Facilitating Community Research for Social Change: Case Studies in Qualitative, Arts-Based and Visual Research

Facilitating Community Research for Social Change asks: what does ethical research facilitation look like in projects that seek to move toward social change? How can scholars weave political and social justice through multiple levels of the research process?

This edited collection presents chapters that investigate research facilitation in ways that specifically attempt to disrupt and challenge anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, and sexism to work toward social change. It also explores what it means to develop facilitation practices across multiple contexts and research settings, including specific facilitation methods considered by researchers working with visual and community-based methods with Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities. The complexities of how scholars negotiate decisions within their research with people and communities have an effect not only on how researchers construct their participants and communities, but also on the overall purpose of projects, the ways their projects are shared and disseminated, and what is learned in the doing of facilitation.

This book will be of great interest to both emerging and established researchers working within the social sciences. It specifically attends to diverse fields within the social sciences that include health, media studies, environmental studies, social work, sociology, education, participatory visual research methodologies, as well as the evolving field of digital humanities.

Casey Burkholder is an Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, interested in community-based and participatory visual research. In choosing a research path at the intersection of resistance and activism, gender, sexuality, DIY media-making, and pre-service teacher education, Casey’s work engages participatory approaches to equity and social change. Her recent projects can be found at: www.caseyburkholder.com.

Funké Aladejebi is an Assistant Professor of history at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Schooling the System: A History of Black Women Teachers (2021), which explores the intersections of race, gender, and access in Canadian educational institutions. Her research interests are in oral history, the history of education in Canada, Black feminist thought, and transnationalism. Her current research projects can be found at www.funkealadejebi.com.

Joshua Schwab-Cartas is a mixed race Indigenous Binnizá-Austrian, father, filmmaker, and Indigenous language scholar-activist. He is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia in the department of Language and Literacy Education. His research seeks to explore how best to combine mobile technology, specifically cellphilms, into Indigenous practice and land-based education as means of fostering intergenerational knowledge transmission and language reclamation.