. These initiatives described above can be con-
sidered approaches of migrant resistance through two Arendtian ration-
ales: ‘the right to have rights’ and the right to appear in the ‘space of
appearance’ becoming public and visible, asking to be recognised
through acts of political disobedience against the structural order and
global system of moral principle of ‘hospitality’, and regardless of their
former and current legal situation. Sans-Papiers is a hugely significant,
self-organised migrants’ movement in France, where being ‘without
papers’ has indeed represented a political effort to validate this term over
the years. Sans-Papiers activism is encapsulated in the slogan: “We are
not dangerous, we are in danger”, demanding and enacting the right to
move and to stay, and protesting the violence of contemporary border
regimes, but also the specific forms of exploitation of non-citizens and
non-Europeans coming from the South and East, redefining the notion
of political community, addressing the root causes of the suffering: impe-
rialism and capitalism. It is because of this effort to link and connect the
struggles that these activist initiatives seek publicity through mostly social
and digital media, given their exclusion and sensationalisation by main-
stream media.
This shift towards finding and speaking with their own voices and the
effort to connect the struggles is illustrated poignantly in the case of the
Documenta art exhibition in Athens in 2017. We use this example as a
5 Gilets Noirs Press release 20 May 2019, http://www.statewatch.org/news/2019/
may/fr-communique-gilets-noir-airport-5-19.pdf.
means of illustrating how refugees/migrants reclaim their voices from

those who seek to speak on their behalf while at the same time show-
ing the vacuity and narcissism of humanitarianism. The controversial
decision to host Documenta in Athens and thus exploit the spectacle of
the debt and the immiseration of Greek people was criticised by many
(Plantzos, 2019). When the artist Roger Bernat asked local refugee and
migrant communities to help with an art installation of an ancient stone
in exchange for a €500 fee, the LGBTQI refugee collective in Athens
decided to ‘abduct’ the stone. Their announcement of this act seen in
Fig. 11.1 includes the text: “Governments and NGOs have been pulling
our strings, making decisions for us for far too long. But we are cutting
the strings, dancing on our own, speaking louder than any stone”.
We have insisted in the above on the political actions of refugees/mi-
grants themselves for two reasons: the first is because we did not
want to silence them by imposing a meta-narrative that comes from
other sources. Rather, we wanted to refocus the discussion using the
voices, terms and acts of refugees/migrants themselves. As mentioned
above, the realisation that migrants and refugees have their own voice
de-centres our meta-voices as researchers and makes our first priority to
prevent these voices and their demands from being made invisible, and
to amplify the voices and support them in realising their demands using
our access to privileged spaces. This emerges not out of an ethical com-
mitment but from the decision to address the issues in their political
dimensions. Second, in so doing, we wanted to make clear some of the
theoretical arguments pursued in the first section. There, we argued that
it is impossible to think of an ethical act of representing suffering that is
not first and foremost an attempt to alleviate and prevent suffering. We
argued that discussions of ethics revolve around proximity and distance,
hence thematising borders and separations between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Politico-ethical acts that seek to address, bridge or destroy these borders
and separations inevitably emerge as superior to acts that merely re-pres-
ent, i.e. repeat and in some ways re-enact the suffering.
Communities that suffer are all too aware of the double exploitation
imposed on their bodies: first through the violent acts of war, displace-
ment, subjugation, detention and so on; and second, through capi-
talising on their situation through a politics of pity that focuses on the
spectacle of the suffering bodies and the ‘feel good’ narcissistic factor
of pursuing humanitarian causes (Chouliaraki, 2013). This is why, as
we documented above, there is a clear shift towards self-representation
Fig. 11.1 LGBTQI+ intervention in Documenta 14, 2017

by refugees and migrants and towards speaking with their own voices.
And as we saw in the discussion above, their acts of self-representation
are also deeply political acts that seek to show the gaps between bodies
demarcated as bare life and the privileged European bodies for whom
borders are an abstraction. What is urgent in their actions is not a quest
to be the most ethical but a political intervention to identify and stop the
exploitation and subjugation. As researchers and media activists, we can
only follow their lead.
Conclusion
This chapter began with a consideration of the literature on the ethics of
media representations of vulnerable others. We criticised this position on
the basis that it focuses almost exclusively on ethics from a philosophical
point of view, thereby overlooking any political dimensions. In parallel,
the literature, despite recognising the importance of voice for those rep-
resented, still tended to focus on representations in mainstream media.
In examining migrant activist practices and their media components,
we focused on two main inter-related strategies and their tensions. The
first was the pursuit of visibility through self-documentation of suffer-
ing, as emerging in detention centres in Libya. Through this strategy
refugees seek to expose the problems of the externalisation of the EU
border policies and the hypocritical rhetoric on human rights of interna-
tional bodies, but also to keep a record of their own existence and per-
sonal trajectories. The two clear tensions here concern first, the danger
to which vulnerable refugees are positioned, and the lack of any tangible
outcomes of this pursuit of visibility. The second strategy concerned the
connection of struggles and the explicit political positioning against the
precariousness imposed on undocumented migrants and the associated
exploitation and violence against them. Through poignant interventions
which are mediatised through social media, movements such as the Gillet
Noirs in France and the LGBTQI+ Refugees in Greece make clear the
exploitation and violence of border regimes, and articulate clear demands
for political rights that extend beyond and transcend national borders.
The tension in this strategy concerns precisely the politics of asking
for the rights to be conveyed by the state, legitimising thus the same
nation-state authorities that are engaged in exploitation in the first place.
In terms of the question of ethics—i.e. what constitutes an appro-
priate representation of vulnerable of suffering others?—we see that
in practice, migrant activists transcend such dilemmas by explicitly politi-

cising the questions involved. This politicisation means that humanitarian
questions are exposed as political questions: the suffering in detention
centres is not the result of a random humanitarian disaster but the direct
outcome of EU border policies. When migrants and refugees document
torture practices in detention centres, when they film and stop depor-
tations, when they occupy buildings or intervene in otherwise nor-
mal everyday social events, migrants are less concerned with the details
of mediatised representations and more with speaking with their own
voice, articulating their own demands, and in the process reclaiming the
humanity denied them. Notwithstanding the tensions in the strategies
pursued, we contend that the migrant activist practices are de facto ethi-
cal because in politicising the issues using their own voices and struggles,
they overcome questions of separation and distance, and questions of
narcissistic humanitarianism. Instead, they specifically seek to both alle-
viate the suffering and exploitation and address the root causes and the
socio-political processes that are involved in producing such suffering.
Where does this leave us as researchers? Following through these
arguments, merging the ethical with the political, rather than seeking to
separate the formal ‘scientific’ work that research does from the voices of
the subjects of this research, the ethico-political line is to bridge bound-
aries and borders and to join our voices with those of the people with
whom we are researching.
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CHAPTER 12
Challenges of Ongoing Conflict Research:

Dialogic Autoethnography in Studies
of Post-2014 Ukraine
Yuliya Yurchuk and Liudmila Voronova
Events happening in Ukraine since 2014—change of government, the

annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, and ongoing armed
conflict in the east—have been discussed by scholars from the perspective
of the “war of narratives” (Khaldarova & Pantti, 2016). The main focus
of international scholarly attention has been on the Russian actors and
what has been labeled propaganda (see Pantti, 2016). Bolin, Jordan, and
Ståhlberg (2016) have highlighted the importance of choosing a differ-
ent frame, analyzing the Ukrainian actors, the internal flows of informa-
tion, and the media situation within the country.
Addressing this gap, the transdisciplinary project “Propaganda and
management of information in the Ukraine-Russia conflict: From nation
Y. Yurchuk (*)
Department of History, Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: yuliya.yurchuk@sh.se
L. Voronova
Department of Journalism, Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden
e-mail: liudmila.voronova@sh.se

