On the 19th of March 2024, our project team held an online workshop about collaborative and participatory research.
It was led by dr Paloma Gay y Blasco, an anthropologist from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Paloma Gay y Blasco is a renowned scholar of Romani and gender issues, recognised for her long-lasting ethnographic studies among Roma communities in Spain.
The aim of the workshop was to reflect on two dimensions of collaboration: among the research team members, acknowledging our multiple positionalites (Roma, non-Roma and Czech, Polish, Slovak, Ukrainian), and with our research participants. As is broadly acknowledged, collaborative ethnography means that participants (interlocutros) are involved in designing and implementing the research project, also as co-authors and co-presenters. This paradigm also blurs the boundaries between the researcher and “the researched”, making the process of inquiry mutual. In the spirit of participation – and as it turned out, friendship – Paloma co-authored (with Liria Hernandez) a book titled Writing Friendship: A Reciprocal Ethnography (Palgrave MacMillan 2020). With this in minds, we discussed the opportunities and limits to collaboration and possibilities of collaboration and participatory research in our project.
Online workshop on collaborative and reciprocal ethnography
It is worth acknowledging that some of us already had a pleasure to collaborate as co-editors and authors with Paloma on a book titled Romani Chronicles of Covid-19: Testimonies of Harm and Resilience (Berghahn Books 2023), which describes the pandemic experiences of the Roma communities in Spain, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland and Brazil.