Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds

Michelle Bastian, Owain Jones, Niamh Moore, Emma Roe, Michelle Bastian, Owain Jones, Niamh Moore, Emma Roe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317340874
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Socio-environmental crises are currently transforming the conditions for life on this planet, from climate change, to resource depletion, biodiversity loss and long-term pollutants. The vast scale of these changes, affecting land, sea and air have prompted calls for the 'ecologicalisation' of knowledge.

This book adopts a much needed 'more-than-human' framework to grasp these complexities and challenges. It contains multidisciplinary insights and diverse methodological approaches to question how to revise, reshape and invent methods in order to work with non-humans in participatory ways. The book offers a framework for thinking critically about the promises and potentialities of participation from within a more-than-human paradigm, and opens up trajectories for its future development. It will be of interest to those working in the environmental humanities, animal studies, science and technology studies, ecology, and anthropology.

Part I
Experiments in more-than-human participatory research

1 Towards a more-than-human participatory research

Michelle Bastian

Introduction

In Spindrift: A Wilderness Pilgrimage at Sea, participatory action researcher Peter Reason (2014, p. 71) tells the story of a seminar offered by philosopher Henryk Skolimowski at the University of Bath. While supporting the participation of a wider range of people in research has been, and continues to be, a significant challenge to academic norms, this seminar offered further challenges by exploring participatory ways of engaging with the more-than-human world.¹ As Reason writes, ‘this was strange, even to me. In the abstract world of university seminars, participation was still what one did with other people. It had nothing to do with the natural world’ (2014, p. 71). While recognising the strangeness, a core question for this chapter is how participatory research (PR) might move in this kind of direction. Arguably issues like climate change, biodiversity loss and increasing rates of extinction create conditions where it is possible to put nonhumans explicitly on the PR agenda, and to ask how the commitments of PR – to situated knowledges, a wider recognition of agency and an expansive sense of stakeholders – might be revisited. That is, these crises invite participatory researchers to explore whether the injunctions of Western anthropocentrism might have unnecessarily restricted how participation is imagined, and to reconsider to whom its commitments might be made.

One way of supporting such enquiries is to bring PR and emerging more-than-human approaches into direct conversation. As noted in the introduction to this collection, both Henry Buller (2015), and Timothy Hodgetts and Jamie Lorimer (2015) argue that more-than-human geographies should seek methods that enable researchers to ask ‘what matters’ to nonhumans (e.g. Buller 2015, p. 7). For PR, this kind of question has been continually at its core, as participatory researchers seek ways of working with specific human communities to identify and respond to issues that matter to them. They do this by breaking down the boundaries between researcher and researched, ideally working in partnership to set research questions, determine which methods to use, analyse data, co-create outputs and develop dissemination strategies. In the process, broader questions of ethics, voice, knowledge and power are explored both practically and theoretically. Related questions also reside at the heart of more-than-human approaches, with issues of ethical relationality, the problem of representation, of exchange across different perceptual worlds and anthropocentrism constituting some of the area’s most pressing issues.

These potentially fruitful overlaps between PR and more-than-human research (MtHR) were explored in a project called In conversation with…: co-designing with more-than-human communities, which took place in the UK in 2013, and which will be the focus of this chapter. Its two key objectives were first to ask whether participatory methods might extend towards a consideration of the more-than-human, and second whether the wealth of experience gained by participatory researchers, from working across social, cultural and other boundaries, might helpfully illuminate issues faced by more-than-human researchers. In order to respond to these questions we trialled the use of participatory methods, such as participatory design and participatory action research, as frameworks for two-day workshops with nonhumans. We wanted to know what might result from attempting to work with particular animals, insects, plants and elements specifically as research partners, rather than as subjects of experiments, for example.

This chapter will therefore share some of the insights generated by the project, as notes towards a more extended conversation about the possibility of more-than-human PR (MtH-PR). First, I outline the design and implementation of the project. I then place the project into conversation with PR literatures in order to highlight some of the ways that participatory approaches may indeed be open to working with wider understandings of who could be involved. Crucially, these literatures also offer cautions against the assumption that certain forms of inclusion are necessarily a good, and so this chapter will also discuss potential pitfalls of uncritically taking up the promise of participation.