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4_12
250 Y. YURCHUK AND L. VORONOVA
branding to information war” (2016–2018) has focused on Ukraine as

an arena for information management. With an aim to analyze the new
types of actors engaged in information war and their impact on the
practice and character of information warfare (Hoskins & O’Loughlin,
2010; Tumber & Webster, 2006), it has focused on actors, audiences
and messages in and around information management and propaganda.
The two senior researchers (the project leader Per Ståhlberg and Göran
Bolin) built on their experience in researching media campaigns and
nation branding, and focused primarily on pro-Ukrainian information
management directed toward international audiences. We—two junior
scholars—worked within our respective primary spheres of interest: his-
tory and its representations in contemporary media and cultural products
(Yurchuk), and journalism culture (Voronova). While we applied textual
analyses to materials of various kinds, our primary research method was
interviews. The interviews were primarily conducted in Kyiv, but also
other cities both within Ukraine (Lviv, Odesa) and outside the country
(Hamburg, Vienna).
Since 2014 each of the authors had to go through difficult stages of
coming to terms with the situation that had developed. When we started
the project in 2016, we had some anxieties regarding the process of
doing research, writing papers, presenting results at conferences, etc.
These were related not only to the usual research risks of being perceived
as biased, not establishing rapport with research subjects, etc., but also to
the emotional effects of the information we uncovered, the impossibility
of foreseeing future developments in our countries of origin, and even
potential consequences of the conflict situation for our own friendship.
These proved to be unfounded, although we were often asked how we
worked on the project. We realized that our experience is worth sharing,
as it is not only our personal experience as individuals but our experience
as researchers which may be meaningful to other scholars who may work
in similar contexts. Today, from the perspective of more than five years
since the conflict started, this reflection is not only possible, but needed
to contextualize our and other people’s experiences in the important his-
torical moment that is passing.
Ethnographic work, even if it only builds on interviews, always
requires that self-reflexivity be an essential part of the research
(Bourdieu, 2001 [2004]). As feminists, we have also largely searched
for inspiration in feminist perspectives on ethnography (Fields, 2013;
Golombisky, 2006; Hoffmann, 2007; Jaggar, 2016). According to
12 CHALLENGES OF ONGOING CONFLICT RESEARCH … 251
Checker, Davis, and Schuller (2014, p. 208), “feminist methods stress

equality, intimacy, dialogue, and reciprocity between researchers and par-
ticipants.” In conflict ethnography, which focuses on societies in conflict
or post-conflict situations, the role of researcher self-reflexivity is even
more important, as it relates not only to such universal issues as power,
distance, and objectivity in research, but also to safety, polarization, and
taking sides (see Käihkö, 2018). Malyutina (2017) defines three chal-
lenges of researching post-2014 Ukraine: risks for the research subjects
and researchers themselves; limitations on the process of writing set by
the conflict; and splits in research communities that may negatively influ-
ence knowledge production.
Voronova conducted interviews with several often-overlapping groups
of informants1: journalists working for the national and local media,
including immigrant journalists from Russia, and internally displaced
journalists who cannot return to their professional activities in Crimea
and non-government-controlled areas of Donbas, as well as media experts
and representatives of professional media associations. She focused on the
activities of the project “Two countries - One profession” (OSCE, 2018),
initiated by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, by
attending its events in Hamburg and Vienna. The initial contacts were
received via her Russian acquaintances and former colleagues working for
media and professional media associations, and later snowball sampling
was used. Twenty-two interviews with journalists, and twenty interviews
with representatives of media and journalism associations on an inter-
national, national, and local level were conducted, as well as two focus-
groups with young journalists from Ukraine and Russia who participated
in the collaborative production of documentaries in the framework of the
“Two countries – One profession” project.
Yurchuk conducted seven interviews with historians who united their
professional efforts with the aim to counter Russian propaganda by pro-
ducing a series of historical articles and books under the umbrella of the
popular history project “Likbez” (Likbez, 2018), meaning “elimination
of illiteracy.”
Due to the changes that Ukraine is going through there has been
a shift in journalists’ and historians’ perceptions of their societal roles.
1 We are aware of the discussion on the use of the word “informant” (e.g. Morse, 1991).
We chose to use the concept “informant” over “respondent” as it connotes qualitative

research in contrast to quantitative analysis.
They oscillate between the professional ideal of neutrality and objectivity,

on the one hand, and the desire to be activists and agents of change in
society, on the other (Budivska & Orlova, 2017 on journalists; Yurchuk,
2017 on historians).
Although our research can to some extent be considered conflict eth-
nography, as we ourselves never visited the areas of the armed conflict
(i.e., the non-government-controlled areas of Donbas), we conducted
interviews with actors directly influenced by the conflict, reflecting on
and covering it as part of their professional activities. In this sense, they
“participated” in the conflict on a daily basis. Dealing in research with
such sensitive issues as information warfare and conflict becomes espe-
cially problematic when the scholars are not complete “outsiders” to the
conflict themselves (Malyutina, 2017). Living in Sweden, outside of the
country where the ethnographic work was conducted, and working in a
field that only partly overlaps with the fields the informants belong to,
created a cultural and professional distance. Bourdieu (2001 [2004])
argues that this distance can be beneficial, as an outsider might notice
details invisible to an insider. At the same time, the distance might cre-
ate obstacles for the researcher, from establishing contact with subjects
to difficulties in interpretation of the interview and other data. Yet, as
Livingstone (2003, p. 491) states, “the trick is to keep the insider and
outsider perspectives in dialogue.”
This insider-outsider dialogue was supported by an ongoing dia-
logue with each other. This chapter is based on what we define as dia-
logic autoethnography wherein we reflect on the challenges that we
faced and solutions we found in the process of research: from prepar-
ing to enter the field to writing reports. By dialogic autoethnography,
we understand a practice of reflection, in which the scholar is not left
on her own with her diaries and thoughts, but rather discusses the com-
mon and different experiences of the research practice with another
scholar—in our case, from the same project. How do our feelings of
guilt, shame, anger, affection, attachment, love, and so on interact with
our professional goals and the way we deal with the research mate-
rial? How do they influence our interactions with informants and each
other? What can we do for the conflict (resolution) and empowerment
of informants, while remaining in the framework of academic research?
By responding to these questions, we contribute to several discussions:
the field of conflict ethnography, work in multidisciplinary research envi-
ronments, and particularities of conducting interviews with activists.
We argue that while the conflict situation maximizes the question

of belonging and non-belonging it is still possible to be emotionally
engaged without leaving the boundaries of academic identities. We have
chosen an experimental format of writing: as we discovered the con-
cept of dialogic autoethnography, we conducted an interview with each
other that we cite throughout the text. We first introduce our theoretical
and methodological framework; we proceed by discussing the questions
of belonging and non-belonging, emotional vs. political engagement,
hegemonic appropriation, and ethical considerations. Finally, we provide
some suggestions for future ethnographic research on conflict.
Dialogic Autoethnography: Theoretical

and Methodological Framework
To initiate the writing of this chapter, we conducted a 1.5-hour interview

with each other. Its transcription provided us with the material we used
as grounds for our meta-analysis, which we enriched with our observa-
tions, emotions, and memories of interactions and encounters we had
during our work.
Autoethnography or self-ethnography2 is “an alternative method
and form of writing” (Neville-Jan, 2003, p. 89) for those who are
interested in “rewriting selves in the social world” (Denshire, 2014,
p. 831). Scholars underline that autoethnography is “a relational pur-
suit” (Turner, 2013) in which personal stories about experiences of the
researcher help to better understand broader contexts (Holt, 2003;
Sparkes, 2000, p. 21). This is also a highly destabilizing pursuit, as in
autoethnography the boundaries between a researcher as a professional
and as a person are blurred (Reed-Danahay, 1997). While writing this
chapter and also during the project, we saw ourselves as human subjects
“constructed in a tangle of cultural, social and historical situations and
relations in contact zones” (Brodkey, 1996, p. 29).
Autoethnography can be written in evocative or analytical style, or a
combination of both (Denshire, 2014; Ellis & Bochner, 2006; Kennedy,
MacPhail, & Varley, 2018). An evocative approach suggests the sin-
cere, subjective and self-reflective accounts of lived experience (Ellis,
2 Self- and autoethnography can be seen as interchangeable terms. In this chapter, we will
predominantly use the term “autoethnography.”

