##plugins.generic.forthcoming.label##

Experiments in Care

Co-facilitation, Responsiveness and Relational Learning in Collaborative Doctoral Fieldwork Projects

Autori

  • Julia Dobson Institute of Education, University College London

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.wx6fgx-2563

Parole chiave:

care, education, collaborative research, doctoral research, focus groups, collaboration

Abstract

Practising collaborative research methodologies involves relational skills and offers relational learning opportunities for researchers. In this critical intervention, I explore my experiences of co-facilitating focus groups about care as part of my doctoral research in schools. I draw upon the lenses of care and therapeutic scholarship to present insights from my own relational learning journey and explore care in collaborative research more broadly. Through creative, autoethnographic approaches, I look back on the joys of shared responsiveness in the co-facilitated focus group space and reflect upon moments when I found it challenging to step back and co-lead. In doing so, I consider what might further support doctoral researchers—and researchers more broadly—to develop care-full practices in co-facilitated focus groups, collaborative research, and beyond. This intervention contributes to calls for more practical support for researchers engaging with the nuances and complexities of these methodologies, as well as to broader, interdisciplinary calls for more relational orientations to research.

Riferimenti bibliografici

Aissatou, Evangelia Prokopiou, and Lucy Leon, et al. 2022. “Stories Too Big for a Case File: Unaccompanied Young People Confront the Hostile Environment in Pandemic Times,” Sociological Research Online 27 (3): 550–558.

Bragg, Sara. 2024. “A Logic of Care in / of / for Voice: Tuning-in, Enacting and Assembling in Student Voice Practices and Education,” Education 3-13 52 (6): 843–855.

Brannelly, Tula, and Marian Barnes. 2023. Researching with Care: Applying Feminist Care Ethics to Research Practice. Bristol: Policy Press.

Brown, Nicole. 2022. “Scope and Continuum of Participatory Research,” International Journal of Research and Method in Education 45 (2): 200–211.

Cahill, Caitlin. 2007. “Repositioning Ethical Commitments: Participatory Action Research as a Relational Praxis of Social Change,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 6 (3): 360–373.

Chidiac, Marie-Anne. 2018. Relational Organisation Gestalt: An Emergent Approach to Organisational Development. New York, NY: Routledge.

Eales, Lindsay, and Danielle Peers. 2021. “Care Haunts, Hurts, Heals: The Promiscuous Poetics of Queer Crip Mad Care,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 25 (3): 163–181.

Education Support. 2023. Teaching: The New Reality. London: Education Support and YouGov.

Elliott, Cathy, and Jesper Hansen. 2022. “Queer Pedagogy: How to Stop Teaching Straight.” Training Course, Arena Centre, University College London.

Gallacher, Lesley-Anne, and Michael Gallagher. 2008. “Methodological Immaturity in Childhood Research?: Thinking Through ‘Participatory Methods’,” Childhood 15 (4): 499–516.

Guerrero, Gonzalo, and Julia Dobson. 2025. “Navigating Collaborative and Participatory Research During and After the Covid-19 Pandemic: Emerging Possibilities from a Network of PhD Students,” Possibility Studies and Society 3 (1): 161–176.

Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

hooks, bel. 1994. Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY: Routledge.

Kara, Helen. 2018. Research Ethics in the Real World: Euro-Western and Indigenous Perspectives. Bristol: Policy Press.

——— 2020. Creative Research Methods: A Practical Guide. Bristol: Policy Press.

Khawaja, Jaspar. 2022. "How Can Educational Psychologists Facilitate Youth Participatory Action Research to Create Change?" Doctorate diss., University College London.

Kittay, Eva Feder. 2019. Learning from My Daughter: The Value and Care of Disabled Minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lac, Van T., and Michelle Fine. 2018. “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: An Autoethnographic Journey on Doing Participatory Action Research as a Graduate Student,” Urban Education 53 (4): 562–583.

McPherson, Charlotte, Sait Bayrakdar, and Sharon Gewirtz, et al. 2023. Schools for All? Young People’s Experiences of Alienation in the English Secondary School System. London: Young Lives, Young Futures.

Meloni, Francesca, Karine Vanthuyne, and Cécile Rousseau. 2015. “Towards a Relational Ethics: Rethinking Ethics, Agency and Dependency in Research with Children and Youth,” Anthropological Theory 15 (1): 106–123.

Nielsen, Anne Maj, and Freja Filine Petersen. 2021. “Affectivity and Relational Awareness in Pedagogy and Education: Moments of Hesitation in Intersubjective Encounters,” International Review of Theoretical Psychologies 1 (2): 135–151.

Naicker, Inbanathan, Daisy Pillay, and Sibonelo Blose. 2020. “Restorying Lived Lives in Educational Research: Storyboarding as a Creative Space for Scholarly Thinking in Narrative Analysis,” Journal of Education 80: 126–141.

Noddings, Nel. 2012. “The Caring Relation in Teaching,” Oxford Review of Education 38 (6): 771–781.

Owis, Bishop. 2024. Towards a Queer and Trans Ethic of Care in Education: Beyond the Limitations of White, Cisheteropatriarchal, Colonial Care. New York, NY: Routledge.

Pascoe, Sophie, Anna Sanders, and Andrea Rawluk, et al., “Intervention – 'Holding Space for Alternative Futures in Academia and Beyond’,” Antipode Online (blog), April 22, 2020, https://antipodeonline.org/2020/04/22/holding-space-for-alternative-futures-in-academia-and-beyond/.

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi. 2018. Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press.

Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2012. “’Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care,” The Sociological Review 60 (2): 197–216.

Ringrose, Jessica, Kaitlyn Regehr, and Shiva Zarabadi. 2021. Feminist Craftivist Collaging: ReMattering the Bad Affects of Advertising. In Creative Approaches to Health Education edited by Deborah Lupton and Deana Leahy 105–122. New York, NY: Routledge.

Shah, Vidya. 2023. Topographies of Research as Relational. In Handbook of Critical Education Research, edited by Michelle D. Young and Sarah Diem, 810–833. New York, NY: Routledge.

Taylor, Miriam. 2021. Deepening Trauma Practice: A Gestalt Approach to Ecology and Ethics. London: Open University Press.

The Care Collective. 2020. The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence. London: Verso.

Tronto, Joan. 2013. "Democratic Caring and Global Responsibilities for Care." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Western Political Science Association, California, March.

——— 1993. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York, NY: Routledge.

Wood, Lydia, Kate Swanson, and Donald E. Colley. 2020. “Tenets for a Radical Care Ethics in Geography,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 19 (2): 424–447.

Woodly, Deva, Rachel H. Brown, and Mara Marin, et al. 2021. “The Politics of Care,” Contemporary Political Theory 20 (4): 890–925.

##submission.downloads##

Pubblicato

2026-07-13

Come citare

Dobson, J. (2026). Experiments in Care: Co-facilitation, Responsiveness and Relational Learning in Collaborative Doctoral Fieldwork Projects. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, (00). https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.wx6fgx-2563

Fascicolo

Sezione

Special Issue: Decolonising research? The ethics, politics and practicalities of collaborative research