Speculative field experiments

In looking for ways to describe the overall approach of the In conversation with… project, I would suggest that it might be thought of as a kind of philosophical field experiment (Bardini 2014, Frodeman et al. 2012), a form of speculative design (Dunne and Raby 2013) or perhaps even as a fantastic ethnography (Galloway 2013). That is, the project was not designed to establish MtH-PR as a definite possibility, since we were only at a preliminary exploratory stage. Instead, we were drawn to the speculative ‘what if?’ What if you could do participatory design with dogs? What if you could do participatory action research with bees? That is we primarily saw the workshops as putting ourselves in a position where we would be confronted with what it might mean to even try to include nonhumans in PR processes. In particular we were inspired by Clara Mancini and her colleagues, who argue that in seeking to conduct interspecies research there needs to be a willingness to explore the issues raised ‘with genuine curiosity, no matter how challenging or ironic they may appear’ (2012, p. 9). Thus even while recognising the stretching and cracking our questions might create within mainstream conceptions of what PR is and what it can do, we sought to take the tenets of both participation and the more-than-human as seriously as possible, put them into action, and see how this speculative experiment might play itself out.

Specifically, the project involved four exploratory workshops that took place between April and October 2013 in various locations in the UK. (Descriptions of each of these workshops can be seen in Boxes 1.1 and 1.2.) Attendees came from three main groups. First were members of a core team that included researchers from computing, environmental arts, forestry, geography, philosophy, sociology, theatre and women’s studies, with further diversity in terms of the interdisciplinarity of their backgrounds and research methods used. Almost all were involved in the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme, which has a particular focus on PR and which funded this project. Second, there were the nonhuman participants. In broad terms they included animals, insects, plants and the elements; more specifically dogs, bees, trees and water. The focus on these four was partly shaped by the expertise of the team and our pre-existing links with potential partner organisations. However, we were also interested in pushing the boundaries of who, or what, could potentially be considered as an active research partner, and so the workshops focused on nonhumans across a range of (commonly assumed) levels of sentience, even though we also sought to trouble this hierarchy. Third were human intermediaries, such as dog trainers and beekeepers, who shared their expertise and facilitated engagements with the particular nonhumans that they worked with. Here we drew parallels between our project and the role of community leaders or community experts within PR, as well as more general discussions of border-crossers who are able to link different social worlds (Anzaldúa 1990).

As for the specific content of the workshops, we aimed from the outset to support diverse ‘ways of knowing’ (Graham et al. 2015), and so avoided the usual focus on academic presentations in favour of learning from the nonhuman participants and human intermediaries via inductions, practical/experiential activities and facilitated discussion and reflection. The workshops thus included at least one day of exploration, which was experiential and hands on. This included inspecting beehives, wild swimming and wood carving. These activities were analogous to the project initiation phase of PR where potential research partners spend time getting to know each other and exploring issues that are important to the community partners. Next, the core team and participating intermediaries articulated issues that arose during these activities and tried to identify which ones might develop into research questions, again drawing analogies with the later stages of project initiation.

We then workshopped a particular participatory model (see Box 1.1), keeping our commitment to our speculative approach always in mind. This often meant working through a specific PR handbook or toolkit and identifying what affordances or frictions might arise if groups tried to apply the guidelines in a project with a specific nonhuman partner. Some conversations that resulted included: the possibilities of data-gathering with bees, where we felt there might be some interesting approaches that could be developed; or asking whether core principles of participatory ethics, such as privacy, would hold when working with water, where we found it almost impossible to develop any kind of coherent response. Both of these kinds of responses were important as they helped to shape our understanding of how PR might extend towards a consideration of the more-than-human and how it might not. They also highlighted which nonhumans might be more readily included than others and in what ways.