2009; Kennedy et al., 2018). This is why some scholars call it “episte-
mology of emotion” (Denzin, 1997, p. 228). In an analytical approach,
the autoethnographic data is not seen as a source of knowledge itself;
rather it is analysis of the data in the wider social context that is valued
for knowledge production (Anderson, 2006; Denshire, 2014; Kennedy
et al., 2018). In this chapter, we have combined both approaches.
The interview conducted with each other is a self-reflective or evoc-
ative account of our subjective experience doing research. At the same
time, it also serves as an analysis of our experience. The next step is the
meta-analysis of the interview, where a theoretical framework is applied
to explain the experiences and emotions articulated in the interview.
Our chapter is both ethnography and autoethnography as each of
us was a subject of study both for ourselves and for each other. We use
ourselves and our experiences as a resource of the ethnographic study
(Collins & Gallinat, 2010). This work is a dialogical performance of our
professional subjectivities where we reflect on the challenges we faced
while studying subjects in a challenging situation. These challenges
arose not only because of the conflict itself but also due to other par-
ticularities of our research activities. We both studied our colleagues and
experts in related fields: professional communities of journalists and his-
torians, respectively. We came into the project with the baggage of our
personal histories, carrying the imprints of our countries of origin, and
the years of our friendship which has evolved in a country that is foreign
to both of us.
According to Burnier (2006), one cannot feel at home in one’s dis-
cipline in order to write autoethnography. Indeed, the transdisciplinary
character of our project constantly encouraged us to step out of the
frame of our respective research fields, and through discussions with each
other and conducting interviews together, to understand other perspec-
tives and approaches (cf. Denshire, 2014). In a way, we were destabi-
lizing ourselves and challenging the preconceptions we had about the
subjects of our study. The dialogic autoethnography that we engaged in
shows how autoethnography practices can become “vehicles for talking
to each other often, across the borders of discipline and identity loca-
tions” (Burdell & Swadener, 1999, p. 26).
Academic environments often encourage professional relations
that are opposite to what feminist research stands for, with competi-
tion, rivalry, and strict hierarchies. Power hierarchies and structures
within educational and research spaces are critically addressed from

post-colonial and queer perspectives among others (e.g., Bertilsdotter

Rosqvist et al., 2019). An “epistemological ‘intimate’ community
of both learning and writing together” is suggested by Bertilsdotter
Rosqvist et al. (2019, p. 14) as one of the ways of re-imagining spaces
of knowledge creation. In these spaces, we argue, rigid categories of the
researcher and the research subject are blurred.
In the process of research and in the process of meta-reflection on
this research that we engage in this chapter, we have been trying on
the roles of both researchers and objects of (self-)analysis. That is why
it has been especially important to reflect upon the fluidity of catego-
ries of belonging. To what extent can we think of ourselves as belong-
ing to one particular group, be it country of origin, country of living,
one’s academic discipline or professional affiliation? This autoethnogra-
phy demonstrates how our selves are constantly moving between catego-
ries depending on the roles and positions we take in specific contexts and
times, destabilizing the category of researcher who might at the same
time be an activist, a citizen, and/or a gendered and emotional human
being.
Conflict Ethnography as Belonging and Non-belonging

Ethnographic research always poses questions of belonging (e.g.,
Bourdieu, 2001 [2004]). In our case, we have reflected on how belong-
ing and bonds were imagined and formed on several levels: personal,
disciplinary, professional, national, and geographic. Yurchuk was warmly
welcomed by her informants at one of the organizations, as they per-
ceived her “as a part of them.” Voronova, in turn, felt a complete out-
sider, lacking knowledge about the context, despite reading about the
Ukrainian media landscape, history, and current events prior to entering
the field. Jenkins (2018), with a reference to Smyth (2005, p. 17) writes
that it is
widely acknowledged that outsider researchers face greater challenges in

terms of establishing trust and accessing the field than their insider coun-
terparts. The latter are able to mobilize their preexisting social networks,
have a greater proficiency in the language, and enjoy a more nuanced
familiarity with the local social and political context.
To address this challenge, Voronova readily took on the “student” role

of a researcher (Hoffmann, 2007). It helped to justify her research aims
and provided her with detailed information on political, cultural, social,
and media phenomena and processes. We reflected on it thus in our
mutual interview:
Y: When I was speaking with [one of the historians] she said: “As a histo-
rian you understand me.” And I thought: “Yes, I am a historian, but I
am not doing the same thing that you are doing.” She was very self-re-
flective in this way. She said: “You, as a historian from the West, you
can criticize our work.” But still, she communicated with me as with a
Ukrainian.
V: I was quite surprised, I should say, when I realized that my own pro-
fessional belonging to journalism really became the entrance door to
this group of people. Plus, thankfully I had contacts in Russia who put
me in contact with Ukrainian informants, and then it became a snow-
ball sampling. These Russian contacts of mine were so reliable, and had
such a good reputation that I could then by association with them get
into the field, and then also through the people I met in Ukraine I got
the other contacts who felt that I was reliable.
Thus, whereas for Yurchuk, despite being an “outsider” in the sense of

belonging to a different geographic location, an academic location in
the West, the entrance point to the field was her national belonging,
for Voronova the entrance point was shared professional belonging. For
both of us a good rapport with the informants was also achieved due to
the contacts who put us in touch with the informants. “Trust by associ-
ation” (Norman, 2009; see also Jenkins, 2018), thus, to a large extent
was what had enabled successful fieldwork.
Reflecting upon our different belongings and “entrance points,”
and the related challenges and benefits, we realized how from initially
being outsiders we turned into oursiders. By this, we mean that we were
welcomed by informants to their “side” as empathic observers who
acknowledged the interviewees’ emotions and engagement, yet, we were
not expected to take their side and could keep our professional and indi-
vidual integrity. While maintaining boundaries when it came to political
engagement, we were emotionally engaged with the informants, which
became one of the solutions to the challenge of ethnographic work in a
conflict situation.
Conflict Ethnography as Emotional Engagement:

A Feminist Approach
Emotional engagement does not only affect the rapport between the
researcher and her informants when located in the field, it also influences
the knowledge produced (Jenkins, 2018). As formulated by Widdowfield
(2000, p. 201), “[n]ot only are emotions an inherent and integral part
of conducting research, but emotions can have a real and tangible impact
on the research process. In particular, emotions may affect the way, or
indeed whether a particular piece of research is carried out.”
There were several levels of emotional work in our project. First,
we were handling our own emotional reactions to the situation of the
conflict itself. Second, our emotions were revealed, triggered, and
reflected upon in the process of interaction with informants. Third, our
interactions within the research team were not just professional, but

emotional, too. When interviewing each other, we discussed how this
ethnographic project helped us to cope with anxieties and anticipated
oppositions related to the conflict. There was an interesting paradox: on
the one hand, our interactions with the informants and our entire pres-
ence in the field were charged with emotional reactions. On the other
hand, this emotional work, in the end, resulted in our rationalization of
the situation. Yet, we could agree that the project, in the end, was about
shared human feelings, which, in our mind, provides hope that the con-
flict will eventually be reconciled.
V: The most emotional interview I have ever had in my life was

with a person who migrated internally, who was from the now
non-government-controlled territory. He was telling me very rationally
and very calmly the story of how he had to move […]. I was listen-
ing to it and I was very stressed. I was not at all prepared for it psy-
chologically. It was a spontaneous idea to do interviews with this group
of people… And then he started telling me about not being able to
come back… and I started to cry. I was just sitting there in front of
him and crying. I could not stop. I felt extremely uncomfortable and
I thought—should I just go away or should I stop the interview? What
should I do now?
Voronova chose to continue this interview, which turned into a dia-

