Community-collaborative approaches (CCA) have been proposed as more equitable ways to engage communities in research, as they urge researchers to commit to long-term relationships with community members than with other participatory methods. However, the normative structures of HCI and computing research can present challenges in pursuing CCA for the researchers and community partners involved. This paper offers insights into: i) how research and relation impact each other, and ii) how we can conceptualize research as a mode of relation. We present our findings from eighteen semi-structured interviews with community-collaborative researchers in computing and HCI. We then ground our paper in theories of relation and relationality from Caribbean thought, Black studies, and Indigenous scholarship to apply a conceptual framework of relation to our findings. Through this work, we aim to interrogate what it means to center relationality in CCA, beyond and within the development of scientific research.
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Organizing Community-based Events in Participatory Action Research: Lessons Learned from a Photovoice Exhibition
Participatory action research (PAR) approaches center community members’ lived experiences and can spur positive change around pressing challenges faced by communities. Even though PAR and similar approaches have been increasingly adopted in HCI research that focuses on social justice and community empowerment, public-facing events that are based on this research and center community members’ voices are less common. This case study sheds light on how to initiate and organize events that build on existing PAR efforts, and what practical challenges might exist in this process. Building on a photovoice research project, we—a collaborative team of university researchers and staff members of a community organization in Eastside Detroit—co-organized a community-based public-facing exhibition that featured community members’ photographic narratives of personal and communal safety and surveillance. In this case study, we reflect on the challenges we experienced in planning and holding the exhibition. We contribute a set of practical guidelines to help researchers facilitate community-based events when conducting participatory action research in HCI.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1352915
- PAR ID:
- 10451895
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI EA '23: Extended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 8
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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