Join us for a half-day workshop to explore experiences, challenges and theoretical possibilities emerging from the use of participatory research methodologies. The workshop will draw on the work of researchers applying PAR (participatory action research) and other participatory methodologies in diverse, interdisciplinary and global research projects. We will share and explore different understandings and traditions of participatory research across geographic contexts, the practicalities of designing and undertaking participatory projects and the challenges (and joys!) of building and maintaining relationships for this work. We will also examine the ways in which participatory methodologies can help shape knowledge production and influence activist agendas within and beyond academia.  

The workshop will begin with short (5 minute) presentations from researchers using participatory methodologies in different contexts, including IHSS Visiting Fellow Dr Venâncio Ramos, who will speak about his experiences using participatory methodologies with agrarian social movements and indigenous, quilombola and small farming communities in the Southern Brazilian Amazon. This will be followed by small group work, sharing and discussion on the themes above. Tea, coffee and cakes provided! 

This workshop is hosted by QMUL’s Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) and the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS)

With the climate crisis firmly upon us, it is clear, now more than ever, that mainstream solutions centred on the market and technology have done little to move us along a sustainable ecological transition. Even the disruptions of the pandemic proved temporary, and global production and extraction have continued apace. At the same time, struggles of working people have mushroomed across the globe around their conditions of work and life and around questions of racial, gender, ethnic, inter-generational and environmental justice. While not all these struggles are linked to the climate crisis, they reflect deep unrest with business-as-usual and an urgency towards progressive transformation.

This end-of-year event seeks to centre the labour-nature relation, and the multiple sources and trajectories of alienation within capitalism, in thinking through the climate crisis and the green transition. It will explore the varied manifestations of workers’ struggles as ecological struggles and seeks to reposition labour in its plurality at the centre of the green agenda.   

It asks: What is the place and role of labour in the green transition? What kinds of class struggles can be and should be organized in the short-term? What can we learn from history, i.e., from past struggles and debates on sustainability, environment and the climate crisis? Is there space for a 'thin-green-line' to reconcile global classes of labour across their multiple axes of fragmentation (race, gender, ethnicity, age, geographical location etc.)? Is it possible to envisage a green transition that does not lose sight of labour, one that reconfigures (potentially, challenges) global capitalism to save the people as much as it saves the planet?  

The event will be followed by a reception.