logue about life paths and displacement. It appeared fruitful in terms
of collecting research material and in terms of emotional connection. It
demonstrated that emotional engagement can be a point of establishing

rapport between the researcher and the informants because, despite the
fact that experiences can be different, emotions are universal.
What we argue was also a crucial part of the project was the emotional
support we received from and gave to each other. Previous research in
the field of conflict ethnography discusses the relations between the
scholar and informants (e.g., Käihkö, 2018), or the scholar and assistants
(Jenkins, 2018), but we suggest that it is also important to discuss the
relations between scholars. Van der Haar, Heijmans, and Hilhorst (2013)
argue that all knowledge is co-produced by researchers through com-
munication. In our case, as friends we have had this communication for
many years. This has allowed us to enrich our perspectives by crossing
disciplinary boundaries. Moreover, we acknowledged that we saw each
other as a source of emotional support:
Y: We had a very supportive environment. Because we are friends, I had a

feeling that if something went wrong, I would not be blamed. I would
be understood. And maybe that is why it was not that difficult…I per-
sonally thought that if we can still be friends and we can work together,
it means that it [the conflict situation] can change.
Speaking about the changes that we—and the informants—are longing

for, of course, we had to reflect again and again upon the limitations
that we as researchers have when it comes to impacting the lives of the
informants and the political situation. Activists clearly direct their ener-
gies toward achieving changes in society. However, as Checker et al.
(2014, p. 409) state, sometimes researchers “do not have the ability to
make the change that our participants ask of us, much as we would like
to do so. Our activist efforts can and do fail. Still, our intention is not
to discourage activist engagement.” Even if there remains a slight disap-
pointment related to these limitations, our hope is that with our project
we may contribute to a better understanding of the conflict and its com-
plexities. We realize that, in the process of our research, the conflict has
become deconstructed, and today rather is perceived by us as a complex
of conflicts. The fieldwork has located us at the crossroads of different
agendas. Yet, it has also enabled us to show different perspectives on how
the conflict can be understood, and how different actors take part in it
and understand the conflict themselves. Believing in the co-production
of knowledge in a dialogue (cf. van der Haar et al., 2013), we also hope
that our research findings can be brought back to the Ukrainian actors,
to enable a better understanding of the situation in which they them-
selves are located.
Conflict Ethnography as Political Engagement:

Being Part of the Conflict?
The main topic we constantly discussed while working on the project
was what the conflict did to the informants and to us, as researchers.
In the mutual interview, we discussed how we were dealing with the
challenge of political engagement (Avruch, 2001; Hammersley, 2006).
From the very beginning we took a clear position that we are first of
all researchers, not activists, even if we have our own visions about the
desirable future resolution of the conflict. As formulated by Yurchuk, “it
was difficult to put boundaries and limitations and be very specific that I
was not a part of their project, of their activist agenda.”
Yurchuk’s research shows that historians see themselves as part of the
information war and are clear in their intentions to use history-writing
as a weapon in this war. At the same time, they try to adhere to profes-
sional ideals and not be engaged in myth-making, as they conveyed in
the interviews. The books written by these historians from 2014 to 2018
show that professionalism prevailed. Similarly, most of the journalists
interviewed by Voronova talked about professional values, such as objec-
tivity, as ideals that guide their work, and many criticized the segment of
the media community that stands for “patriotic journalism” (Ginosar &
Cohen, 2017). Yet, they see themselves increasingly as actors who should
also lead society toward social improvement. For example, one of the
journalists who moved from Russia to Ukraine told Voronova that what
characterizes Ukrainian society today is that it is moving somewhere, and
being a journalist, he sees himself as part of this movement. In this sense,
many journalists perhaps see themselves as, if not activists, then agents of
change in society (cf. Budivska & Orlova, 2017).
If we agree with scholars who suggest that informants—consciously
or unconsciously—try to influence the researcher’s perspective, we can
ask ourselves whether as a result we were also expected to become agents
of change. Jenkins (2018) writes about how activist struggles for social
justice can encourage others to contribute to their cause. As reflected on
by Yurchuk,
Y: I always felt like they were convincing me of the rightness of their

cause, but I was very clear that my intention was not to become part of
their group. I felt that maybe they could expect it. […] On the other
hand, when I was doing my analytical part, I had to be very fair with
myself and the aim of the work, and to criticize them.
This dilemma makes us think of different kinds of critique. As Yurchuk

tried to resolve this question for herself, she took the same approach to
reading the books published by the historians who became activists as
she would have taken reading any other books written by professional
historians: contextualizing the situation of writing and analyzing the way
the material and sources were discussed. As a result, it is a reflective cri-
tique that guided us, in the sense that we were aware of the work con-
text of the professionals we interviewed and at the same time we were
guided by the professional principles of academia (critical thinking, com-
mon good, interdisciplinarity, objectivity, ethics, and new knowledge
production).
Reflecting on our position as researchers, we took into consideration
both approaches to conflict ethnography, one proposing an engage-
ment for change and another a more distanced approach. Addressing
the call for engaged, social change-oriented anthropology in recent
years, Checker et al. (2014, p. 418) problematize the role of research-
ers who are encouraged by informants and colleagues alike to be both
scholars and activists, suggesting that a new myth has appeared, “that
of the publicly engaged scholar who […] resolves social problems.”
Avruch (2001) suggests that scholars work on the level of discourse, and
this limitation makes social change impossible. Similarly, Visweswaran
(1994, p. 69) has criticized researchers for intervening into the field as
“uninvited guests.” Yet, Hammersley (2006, p. 11) proposes a more
moderate perspective on the role of ethnographers in the field: while
we try “to understand people’s perspectives from the inside,” we also
view “them and their behavior more distantly, in ways that may be alien
(and perhaps even objectionable) to them.” We tended to take the lat-
ter approach, but as we will show, this approach does not exclude the
possibility of impact on society or on the informants. Yet, we hold with
Checker et al. (2014, p. 418), who point out that the scholar’s powers
are limited, that they “do not extend to the ability to change the terms
of grassroots struggles or to intervene in the political-economic forces
that are arrayed against them.”
Unlike many other groups, representatives of the media community

and historians that we have met know how to narrate their stories and
might not be in need of retelling as a research strategy (Davis, 2014).
Yet, as scholars from the West, in the eyes of the informants we might
have acquired the position of those who “will make them heard,” albeit
in a different context. For some informants, meeting us could have been
seen as a way to reach out to broader international audiences. In relation
to this expectation of researchers being “conduits to certain spheres of
power” (Davis, 2014, p. 415), we feel a need to reflect on the dissonant
temporalities of academia and the communities we studied, with differ-
ent publication cycles, ideas of topicality, and newsworthiness.
V: I was trying to explain already while conducting these interviews that

everything is very slow in the academic world. I would love to publish
these interviews just as they are, as soon as possible, but that is impossi-
ble. So, what I can do is that I will try to put some kind of a theoretical
framework on it, and it will take time. And then the publication process
will take time.
We both felt that to a large degree we shared many ideals and values
with the informants. Yet, we can distinguish considerable differences in
how we approached the situation in the country and in the professional
community. While informants may see themselves as part of the conflict
(e.g., producing a discourse against propaganda), we took a certain dis-
tance and tried to construct a meta-description of the conflict. Reflecting
on the influence of the informants on us, we both agreed that we could
not help feeling respect for the people with whom we share professional
interests but who choose to act in a way which might be different from
our own.
Avoiding Hegemonic Appropriation and Discursive