Box 1.1 The In Conversation with… workshops

1. 1 In conversation with animals (April 2013) was organised by computer-interaction researcher Clara Mancini and philosopher Michelle Bastian and drew on a participatory design framework. It was conducted with the team from the Open University’s Animal–Computer Interaction Lab and dogs and people from Dogs for Good (formerly Dogs for the Disabled). Activities included train the trainer exercises and interacting with service dogs and dogs in training.
2. 2 In conversation with insects (May 2013) was organised by geographer Phil Jones and drew on a participatory action research framework (specifically, Pain et al. 2012). It was conducted with bees and people from the Evesham Beekeepers Association, as well as the Vale Heritage Landscape Trust. Activities included hive inspections and bee habitat maintenance.
3. 3 In conversation with plants (September 2013) was organised by landscape and forestry researcher Richard Coles and drew on a community participatory arts perspective. It was conducted with the trees and people from the Wye Valley Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and Wildwood Coppice Crafts. We explored techniques used by the Wye Valley InsideOUT project to connect excluded and under-represented groups with the forest. Activities included wood carving, materials collecting and making, as well as individual time spent in the woods.
4. 4 In conversation with the elements (October 2013) was organised by geographer Owain Jones and artist Antony Lyons and used a set of ethical guidelines on community-based research developed within the Connected Communities programme (Banks and Manners 2012). It was conducted with water, specifically the River Torridge and its catchment area, and the people of the North Devon Biosphere Reserve, Devon Wildlife Trust and skipper Dave Gabe. Activities included field trips to the culm grasslands and a search for the river source, a boat trip up from the river’s mouth, salinity sampling to see the mixing of fresh and sea water in the river, and wild swimming.

Detailed accounts of each of these workshops, including images and films, are available on the project website (www.morethanhumanresearch.com).

Finally, each workshop also included a session where we stepped back from the speculative experiment and critically reflected on the process. Here we explored the differences between the ‘what if’ and the ‘what was’. While some of these reflections will be discussed below (and see also Heddon, in this volume), an example of an issue that arose was around the freedom of nonhumans to participate. Questions that came up included the following: Was inspecting a hive really analogous to meeting a community partner? What did it mean that we wore protective suits and used smoke to avoid being stung? Was wood carving a useful way to participate with trees and learn about their qualities, or was it more similar to a dissection? These questions were indicative of the generative nature of our discussions, and the impossibility of any quick and easy answers.

Box 1.2 A detailed look at In Conversation with Dogs

When starting to plan the workshops themselves, we found that turning the wider inspirations and approaches for the In conversation with… project into a programme of activities required its own kind of translation work. Faced with the task of designing the first workshop, both Clara and I found ourselves puzzling over what we were actually going to do.

Our plan was to build on work Clara had been doing with the Animal–Computer Interaction (ACI) Lab at the Open University (see Mancini, this volume). ACI arises out of the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), which focuses on designing interactions with technology that are experienced positively and respond to the needs of specific user groups. However, it is rarely acknowledged that nonhuman animals can also be users of technology. For example, service dogs can learn to use kettles, washing machines and even cash machines. The ACI Lab thus seeks to design for specific nonhuman users by taking into account their physical and perceptual abilities, how they learn and what constitutes positive feedback for them.

We were also lucky to have keen and interested partners for the workshop. Namely, Dogs for Good, including service dogs Winnie and Cosmo, as well as Helen McCain, Head of Canine Training, and Duncan Edwards, Head of Client Liaisons, both of whom acted as our human mediators.

A core participatory approach within HCI is participatory design and so this was taken as our framework. Our building blocks were the core steps of the design development cycle, which include collaboratively identifying requirements, proposing designs, prototyping these designs and evaluation. As with the participatory methods we drew on for the other workshops, these steps require considerably more time than is available in a two-day workshop.

However within design there are also a range of methods that can create quick initial responses to a design problem. These include techniques such as paper prototyping, where initial design proposals are mocked up on paper, or design challenges where participants may cycle through the design process in a few hours to explore new ideas. Methods like these allow participants to get an initial sense of what kinds of tactics might work as well as what potential problems or blocks might arise. Given that our aim was principally to explore the potential for a dialogue between MtHR and PR, these kinds of approaches resonated well.

As became customary for each of our workshops, the teams were first sent a series of preparatory readings. These looked at issues of dog perception and evolution (Range et al. 2008, Honeycutt 2010, Taylor et al. 2011, van der Zee et al. 2012), examples of design focusing on dogs or human-dog interactions (Resner 2001, Mankoff et al. 2005, Wingrave et al. 2010, Higgin 2012) as well as texts on participatory design itself (Kensing and Blomberg 1998, Muller 2009).

The first day was spent ‘identifying requirements.’ This including presentations from Clara about H...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: More-than-human participatory research: Contexts, challenges, possibilities
• Part I Experiments in more-than-human participatory research
• Part II Building (tentative) affinities
• Part III Cautions
• Index