Intersectionality and Positionality in Participatory Democracy and Research: Not Just an Add-on

Hi everyone!

Check out our recent Blog with Dr Dayo Eseonu and Dr Sonia Bussu - "Intersectionality and Positionality in Participatory Democracy and Research: Not Just an Add-on" and let’s start a conversation!

This blog invites reflections on questions of positionality and intersectionality within participatory democracy and participatory research, based on work carried out by Inspire partners, within and beyond the Inspire project.

Intersectionality emphasises that human lives cannot be reduced to single characteristics and that social categories are socially constructed and dynamic. It highlights the inseparability of social locations, mutual constitution of social processes, and promotion of social justice. In this respect, it enables a more complex understanding of people’s subjective experiences of inequality and the role of justice in the context of deliberative and participatory practices. Positionality refers to how our social and political context as researchers, our identities and subject positions, influence the creation and sharing of knowledge.

Positionality statements and intersectional perspective are often missing in research on participatory and deliberative democracy.

In this blog we share three provocations and provide some initial responses based on our work on participatory democracy and participatory research.

Three provocations

Some researchers’ positionality costs more than others

Marginalised Researchers Face Higher Costs

Massoud and Rubin, tell us that marginalised researchers often pay a higher price for revealing their positionality in their work. At times having to use their bodies as a means of legitimising their work by exposing their marginalisation.

Privilege and Authority in Academia

From Gani and Khan we understand that lesser marginalised researchers who acknowledge their privilege can sometimes use this to bolster their own authority and credibility. They might then well-meaningly coopt the knowledge, practices and understanding of marginalised communities, especially in intersectional research.

There is an overemphasis on identity categories

When research focuses too much on individual identity categories, it tends to highlight differences rather than the interconnectedness of various forms of systems of oppression.

Intersectionality's true power lies in revealing how these systems of oppression and how they shape social identities.

Top-down identity categories informing recruitment based on sortition for instance (as well as quantitative analyses of these spaces) can lead to fragmentation and oversimplification of the complex ways systems of oppression affect people's lives.

Positionality as a continuous Methodological Tool

Positionality is not only a statement, but is an ongoing methodological tool that ensures the safety of participants and the integrity of participatory design and research.

Interrogating our positionality: three examples

 Below we offer our reflections on how our positions of power have shaped our understanding of the lived experiences of our participants, recognising that horizontality is often assumed but never wholly present.

Theatre of Climate Action in South Africa – confronting my own anglophone-ness

Dena Arya

In 2024 I worked with a group of youth co-creators on a participatory theatre project in South Africa to amplify Global Majority youth voices on climate justice. During a participatory evaluation session with eight young arts and drama students I had an experience that forced me to confront my own anglophone-ness, despite my own experiences of marginalisation as a bi-lingual member of the Iranian Diaspora in the UK where I live and work.

The young people from South Africa and neighbouring countries, spoke multiple languages, with English not being their first. At our first session on creating safer braver spaces (adapted from the work of Rikkard and Villarreal), some young people began to find the activity challenging and began using their own heart languages to describe what these concepts meant to them. I came to realise that I had assumed English was the default language, without considering the linguistic diversity of the group or the space that I had entered.

Reflecting on my position of power, I recognised from this experience that my practice needed to be more inclusive and platform young people’s knowledge and expertise in ways that are familiar to them.

Youth Participation on mental health policymaking: acknowledging unequal adult-young person relationships

Sonia Bussu

In 2023, I was involved in a project on youth mental health in Greater Manchester, where a partnership of academics and practitioners worked with a diverse group of 16–25-year-olds with experience of mental health challenges. The project aimed to be youth-led and we combined arts-based, digital and participatory research methods for young people to co-create policy proposals to better mental health support.

Although I was keen to open space for the young people to take the lead from the start, by ensuring they were paid and treated as equal colleagues, I came to recognise subtle power hierarchies that might risk turning young people's participation into compliance with adult ideals. Acknowledging our different, more privileged, life experiences as adult, established researchers was crucial, to avoid extractive practices. Genuine co-creation requires young people to see themselves as equal partners with adults; it was not enough for me tell them they were.

It took time to build relationships of trust that enabled them to feel confident rather than overwhelmed. We created space for subversive discussions that allowed both young people and adults to reflect on positionality and question adult biases about youth engagement and mental health. Over time, this continuous reflective process helped us foster more authentic collaborations that continue beyond that one project.

In and Out: power dynamics in setting a research agenda with young people

Temidayo Eseonu

Between 2023 and 2024, I worked with young people, mostly racially minoritised children and young people aged between 9 - 16 in Manchester to understand their experience of racial injustice. It was also important that I activated their imagination towards possibilities of racial justice. I started the project with a broad interest in young people’s experiences. I did this with a variety of creative methods that centred open-ended questions at the start of the research project. To that end, they were able to lead the project’s direction.

As the project progressed, due to my academic and personal experience of the research topic, I started to see patterns in the experiences shared - racial injustice in education through the lens of (dis)belonging. As a Black female mum and researcher, I was an insider and an outsider. I used Eakin and Gladstone’s “value-adding” approach to analyse the experiences young people shared with me. In line with Lewis and Kerkhoff-Parnell, my positionality allowed me to bridge criticality and empathy to understand and frame their experiences.

While I could authentically engage with the subject matter of the research and the young people were part of the decision-making process, I have a lingering question, was the agenda of belonging an equal combination of their experiences and mine?

How do we engage with intersectional positionality as a practice?

Inspired by Masuda to ‘ask the other question’ we put together a short set of questions we might continually ask ourselves throughout the research process, before, and after fieldwork. We hope may be useful to other researchers:

1. When does reflection on positionality happen?

2. Why am I reflecting on my positionality at this moment?

3. How do we engage with our positionality when we take time to reflect?

4. Who is included in our reflections?

5. What impact do our reflections have on ourselves, our cocreators and our research?

6. Where do we share these reflections to improve our practice?

7. What role might my positionality play during this process?

8. How might I use my positionality in different spaces?

9. How might my positionality influence the interactions that I have with participants? 

10. Are you the researcher the right person to conduct the research (Prof Sunny Singh)?

We hope that by sharing our provocations, insights and simple guidelines for practising positionality, other researchers can improve their practice. We consider this blog an opportunity for open dialogue and welcome researchers to continue the conversation with us.