Domination: Ethical Considerations
Questions of hegemony and domination are an important part of
self-reflection in every ethnographic work. Writing on conflict ethnog-
raphers, Avruch (2001) describes a further critical point from which
they can be criticized: the presumption that researchers can “speak for”
the people with whom they have worked. Among the risks of conflict
ethnography is exploitation of the situation of the conflict, where the
informants do not receive anything back from the research they were
involved in. As we were working with the groups of professionals whose
“trade” we each were also trained in, we were more than aware that we
shared certain professional codes which framed the way we conducted
interviews and the ways we later analyzed them. This commonality of
profession made hegemonic appropriation and discursive domination a
highly sensitive question. We never became “active activists” in the way
that some of the informants did. In the interview with each other, we
discussed how we tried to avoid hegemonic appropriation:
Y: At the beginning there was this fear that I would be using or misusing
these people, but then this fear disappeared. I think that these people
really wanted somebody to speak about them, and it helped. [Likbez
historians] published a lot. I read a lot of published materials by them…
I am analyzing their books, their histories.
One of the ways to avoid hegemonic appropriation was arranging

the final workshop when some of the informants came to Södertörn
University in Sweden and presented their projects and ideas. We planned
this workshop early on in the project. It was a conversation among
equals—between scholars and practitioners from the fields of history
and media (studies). During this final discussion, we also presented our
project and its key findings. Beyond the voices appearing in our articles
framed by theories and our own interpretations, this workshop could
be seen as a platform where subjective knowledge and individual expe-
rience were presented in an academic space. However, this also needs to
be reflected upon from a critical standpoint, as not all of the informants
could be invited, for practical reasons, thus, this space can also be inter-
preted as exclusive.
Another important ethical consideration for us was the safety of the
informants. We proposed anonymization as a way of dealing with their
information. Interestingly, not all of the informants wanted to be anon-
ymous (see Introduction in this volume). In particular, historians see
themselves as public figures who openly engage in public discussions and
whose knowledge is accepted as legitimate both nationally and interna-
tionally. In this regard, we respected their preference.
We also considered where to keep the data and how to conduct the
interviews (interviews on Skype and phone could present some risks).
Many of the informants were included as “friends” on our social media
platforms where they could see what we posted and what other friends
we had. It was one of our strategies to be fair and open with informants
so that they could decide whether to talk to us or not (cf. Käihkö, 2018).
Our main strategy was to be transparent about our identities and inten-
tions, and our plan to use the interviews in an ethical way. This included
sending them their quotations for verification and revision afterward.
Suggestions for Future Research: Interdisciplinary,

Cross-Context, Friendship-Based Ethnography
Analysis of interactions within research teams shows that team research
enables learning that can, in turn, be understood as a relationship.
It means that knowledge is never produced by only one isolated indi-
vidual (Svallfors, 2016). Our experience shows that teams can benefit
from including researchers with different national and disciplinary back-
grounds (relevant to the analysis). Similar conditions should be estab-
lished for researchers, and an equal power division should be established
with respect to gender, age, and other factors. In our case, these ideals
were realized through freedom of research activities, choice, and access
to resources, e.g., travel to fieldwork and conferences, and time for
writing.
When it comes to transdisciplinary work, we felt that we benefited
not only from the discussions that we had with each other, but also from
the fact that the first fieldwork trip to Kyiv was conducted by all of us
together in 2016. There we conducted interviews both separately and
in different paired combinations. As such, Voronova and Yurchuk con-
ducted several interviews together. Voronova was thankful to Yurchuk
for providing her with contextual information before, during, and after
the interviews. For Voronova, it also seemed to ensure her acceptance
by the informants: Yurchuk could start the conversation in Ukrainian,
which could put informants at ease. Interviewing the professional
group—journalists and media experts—enriched Yurchuk’s perspective.
For both of us, it was this collaborative start that helped us overcome
many fears and negative assumptions.
We have several suggestions for researchers that we hope can con-
tribute to ethnographic fieldwork in a conflict or post-conflict sit-
uation (cf. Malyutina, 2017). First, ethnographic work should be
understood as a co-production of knowledge not only with the informants
(cf. van der Haar et al., 2013), but also within the team (cf. Bertilsdotter
Rosqvist et al., 2019). We recommend cross-border interactions between
researchers, where people have the same positions and conditions; it is
feminist in terms of how the power is divided equally among all involved.
Second, dialogue can be seen as a way to overcome the traumatic experi-
ences of both informants and researchers (cf. van der Haar et al., 2013;
Williams Moore, 2018). The opportunity to tell and retell stories to
someone who is empathetic and emotionally engaged can be understood
as a cathartic practice. In this sense, even an act of crying together with
(or instead of) an informant or a research partner becomes an important
part of the dialogue, where one feels that someone else cares, which in
itself might help to mitigate trauma. Moreover, dialogue can be seen as
a way to achieve interdisciplinarity while not stepping out of one’s disci-
pline. In this project, we enriched each other’s perspectives, which were
largely framed by specific disciplinary traditions and theoretical frame-
works (cf. Denshire, 2014). Third, dialogic autoethnography is a helpful
tool for avoiding hegemonic appropriation and discursive domination
which are risks often discussed in relation to ethnographic work (cf.
Avruch, 2001). Dialogic autoethnography was helpful as well for creat-
ing balance within the team (cf. Svallfors, 2016). Dialogic s elf-reflexivity is
important for assessing existent power dynamics in relationships among all
knowledge producers, be they community activists or scholarly colleagues.
Conclusions
Conducting research in the context of an ongoing conflict poses par-
ticular challenges for researchers. The conflict situation exacerbates the
question of belonging and non-belonging, requiring a researcher to be
especially clear with her positioning. In our case, empathetic engage-
ment and sharing of professional backgrounds with the informants
helped us to become oursiders without leaving the boundaries of our
academic identities. While we acknowledge that working in conflict and
post-conflict situations can lead to researchers taking an activist role, in
our research we intentionally did not take this role ourselves. We dis-
tinguished between political and emotional engagement, although we
understand that this may be critically questioned. We argue that apply-
ing a feminist approach in research is not necessarily equal to becoming
an activist. A feminist approach to conducting ethnography has helped
us to acknowledge our own agendas and emotions as well as those of
the informants, leading to the co-production of knowledge through dia-

logues with informants and with each other. This allowed us to find ways
to have equitable conversations and mutual exchanges of knowledge,
avoiding the risk of hegemonic appropriation. The informants were
eager to share their thoughts as they saw the results of our research as a
platform where they could be heard by a broader audience. At the same
time, we made it clear that we were analyzing their activities and critically
reflecting on them.
We want to encourage other researchers to engage in cross-border
collaborations and interdisciplinary practices in conflict ethnography.
While interdisciplinary work is often encouraged in theory, it is seldom
done in practice because each discipline vehemently maintains its bound-
aries. Our research has shown how we can stay in our own disciplines but
still influence each other’s thinking and broaden each other’s research. In
our own experience, we found that it was possible to build equal power
relations with informants and within our team. Our dialogic autoethnog-
raphy helped us not only to reflect on our own research but also to dis-
cuss it further with colleagues. And now, through sharing the results in
this chapter, we hope to provide an example to others of what collabora-
tive research might look like.
In a world where academia is suffering from different administrative
limitations, such kind of teamwork may be seen as the (only?) way to
counter the oppressive system that encourages rivalry more than coop-
eration between colleagues. Research communities can split for a vari-
ety of political and ideological reasons; where there are geopolitical
tensions, these splits can be even more challenging, with scholarly per-
spectives more polarized. Our research confirms that friendship, support,
and understanding, even in such times, are fruitful grounds for aca-
demic cooperation. Although the existing frameworks of research are still
meaningful, “friendworks” can offer additional benefits in academia.
Acknowledgements The project was funded by the Foundation for Baltic and
East European Studies (2016–2018, project leader—Per Ståhlberg). Contact:
Södertörn University, Alfred Nobels allé 7, 141 89 Huddinge, Sweden.
We would like to thank our colleagues with whom we were working
on that project—Per Ståhlberg and Göran Bolin—for their support, trust,
and encouragement. We are grateful to the editors of this collection for their
insightful comments that helped to develop this chapter. Vlad Strukov, thank you
for your kind encouragement to experiment with the format of an interview with
each other! The Network for female, trans* and non-binary researchers and doc-
toral students at Södertörn University has provided us with an opportunity to
finalize this text in a beautiful and inspiring atmosphere: thank you for this! And
last but not least thanks to all of the informants who worked with us!
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Index
A affect, 23, 33, 35, 37, 43, 45, 89, 94,

