Dr Umut Erel and Erene Kaptani, Open University Professor Maggie O ’ Neill, University of York

1. PARTICIPATORY ARTS AND SOCIAL ACTION RESEARCH (PASAR): Participatory Theatre and Walking Methods – Research, Engagement, Dissemination Dr Umut Erel and Erene Kaptani, Open University Professor Maggie O’Neill, University of York Professor Tracey Reynolds, University of Greenwich Research Methods Festival, Bath, July 2018

2. Migrant Families Enacting Citizenship • Contestations of migrant families’ marginalization in public and political debates • Migrant mothers and families are often viewed as traditional and standing in the way of their children’s integration • Migrant families often seen as at the boundaries or outside of UK society • Our approach sees migrant mothers’ practices of constructing belonging and place-making as a starting point to critique state and everyday cultures’ exclusionary understandings of citizenship

3. Research • ‘Participatory Arts and Social Action Research (PASAR)’. Two-year research project • funded by the Economic and Social Research Council/ National Centre for Research Methods, is led by PI: Umut Erel and Research Fellow: Erene Kaptani Open University, CIs: Maggie O’Neill University of York, Tracey Reynolds University of Greenwich • Focusing on the use of PAR to generate new knowledge and insights into the social exclusion encountered by marginalised communities • Reach broader audiences and develop website, research training, toolkit, resources

4. PASAR - methods • The research combines walking methods and participatory theatre –working with migrant mothers, girls from migrant families and migrant mothers with no recourse to public funds - to understand the lives, experiences and sense of belonging and place making – involved in enacting citizenship. • Collaborated with a school and Counterpoints Arts (arts organization working with migrant artists), Runnymede Trust (race equality organization) and two support organisations, RENAISI (family support) and Praxis (migrant advocacy) & Marcia Chandra, as film maker.

5. What we are doing and why The project explores the opportunities and challenges of PAR, specifically combining participatory forum theatre and walking stories, enabling us to: • Engage with migrant women, girls and families • Better understand the crucial issues affecting migrant families • Make a difference and impact on practice and policy. • co-production of knowledge around a policy issue (specifically NRPF)

6. Three Strands of Methodological Research 1) participatory methods with migrant parents' and young people on intergenerational communication. What kinds of research data are generated? How can they facilitate dialogue between groups across differences (generation and age) 2) Generating a model for engagement with policy-practice; working with migrant families subject to the ‘no recourse to public funds’ challenging the effects of this exclusionary policy through engagement between research, participants, and policy and practice.

7. 3) Developing training tools for social science research, including • briefing paper for policy and applied research on participatory arts based methods for engagement in collaboration with Runnymede Trust • a learning lab on uses of participation in arts and research • a toolkit for researchers • academic publications • a website including video clips illustrating the methods http://fass.open.ac.uk/research/projects/pasar

8. Participatory Performance Practice (Kaptani, 2005-2017) • Playback Theatre, drawing on Jonathan Fox • Image/Forum Theatre, drawing on Augusto Boal • Psychosocial exercises including: - Physical theatre exercises leading to exploration of everyday movements and interactions to final performances -visualisation -emotion based mapping of the participants’ localities -’writing a letter’ -‘Talking to the Policy Panel’

9. Forum Theatre • to reflect on the social construction of reality • to identify social structures which lead to oppressions. • to try out social interventions • to validate participants’ local knowledges

10. Methods to avoid pathologizing representations • Playback theatre: focus is not only on ‘problems’ but on an ‘everyday’ story. • The use of more abstract and physical theatre methods, • focus on everyday movements and interactions •  emotion based mapping of participants’ localities to enable their emotions become part of their maps

11. Performing as conscientization • Bringing into the school a pedagogy that contributes to  “conscientization” (Freire 1972) where the participants become the  subjects of knowledge by ‘perfoming’ their neighbourhoods, family relations, youth identities and social environments.

