Rethinking participatory research in the pandemic era, webinar for HDCA Annual Conference

The Coronavirus pandemic has affected the lives and livelihoods across the world and disrupted the ways in which we experience our capabilities everyday. In these times of the pandemic, researchers and practitioners who are using participatory approaches,  have had serious implications for the quality and the validity of the participatory inquiries and outcomes of our projects due to the multiple lockdowns, restrictions on travel, connectivity problems and the declining availability of stakeholders.

The webinar “Rethinking participatory research in the pandemic era” – organised by the HDCA Thematic Group on Participatory Methods for the 2020 Human Development and Capability Association Annual Conference (which will take place entirely through online events) – wishes to create a collective learning space to come out with options and alternatives that could be adopted to stay true to the principles and processes of participatory research in the pandemic era.

The webinar will, therefore, address the following questions:

1. What are the frameworks within the capability approach that enable us to understand the present crisis through participatory research?
2. What have been the lived experiences of the researchers in taking forward their participatory work?
3. Is there scope for methodological negotiations and alternatives that could be recommended for participatory researchers to be able to do justice to their research agenda and objectives?

Rethinking Participatory Research in the Pandemic Era

Program:

10:30 – Introduction by TG Coordinators

10:40 – Panellists:

Prof. Alex A. Frediani  (UCL, UK)
Alexandre Apsan Frediani is an Associate Professor at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit of University College London. His area of work focuses on issues around human development in cities of the global South, particularly by exploring approaches to participatory planning and design in informal settlement upgrading initiatives. He has also been conducting research and development projects focusing on the role of knowledge production and translation in advancing a more socially and environmentally just urban development.

Prof. Melanie Walker (UFS, South Africa)
Professor Melanie Walker holds a PhD from the University of Cape Town and is an A-rated NRF scientist. Her research on and in South Africa is concerned conceptually, empirically and practically with social justice in higher education and society, drawing on education, sociology, philosophy and development studies, working especially with human development and Amartya Sen’s capability approach (CA), as well as Martha Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities approach’. She has held the South African Research Chair in Higher Education & Human Development at the University of the Free State since 2013. Here she directs a vibrant group of early career researchers and supervises doctoral students, building together an impressive body of capabilities-facing scholarship. This includes nine single authored monographs by past PhD students in the last few years.

11:40 – Collective learning space: Open discussion for all participants on challenges and solutions to apply participatory methods during the pandemic.

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