ableism, 124 105, 199, 203, 257
academia, 10, 11, 14, 15, 39, 63, 72, Ahmed, Sara, 194, 196, 216
81, 83, 94, 95, 98, 122, 260, alternative media, 177, 178, 186–189
261, 265 anonymisation, 5, 6, 34, 196, 262
academic practices, 10, 64 anonymity, 5–7, 31, 33, 34, 41, 45,
academic research, 70, 111, 140, 252 176
academic spaces, 11, 83, 262 anti-colonialism, 28, 71
academy, 134, 139, 146, 149 anti-deportation, 232, 239, 240, 242
action research, 18, 20, 27, 32, 138, anti-imperialism, 242
193–196, 214 anti-poverty, 43
activism, 4, 9, 14–17, 19, 20, 32, 40, anti-racism, 28, 43, 123
51, 52, 55, 58–60, 62, 70, 91, asylum seekers, 233, 236, 240
104, 110, 162–164, 166, 167, autoethnography, 22, 253–255, 264,
236, 242 265
activist informants, 159 autonomous media, 27, 28, 177
activist networks, 233 axiological reasoning, 191
activist pedagogies, 21
activist practices, 2, 3, 10, 49, 52, 159,
161–163, 167, 170, 171, 231 B
activist researcher, 83, 112, 122, 124 Blender Institute, 157–171
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), 269

under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4
270 Index
border control, 233, 239 communication for development and

bourgeois public space, 184 social change, 52, 64
Brazil, 20, 51, 52, 54, 56, 59, 62, 67, communication policy, 112, 120
68, 70, 72, 73, 75, 77, 81, 83, communication rights, 110–113, 115,
89–91 120, 122, 124
British Broadcasting Corporation community, 11, 13, 15, 16, 18–20,
(BBC), 182, 221 30, 35, 36, 39, 55, 76, 83, 111,
113, 117, 120, 124, 135, 136,
138–141, 143, 146, 148, 157,
C 160, 161, 163, 164, 167–170,
Canada, 18, 20, 21, 27, 30, 49, 177, 194, 195, 197, 203–208,
110–119, 121, 122, 134, 146 210, 212, 213, 215, 216,
Canadia Radio-television and 223–225, 230, 232, 234, 255,
Telecommunication Commission 259, 261
(CRTC), 110–119, 121–124 community activists, 33, 264
capacity building, 118, 212 community-based activities, 132
case study, 112, 118 community-based organisation(s),
cathartic practice, 264 131, 133, 141, 142, 146
circulation of knowledge, 121 community-based research, 112, 123,
citizen journalism, 21, 175, 176, 189 149
citizen journalists, 175, 177, 179 community broadcasting, 113
citizen media, 177–180 community building, 144, 178, 180
citizenship, 53, 84, 144, 182, 235 Community Engaged Learning (CEL),
civic engagement, 200 21, 131–149
Clair, Annie, 32 community engagement, 137, 147
coalitions, 131, 133, 147 community media, 110, 113, 115,
collaborative projects, 212 116, 124
collaborative research, 265 Community Media Advocacy Centre
collective budgeting, 38, 39, 45, 46 (CMAC), 21, 109–112, 114–119,
colonial, 92, 93, 96, 98, 101, 106, 121–124
112, 113, 115, 116, 123 community of interest, 226
colonial history, 121 community partners, 21, 131–133,
colonialism, 4, 7, 101, 110, 113, 115, 135–138, 140–143, 145, 148
116, 124 conflict ethnography, 251, 252, 258,
colonial practice, 90 260, 261, 265
colonial project, 90, 93, 102 content analysis, 59, 68
commons, 9, 10, 12, 14, 54, 57, 58, contentious politics, 69
97, 105, 165–167, 170, 189, Coordination for Development of
197, 201, 204, 212, 214, 227, Higher Education Personnel
230, 232, 233, 239–241, 252, (CAPES), 68, 77
260 corporatised university, 142, 144
communication and media studies, counter hegemonic media, 53
132–135, 137, 138, 144, 149 Creative Commons, 165
Index 271
creative labour, 166 emancipation, 15, 52, 57, 59, 72, 84,
critical media, 177, 178 103
crowdfunding, 157, 158 embedded researchers, 13, 14
cultural actors, 193 emotional engagement, 257, 258, 264
cultural production, 2, 160, 163, 193, emotional work, 257
194, 198, 211 empowerment, 6, 22, 99, 194, 198,
cultural workers, 197, 199, 204, 207 204, 252
culture of practice, 160 epistemic privilege, 96
epistemology, 11, 12, 48, 69, 107
equality, 84, 124, 206, 208, 210, 232,
D 251
data collection, 91, 94, 107, 188 equal participation, 195, 205, 232
decision-making, 28, 74, 97, 195, ethical dilemmas, 3, 9, 53, 176, 180,
197, 200, 204, 205, 209 190, 191, 224
decolonial, 91–93, 97, 102, 103 ethical issues, 131, 132, 134, 138, 148
decolonial epistemologies, 102 ethical practices, 4, 8, 17, 23, 32, 36,
decolonial reason, 95, 96 140, 145, 147–149
decolonial studies, 91 ethics in practice, 142
decolonisation, 10, 18–20, 90, 93, 94, ethics of care, 22, 31, 43, 194, 197,
96, 109, 116, 117, 122, 124 199, 214, 228
decolonising methods, 90 ethics protocols, 1, 5, 31, 34, 39, 41,
demands, 5, 13–16, 21, 28, 61, 44, 45, 142
68, 70, 72, 74, 75, 77, 83, 90, ethnicity, 4, 77, 110, 143, 197
134, 135, 147, 166, 182, 201, ethnic media, 113, 116
204–207, 214, 222, 226, 229, ethnographic fieldwork, 161, 263
231, 232, 234, 237, 238, 240, ethnography, 18, 22, 54, 250–252,
241, 243, 245, 246 254, 258, 260, 261, 264, 265
democracy, 28, 84, 92, 182, 208–210 European Union (EU), 233, 234,
dialogic autoethnography, 22, 237, 238, 245, 246
252–254, 264, 265 #evacuaterefugeesfromlibya, 234
digital culture, 158 Experiential Learning (EL), 131–136,
digital media, 52, 158, 234, 242 139, 140, 142–147, 149
digital remix cultures, 170 expert knowledge, 35, 119, 223
distance, 31, 59, 70, 159, 160, 162, extractivist research, 5, 18
164, 171, 180, 185, 222, 224–
227, 230, 243, 246, 251, 252
distant others, 197, 225, 227 F
diversity, 90, 110, 113, 123, 198 Facebook, 53, 55, 62, 92, 176, 181,
domestic violence, 200 189, 236, 241
favela, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58–60
Favela Não se Cala, 55
E favela residents, 53, 55, 56, 60
each one teach one, 197 feminism, 18, 19, 28, 31, 36, 44, 48,
EL practices, 133, 135 91, 98, 99, 214, 250, 254, 264
272 Index
feminist epistemologies, 92, 99 hip-hop activists, 208

