TY - JOUR
T1 - Think Big
T2 - A multinational collaboration to promote children's role as coresearchers in participatory research
AU - Marinkovic Chavez, Katitza
AU - Gibbs, Lisa
AU - Saracostti, Mahia
AU - Lafaurie, Andrea
AU - Campbell, Rona
AU - Sweeney, Dominique
AU - Hernández, María Teresa
AU - Sotomayor, María Belén
AU - Escobar, Florencia
AU - López-Ordosgoitia, Rocío
AU - Giraldo Cadavid, Diana Alexandra
AU - Aristizábal García, Diana Marcela
AU - Wright, Marcus
AU - Charalampopoulos, Dimitrios
AU - Miranda, Edgardo
AU - Alisic, Eva
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Society for Community Research and Action.
PY - 2022/6
Y1 - 2022/6
N2 - The field of participatory research with children developed largely thanks to shared learning between different cultures, places, and disciplines. However, grand narratives and power relationships in academia inherited from colonialism and imperialism can threaten to obstruct the transformative value of this approach. In this article, we present the case of Think Big, a multinational collaboration for participatory research with children that involved adult and child coresearchers from Australia, Chile, Colombia, and the United Kingdom. Our aim was to explore how this project helped build solidarities between adult researchers from different countries and disciplines. We applied a methodology of diffraction to explore the processes and outcomes of this collaboration and presented our insights using the metaphor of a tree to explain the roots (knowledges and frameworks), trunk (ongoing collaboration and communication between the teams from different countries), branches (local projects), and fruits (research outcomes) of our work. Based on our experience, we proposed that multinational collaborations for participatory research offer important opportunities for adult researchers to collaborate with children to generate more democratic knowledge about their lives and to generate more egalitarian relationships between adult researchers from different places and backgrounds. However, it is important to anticipate that multinational collaborations are more likely to be affected by social and political upheavals, and language barriers must be overcome to decentralize academia. Also, the organizations involved in these collaborations need to develop strategies that facilitate funding, ethics clearance, and international research agreements.
AB - The field of participatory research with children developed largely thanks to shared learning between different cultures, places, and disciplines. However, grand narratives and power relationships in academia inherited from colonialism and imperialism can threaten to obstruct the transformative value of this approach. In this article, we present the case of Think Big, a multinational collaboration for participatory research with children that involved adult and child coresearchers from Australia, Chile, Colombia, and the United Kingdom. Our aim was to explore how this project helped build solidarities between adult researchers from different countries and disciplines. We applied a methodology of diffraction to explore the processes and outcomes of this collaboration and presented our insights using the metaphor of a tree to explain the roots (knowledges and frameworks), trunk (ongoing collaboration and communication between the teams from different countries), branches (local projects), and fruits (research outcomes) of our work. Based on our experience, we proposed that multinational collaborations for participatory research offer important opportunities for adult researchers to collaborate with children to generate more democratic knowledge about their lives and to generate more egalitarian relationships between adult researchers from different places and backgrounds. However, it is important to anticipate that multinational collaborations are more likely to be affected by social and political upheavals, and language barriers must be overcome to decentralize academia. Also, the organizations involved in these collaborations need to develop strategies that facilitate funding, ethics clearance, and international research agreements.
KW - adolescents
KW - children
KW - collaborations
KW - participatory research
KW - scaling up
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85122694116&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1002/ajcp.12582
DO - 10.1002/ajcp.12582
M3 - Article
C2 - 35020200
AN - SCOPUS:85122694116
SN - 0091-0562
VL - 69
SP - 306
EP - 317
JO - American Journal of Community Psychology
JF - American Journal of Community Psychology
IS - 3-4
ER -