Wearing Different Hats: exploring participatory processes workshop

This interactive workshop invites attendees to step into the perspectives of various roles present within participatory processes and explore dynamics of power, agency, and accountability. 

Facilitator and researcher Bramble Gardiner will guide attendees through the activity. They will work in small groups to work through a participatory scenario, based on real-world examples. Each person takes a role, e.g. funder, researcher, community participant. In these roles, together they are will be asked to respond to four questions (the ILBR Framework): 

• Initiating: Who is making requests or offers, and to whom?   

• Labour: Who is doing the work or taking the actions?   

• Benefits: Who is the work or action for?   

• Risks: What risks exist, and for whom? 

The workshop will start with a 10-minute introduction to participatory projects/research with examples of projects and the types of roles people might take within them.

Note: this scenario-based exercise does not require acting, written responses to the questions will be added to an online platform and form the basis for group discussion.

“Participatory processes are inspiring and engaging co-learning experiences. They are also messy, uncertain and highly relational, with potential for complex interpersonal dynamics to arise. Each person involved arrives entangled with long-standing social inequalities as well as potentially conflicting lines of accountability and priorities that they may feel responsible for. The work is then to bring our worlds together to build a mutual understanding from which to collaborate.” – Bramble Gardiner

This session has been designed with a broad range of professionals in mind. We hope it will be a useful session for academics and researchers at different career levels working in a range of humanities subjects, professional services staff from universities, public engagement professionals and staff from community, cultural and charitable organisations.

This event is free, but booking is required. It will be held online and joining details will be circulated via email to registered attendees. This session will be recorded. If you would like to receive a link to the recording, please sign up for the session to receive the recording link once it is available.

This event is part of a series of CPEP training sessions exploring participatory and collaborative approaches to public engagement. Sessions are designed as standalone trainings, but participants may benefit from attending them in sequence.

This session will be held on Zoom and closed captioning will be available. Any resources referred to during the session will be circulated afterwards via email. Please make a note of any accessibility requirements in the booking form. Further details about what to expect in each session will be made available before the session to those who have booked.

Further information about the ILBR Framework 

• A blog about the framework 
• An academic article about its development and the theory behind it 

About the facilitator: Bramble Gardiner

Bramble started their professional life as a community artist (2012-2014) working nationally and internationally, including a Creative People and Places project (2014). They then moved into the third sector working for a behaviour change charity delivering a citizen science project about air pollution (2015-17) and designing pollinator paths (2017). During 2017-2019 they worked with Shared Assets on community ownership and governance models. Since 2019 they moved into academia via an MSc in Sustainable Food and Natural Resources at CAT and a PhD at the University of Plymouth (2022-2026). Bramble’s PhD explores the lived experiences and journeys of Community Food Researchers involved in transdisciplinary food systems transformation research (FoodSEqual), using creative and collaborative ethnographic methods (e.g. collage, poetry, drawing and animation). Part of the PhD analyses ‘how participation works’, and the ILBR framework and workshop arose through this. Bramble also has a research assistant position at the University of Reading investigating diet inequalities using participatory methods.

Connect via LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bramble-gardiner-08849142/