feminist hermeneutics, 104 hip-hop artists, 197, 198
feminist methodologies, 98–101 hip-hop culture, 22, 198, 199, 203,
fieldwork, 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 62, 91, 211
95, 158–160, 163, 164, 169, historians, 22, 251, 252, 254, 256,
184–188, 190, 256, 258 259–262
fieldwork experience, 163 horizontal, 10, 17, 19, 20, 28, 31, 32,
focus group, 5, 7, 8, 30, 133, 142 35, 39–41, 43, 45, 203, 210, 216
Food Not Bombs, 39 horizontal collective, 35, 39–42, 48
140journos, 175–192 horizontal community, 35
France, 183, 239, 240, 242, 245 horizontality, 3, 22, 28, 39–42, 46,
free culture, 158 47, 194
freedom of expression, 222 horizontal process, 40
free graphics, 165 humanitarianism, 232, 233, 239, 241,
free software, 158, 165 243, 246
Freire, Paulo, 57, 71, 82
funding agencies, 8, 195, 196
I
immigrant journalists, 251
G impartiality, 107, 222
gangsta rap, 198 Indigenous, 43, 83, 94, 109–118,
gatekeepers, 212 121–124
gender, 4, 7, 35, 36, 43, 47, 74, 99, Indigenous communities, 18, 112,
110, 143, 197, 214, 263 113, 122
gender studies, 91, 99, 100 Indigenous community broadcasters,
Gezi movement, 181–183, 185, 190 110
Gilets Noirs, 240 Indigenous radio stations, 113, 119
globalisation, 77, 232 inequality, 44, 59, 68, 77, 80, 81,
grassroots campaign, 234 101, 107, 194
grassroots cultural production, 208 informants, 52, 159–163, 168, 171,
grassroots media, 27, 176, 189 251, 252, 255–265
Greece, 221, 245 information management, 250
guerrilla strategies, 39 information warfare, 23, 250, 252
interdisciplinarity, 260, 264
internships, 135
H intersectional, 4, 6, 7, 17, 18, 27–29,
hackers, 168 31, 36, 41–45, 48, 93, 110
hashtag, 183 intersectionality, 29, 36, 37, 46
hate speech, 222 interviews, 3, 5, 7, 8, 14, 31, 34, 56,
hegemonic appropriation, 253, 262, 91, 92, 101, 133, 136, 176, 184,
264, 265 186–189, 250–254, 257, 259,
hip-hop, 193, 197–199, 208 261–263
Index 273
interviewees, 56, 136, 147, 190, 256 Mbembe, Achille, 232

interview participants, 6 meaning-making practices, 167
invisibility, 98, 199, 233, 238 Media Action Research Group
(MARG), 20, 27–33, 40, 124
media activism, 1, 2, 6, 14, 20, 21,
J 32–35, 45, 47, 48, 51, 53, 57,
journalism, 30, 120, 222, 229, 256 60, 113, 118, 124
journalism culture, 250 media activists, 3, 4, 6–9, 12, 13, 16,
journalists, 6, 22, 176, 222, 223, 236, 19, 22, 23, 29–31, 33–35, 37,
251, 252, 254, 259, 263 38, 40, 42–45, 47, 54, 58, 60,
110, 116, 119, 224, 230, 233,
236, 238, 245
K media and communication regulation,
knowledge co-creation, 167 116
knowledge co-production, 3, 33, 160 media and communications policy,
knowledge mobilisation, 15 116–118
knowledge production, 10, 20, 29, 61, media and communication studies, 20,
70, 71, 92–94, 97, 99, 104, 107, 51, 52, 157
149, 158, 159, 161–163, 171, media campaigns, 250
195, 196, 211, 212, 251, 254 media ethics, 224, 225, 229, 230, 237
knowledge structures, 101 media outlets, 74, 184, 185
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), 178, mediapolis, 228
180 media production, 9, 42, 164, 169
media projects, 6, 36, 178, 180, 190
media representations, 223, 231, 245
L media workers, 222, 223, 225, 228,
Landless Workers Movement (MST), 236
20, 52, 54, 58, 59, 63, 67, 68, methodology, 27, 32, 38, 95, 102–
73–84 106, 110, 111, 119, 120, 122,
La Via Campesina, 75, 82 195
LGBTQ+, 11, 18, 28, 29, 36, 43, 74 migrant, 231–243, 245, 246
Libya, 232–238, 245 migrant-led activism, 240
lived experience, 21, 30, 35, 45, 104, militant, 51, 52, 54, 58, 72
105, 111, 184, 253 militant research, 68, 70–73, 84
modernity, 90, 92, 93, 97, 98
moral action, 225
M Mozambique, 20, 91, 92, 95
mainstream media, 60, 113, 175, 177, mutual interview, 259
178, 180, 182, 185, 188, 190,
242, 245
marginalization, 4, 9, 101, 113, 135, N
143, 145 narrative of care, 231
Marx, Karl, 71 neoliberal academia, 14, 64
274 Index
neoliberal austerity measures, 136 159, 164–166, 177, 179, 183,

neoliberalisation, 2, 139 185, 195, 209
neoliberalism, 48, 58 participatory ethnography, 13, 18
neoliberal university, 10, 16, 21, 23, participatory media, 20, 158, 178, 179
27, 32, 48 participatory principles, 211
nepotism, 204, 210, 211, 213 participatory research, 1, 160
neutrality, 107, 252 patriotic journalism, 259
New Social Movements (NSM), 69 pedagogical practice, 79, 80, 137
No Border movement, 232 pedagogy, 2, 3, 79, 80, 82, 132–134,
Non-Governmental Organisation 137, 145
(NGO), 131, 133, 141, 142, 193, people of colour, 11, 35, 43
194, 204, 212, 233, 235, 243 people with disabilities, 11
nonprofit organisation, 110, 119 policy advocacy, 110, 111, 116–118,
non-profit organisation, 131, 133, 124
141, 142, 145, 146 political action, 73–75, 80, 82, 185,
226, 243
political engagement, 237, 253, 256,
O 259
objectivity, 191, 222, 251, 252, 259, political mobilisation, 51, 185, 239,
260 240
open culture, 158, 164, 168 political opportunity structure, 76
open-source software, 158 politics of participation, 158
oppositional public space, 184, 185 politics of pity, 225–227, 243
oppression Olympics, 38, 42, 47, 48 popular knowledge, 71, 72, 79
oppressions, 7, 9, 10, 17, 18, 22, 29, positionality, 37, 42, 52, 100, 148
30, 34–38, 42–45, 47, 48, 90, post-colonial, 255
93, 99, 100, 110, 124 power asymmetries, 4, 17, 229
oppressive, 7, 42, 44, 47, 115, 123, power dynamics, 3, 4, 7, 39, 41–43,
265 47, 159, 264
Ørecomm Festival, 64 power imbalances, 9, 230
othering, 18, 225, 228 power structure/s, 36, 48, 49, 169,
outsider, 13–15, 56, 61, 76, 203, 252, 203
255, 256 practices of abuse, 196
Ownership, Control, Access and precarious labour, 32, 37, 146
Participation (OCAP), 18 prefigurative practices, 28
privacy, 34, 159
privilege, 10, 19, 29, 37, 43, 44, 47,
P 94, 103, 106, 116, 117, 135, 143
Parklar bizim, 183 procedural ethics, 142
participant observer, 160 professional communities, 254
participation, 8, 11, 12, 15, 31–34, proper distance, 224, 228, 229, 236
64, 71, 73, 74, 84, 98, 100, 111, proximity, 73, 84, 159, 163, 171, 224,
114–116, 118, 120, 122, 123, 225, 228–230, 243
Index 275
public communication, 166 research projects, 6, 8, 12, 14, 17, 21,

