Abstract
In this chapter, the author reflects on experience in the Media Action Research Group (MARG) in Canada, a six-year funded project that researched with and within intersectional grassroots autonomous media activist projects. Several contradictions and tensions arose, requiring continuous negotiations with research participants. First, activists appreciated the co-research process but noted an intense participant labour requirement. Anonymity of data intended to protect increasingly criminalised activists was experienced by some as a silencing of voice. Participation and being named in findings produced social capital, yet participants had to continue to occupy a marginalised position to provide the required expertise while also fighting this very marginalisation. Similarly, the funding of a grassroots research collective may generate shifting positionalities among collective members and be perceived warily by participants as an excess of socio-economic privilege. Contradictions can arise between the double positionality of horizontal research collective member and Principal Investigator in relation to the university institution and funder. Considering collective and individual power from an intersectional perspective, the author finds that mobile and invisibilised social and institutional axes of oppression and privilege can create tensions within movements, within research collectives, and between the two. Recommendations for developing ethical movement research practices are mapped as a departure point for generating dialogue among researchers and activists committed to developing improved ethical co-research practices.
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Notes
- 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.
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Jeppesen, S. (2020). Research Ethics: Critical Reflections on Horizontal Media Activism Research Practices. In: Jeppesen, S., Sartoretto, P. (eds) Media Activist Research Ethics. Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44389-4_2
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