Staying with the trouble: Reflections on participation, power, and messiness in community-engaged research

Community-engaged research approaches aim to create environments of shared authority among stakeholders, encompassing the entire research process. In doing so, they seek to disrupt conventional notions of research by repositioning those traditionally framed as ‘participants’ as co-investigators and co-creators of knowledge. At the same time, a growing body of scholarship cautions against the uncritical valorisation of these approaches. Critics highlight the relative under-theorisation of power relations between universities and communities, and the risk of a ‘false egalitarianism’ that obscures rather than confronts existing inequalities. Further tensions arise from asymmetries in time, resources, and institutional incentives, as well as from the persistence of models that position communities as external to the university, an orientation that may reinforce, rather than challenge, the divide between academic and public knowledge.

This presentation reflects on the messiness, tensions, and possibilities of community-engaged research, drawing on a collaborative doctoral project conducted in Makhanda, South Africa. This research project, now in its final stages, adopted an emergent and participatory approach to inquiry, involving community members as co-researchers in shaping research questions, methods, and interpretations.

Rather than presenting participatory research as inherently equitable or straightforward, I foreground the uneven, iterative, and power-laden nature of collaboration, examining how methodological decisions were continually reworked in response to context, relationships, and participants’ preferences, sometimes in ways that contradicted established participatory ‘best practices.’ Ultimately, I argue for an understanding of community-engaged research as a negotiated and relational process, whose value lies not only in formal outputs but in its affective and relational processes of listening, recognition, and shared meaning-making. By making visible the tensions and partialities of collaboration, I seek to offer a grounded account of what it means to conduct research through situated, power-laden, but undoubtedly generative relationships.

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