public opinion, 200 22, 34, 36, 45, 52, 56, 58, 63,
public sphere, 20, 68, 75, 182, 184, 78, 84, 91, 107, 138, 176, 194
237 research subjects, 58, 61, 77, 84, 91,
public square movements, 182 93, 94, 99, 180, 214, 215, 250,
251, 255
resistance, 53–56, 61, 62, 75, 97, 113,
Q 198, 232, 234, 237, 242
queer, 43, 48, 255 rhetoric of openness, 166, 168
Roboski Massacre, 180
rooted researchers, 13, 14
R rural workers, 55, 68, 73–75, 80, 81,
race, 4, 7, 36, 44, 47, 48, 77, 110, 83
143 Russia, 22, 193, 199, 201, 202, 208,
racialised people, 21, 109–111, 212, 251, 256, 259
114–118, 123, 124
racism, 29, 36, 110, 124
reciprocal communication, 159, 161, S
162, 164, 167, 170 Sans Papiers, 242
reflexivity, 52, 53, 57, 58, 94, 141, scholarly activism, 159
148, 149 scholarly practices, 167
refugees, 22, 113, 223, 224, 231–243, self-awareness, 148
245, 246 self-documentation, 245
relations of care, 10, 17, 31, 35, 36 self-reflexive research, 9, 98
relations of power, 163, 189 self-reflexivity, 250, 251, 264
representation of suffering, 223 semi-structured interviews, 30, 133,
research activism, 2, 5, 9, 16, 17, 138
19–23, 31, 32, 40 settler colonialism, 110, 116, 124
research activist, 1, 3–5, 8, 9, 11, 12, sexism, 36, 97, 99, 124
15, 17, 19, 27, 31, 39, 159 situated experience, 132
research aims, 56, 103, 158, 159, 256 skill sharing, 178, 179
researcher community, 163 snowball sampling, 251, 256
Research Ethics Board (REB), 16, 41, social change, 3, 12, 52, 69, 70, 110,
45, 138, 142 137, 138, 162, 180, 185, 190,
research material, 102, 163, 252, 257 193–195, 197, 198, 215, 260
research object, 64, 70, 83, 93, 95, social class, 4, 39, 43, 44, 230
101–103 social justice, 2, 3, 5, 9, 17, 23, 53,
research participants, 6–8, 14, 15, 18, 84, 90, 124, 259
28, 29, 31–35, 37, 41, 43–46, social media, 28, 53, 55, 62, 91, 101,
54, 62, 63 136, 161, 182, 183, 213, 235,
research problem, 93–96, 99 237, 245, 262
276 Index
social mobilisation, 51, 73 U

social movements, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, Ukraine, 249–251, 256, 259
15–20, 28, 29, 32, 36–38, 43, undocumented migrants, 232, 235,
44, 48, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58, 60, 239, 240, 242, 245
62, 64, 68–70, 72, 73, 76, 77, United Nations Children’s Fund
79, 80, 82–84, 93–95, 97, 112, (UNICEF), 221
137, 177, 178, 181, 185, 189 United Nations High Commissioner
social networks, 53, 62, 91, 185, 189, for Refugees (UNHCR), 234,
255 235
social research, 63, 160 unmediated voices, 230
social transformation, 2, 3, 5, 8, urban youth, 198, 215
16–19, 21, 59, 69, 70, 72, 84, user community, 160, 165, 167
101, 104, 106
software developers, 165, 169
space of appearance, 227, 228, 242 V
speaking agents, 229 visibility, 67, 101, 103, 104, 106, 163,
spectators, 222, 223, 227–229 166, 225, 231, 233–238, 245
speech acts, 225, 236 vulnerable others, 222, 225, 245
stakeholders, 15, 111, 113, 115, 134
street cultures, 199
subalternised groups, 51, 52 W
subaltern social subjects, 52, 89 war of narratives, 249
Sweden, 22, 64, 157, 199, 252, 262 Wawatay Radio Network, 118
Swedish Institute (SI), 194, 205 WhatsApp, 62, 175, 196
symbolic proximity, 224 women, 11, 22, 35, 43, 44, 90–92,
symmetric engagement, 162 95, 97–101, 104, 116, 117, 193,
symmetric fieldwork, 159, 161, 162 194, 197–200, 205, 207, 211,
systemic change, 110, 117, 124 212, 215, 221
systemic racism, 115, 116 women’s activism, 104
systems of oppression, 44, 90 #WorldRefugeeDay, 238
T Y
techno-community, 168 youth, 52, 74, 75, 194, 198, 201–203
trail radio network, 113 youth politics, 201, 208, 211
Tunisia, 237, 238
Turkey, 22, 175, 176, 178, 181, 183,
185–189, 191
Twitter, 53, 175, 176, 180–185, 189

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GLOBAL TRANSFORMATIONS IN

MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION RESEARCH

More information about this series at

Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and

Cover image: oxygen/gettyimages

1 Introduction: Mapping Questions of Power and Ethics

Part I Practice-Based Perspectives on the Ethics

2 Research Ethics: Critical Reflections on Horizontal

3 Dealing with Ethical Dilemmas in Activist Research

4 Challenges for Social Movement Research in Contexts

Part II Decolonizing Methodologies and Negotiating

5 Denaturalizing Research Practices: (Re)Signifying

6 Disrupting Settler Colonialism and Oppression in Media

7 Wearing Multiple Reflexive Hats: The Ethical

Part III Negotiating Power Dynamics Between

8 The Ethics of Reciprocal Communication 157

9 Researcher Ethics: Between Axiological Reasoning

10 Difficult Choices: Application of Feminist Ethics

Part IV Media Activist Research in the Context

11 The Ethics of Media Research with Refugees 221

12 Challenges of Ongoing Conflict Research: Dialogic

Community Media Advocacy Centre (www.CMACentre.ca) was

Finland and Brazil. Custódio also coordinates the Activist Research

Mayrá S. Lima holds a doctoral degree in Political Science from

Rosane Rosa is Associate Professor at Universidade Federal de Santa

Julia Velkova Research Fellow in Technology and Social Change at

ANCA Associação Nacional de Cooperativas Agrícolas (National

ICTA Information and Communication Technologies Authority

UFMT Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso (Mato Grosso Federal

Fig. 10.1 Organisational structure according to the project application 202

Table 4.1 Civil society organisations related to MST 75

Introduction: Mapping Questions

Sandra Jeppesen and Paola Sartoretto

In the course of the past three decades, participatory researchers have

© The Author(s) 2020 1

The increase in participatory social justice research has happened in

within or with some connection to a university while simultaneously

Ethical concerns linked to issues of micro- and macro-power config-

Activists: Beyond Extractive Research

structures demanding scholarly outputs and upward reporting. The trick

Activists: The Contradictions

are inadequate to conceal the identity of a speaker, for example, in a

broader social movement. The conversation between the researcher

Activists: The Labour of Research Participation

participation following an interview, however, as the project moves

trained interviewers and writers, researchers share aspects of their back-

Researchers: Hierarchies of Participation

engage, either as a researcher or as a participant. Moreover, this ques-

by a graduate student, or writing single-author publications that avoid

are seldom carbon-neutral; conversely, carbon usage to attend them is

Researchers: Rooted vs. Embedded in Movements

criminalized by police, may give rise to increased surveillance, including

Researchers: The Double Labour

As we have seen above, those involved in both academia and activism

publication of journal articles, books, and academic conferences consist-

Conclusions: Critiques and Power

Reciprocal Critiques Between

Asymmetries: Intersectional Power

Part I Practice-Based Perspectives on the Ethics

Part II Decolonizing Methodologies and Negotiating

Part III Negotiating Power Dynamics Between

Part IV Media Activist Research in the Context

ANCA Associação Nacional de Cooperativas Agrícolas (National

ICTA Information and Communication Technologies Authority

UFMT Universidade Federal do Mato Grosso (Mato Grosso Federal

Activists: The Labour of Research Participation

Researchers: Rooted vs. Embedded in Movements

shift their practices to some extent when they become a university-based

Grounding Principles and Inclusion Criteria

Indigenous podcasts, trans sex worker support, anti-Islamophobia, challenging racialised

Critical Reflections: Contradictions and Tensions

the movement’s internal cohesion, the formation of a c ounter-hegemonic

Overcoming Suspicion and Resistance in the Field

Justifying the Research to Activists

Paths for Researcher-Activist Dialogue