12. Participant’s reflection I liked when we were allowed to say how much the world that it affected us, and how people judged us, and how we act. And what culture we come from, and what religion, and that we were allowed to express how we were feeling, and how we were allowed to act out and try and resolve it, and try and make the world to be a better place. And I liked that because it felt like my ideas were being put through, and I was being listened to. (Participant from Girls’ Group)

13. Performative dialogues • In the intergenerational performance exchange mothers and daughters communicated their issues and gained an understanding of each other's experiences • What the participants are not able to say, here the characters are.

14. Enabling transformation: from personal to Political • The mothers with No Recourse to Public Funds came together as a group through these methods and found a holding space through the structures of participatory arts to share experiences and challenge anti migrant, racist and sexist attitudes from services and self blaming discourses that perpetuate social injustice and inequality.

15. Epistemological difference • Academics are collaborating with artists from the onset of the research and not only as part of the dissemination process. • Participatory Artists developing practices specifically for community involvement and for research. • Working as an artist in an academic project means that one has to negotiate different practices that can ‘change’ both Academia and Art.

16. performance production as research and vice versa • Researchers became facilitators and co-producers of social participation as research participants engage in the research process by reflecting, analysing and creating performances to show them to different publics to increase knowledge and bring change.

17. Why participatory, MAPPING and MOBILE / WALKING METHODS • The research team share a commitment to PAR - inclusion, participation, valuing all voices –action oriented interventions • The importance of sharing and facilitating space for stories and voices to be heard. We lead ‘storied lives’ • Use of theatre, mapping and arts based walking methods – importance of creativity in our research for social change

20. WORKSHOP PROCESS – MAPPING &WALKS • Mapping: draw a map from a place you cll home to a special place-mark the landmarks along the way that are important to you. • The women chose their walks based on a place of their choice, either individually, or in pairs. They were in situational authority. • Members of the research team accompanied the mothers on each of the walks. • The mothers were took photos of anything that captured their interest of the walks or on aspects of their lives they wanted to share. Some walks were audio or visually recorded.

21. Walking as arts based method • Arts based walking methods are embodied, relational, sensory, walking together creates a shared viewpoint and understanding is made very real - a collective story-collaborative knowledge production –empathic witnessing (O’Neill, 2010, 2017; O’Neill and Hubbard, 2010).

22. Visualisation techniques • the mothers engaged in visualization exercises (Kaptani 2016) where they were asked to visualise and reflect on their everyday routes, - for example work, school, to access welfare services • Participants then mapped these images onto individual maps. The maps were used then as part of the walks. • Process of walking together and mapping walks created sharing and facilitating space for stories and voices to be heard.

29. Policy and practice impact • Interventions into social delivery and policy • Equalise power relationships • Bridge empathy gap - bringing different groups/people and voices together

30. Policy day

31. Policy day: mothers discussing with professionals

32. Policy Interventions Examples • House of Commons event, Dec 2017 • Briefing report ‘how to guide’ for policy and practice professionals using PAR

33. Practice Interventions Bringing Social Workers into workshops (NRPF families) School space (young girls) • Service delivery: Talking to the Panel • Re-asserting power in institutional and hierarchical space where power routinely denied as result of age/ gender/race subordinate status

34. Bringing different voices together • Inter-generational day – migrant mothers and young girls together • Change perceptions of each other; generated understanding and appreciation of different groups and voices • Methods and principles can be used with other groups (eg teachers and pupils; migrant and non-migrant groups)

35. Challenges/limitations • Financial costs • Time and labour intensive • Power relations between researchers and participants and between participants • Ethics - trust/risk • Managing expectations • PAR is not a panacea

36. What participatory methods do • Allow for participants to share knowledges with each other • Validate their knowledges, despite pervasive racism and sexism that casts migrant families as outsiders to the nation or potentially a ‘burden’ • Allow for embodied, situated knowledges beyond language to be validated • Allow for engagement of policy and practice and dissemination which addresses issues holistically, challenging the de-humanisation of bureaucratic and racializing language

37. Research as an act of citizenship • Participatory arts for research can also change the relationship between researchers and participants • Allowing new forms of subjugated knowledges to emerge • Developing new knowledges with researchers, to contest existing discourses which marginalize migrant families • Developing research as a shared act of challenging existing ways of knowing and the social injustices which are constituted by and constitute these injustices