Mike Kesby

Spatialising participatory approaches: the contribution of geography to a mature debate

This paper explores the contribution that geographers can make to debates about the nature and utility of participatory approaches. It argues for a constructive reconciliation between these approaches and the growing poststructural critique of participation. Through an examination of the similarities and entanglements between power and empowerment it highlights the centrality of geographical issues to understanding how participation works and how its resources might be distanciated beyond the arenas of participatory projects to produce empowering effects elsewhere.

Participatory Action Research

Participatory action research (PAR) is a rapidly growing approach in human geography. PAR has diverse origins in different parts of the world over the last 70 years and it takes many forms depending on the particular context and issues involved. Broadly speaking, it is research by, with, and for people affected by a particular problem, which takes places in collaboration with academic researchers. It seeks to democratize knowledge production and foster opportunities for empowerment by those involved. Within human geography, it offers a politically engaged means of exploring materialities, emotionalities, and aspects of nonrepresentational experience to inform progressive change. Participatory approaches are not without their critics who argue that these can verge on the tyrannical, reproducing the inequalities they seek to overcome. Yet, PAR has exciting synergies with feminist, post-structural, and postcolonial geographies. These enable engagements with both productive and negative effects of power through attention to language, representation, and subjectivity. The ongoing development and experimentation with a range of participatory methods and techniques continue to inspire new understandings and possibilities for action-oriented research within and beyond the academy.

Methodological Insights on and from Children's Geographies

at the meeting, delegates resolved to work up a special edition on methods. This was a common point of contact and we wanted to share with other colleagues our insights on working with children. In addition, we wanted to explore the methodological contribution that children’s geographies might make to the rest of the discipline. In so doing we endeavour to respond to some of the challenges laid out in Horton and Kraftl’s (2005) recent editorial. Thus, we also attempt to offer methodological insights from children’s geographies. As our contributors show, work with children offers new insights on familiar problems but can also provide innovative and theoretically informed methodological approaches that have wider relevance for the discipline as a whole: demonstrating that children’s geographies can be useful and more-than-useful at the same time (see Horton and Kraftl, 2005). Contributions address a wide range of issues and phases of the research process and are ordered in a way that I hope seems logical to the reader. We begin with Fionagh Thompson and questions of research design that need to be addressed before methods are even broached. Samantha Punch, Naomi Bushin and Jane Reeves then draw our attention to various issues related to the basic tools of qualitative interviewing, before Thilde Langevang discusses multiple methods and Amanda Bingley and Christine Milligan explore innovative multi-sensory techniques. Lastly, Caitlin Cahill and Lorraine Van Blerk and Nicola Ansell, focus more explicitly on participatory approaches, and the all-important final stage of research: dissemination. Rather than describing each contribution in turn I use this editorial to draw out common themes and exciting ideas contained therein.

The persistence of ‘normal’ catchment management despite the participatory turn: Exploring the power effects of competing frames of reference

Presented as a panacea for the problems of environmental management, ‘participation’ conceals competing frames of meaning. ‘Ladders of participation’ explain insufficiently why public engagement is often limited to consultation, even within so-called higher level partnerships. To explain how participation is shaped to produce more or less symmetric exchanges in processes of deliberation, this article distinguishes between (1) discourses/practices, (2) frames and (3) power effects. This article’s empirical focus is the experience of participatory catchment organisations and their central but under-researched role in integrated catchment management. In addition to an analysis of policy statements and other relevant documents, this article draws on qualitative interview and participant-observation data gathered in an international participatory knowledge exchange that we facilitated among four participatory catchment organisations (and various other agencies). Results suggest that while statements about legislation promise symmetric engagements, the mechanics of legislation frame participation as asymmetric consultation. In their own arenas, participatory catchment organisations deploy participation within a framework of grassroots democracy, but when they engage in partnership with government, participation is reshaped by at least four competing frames: (1) representative democracy, which admits, yet captures, the public’s voice; (2) professionalisation, which can exclude framings that facilitate more symmetric engagement; (3) statutory requirements, which hybridise participatory catchment organisations to deliver government agendas and (4) evidence-based decision-making, which tends to maintain knowledge hierarchies. Nevertheless, participatory catchment organisations proved capable of reflecting on their capture. We thus conclude that the co-production of science and society, and the power effects of framing, must become explicit topics of discussion in processes of environmental policy deliberation for participation to result in more symmetric forms of public engagement.

Locating and Dislocating Gender in Rural Zimbabwe: The making of space and the texturing of bodies

In this article the author analyses some of the key discourses and practices that locate the meanings of gender in contemporary rural Zimbabwe and maps their strategic reproduction throughout a cen...

Arenas for control, terrains of gender contestation: guerrilla struggle and counter‐insurgency warfare in Zimbabwe 1972–1980

This paper explores the contingent nature of war‐time developments in gender relations, focusing particularly on the experience of protected village inmates in Chiweshe. It suggests that expectations of dramatic change in the position of ordinary women were unrealistic and based on four analytical flaws: a linear model of female emancipation, a tendency to generalise from a limited set of war‐time experiences rather than recognise the diversity of locally contingent circumstances, a failure to include struggles over masculine identity within the analysis of gender relations and finally, a lack of sensitivity to the social‐spatial structures that are integral to rural society. The paper highlights the spatial dimensions of war‐time contingency at the national and the local level and analyses how the enforced restructuring of rural communities destabilised the spatial discourses and practices that ‘normally’ structure gender identities and relations. The paper focuses on the extraordinary, and under researc...

The blood service should ask donors about practice, not just partners

ROB WHITE Richard Titmuss’s seminal study of blood donation systems, The Gift Relationship , concludes that the central question for ensuring the safety of the blood supply is, “What particular set of conditions and arrangements permits and encourages maximum truthfulness on the part of donors?” (see BMJ 2011;342:d2078, doi:10.1136/bmj.d2078). Notwithstanding advances in the epidemiological modelling of risk and the screening of blood, truth telling and trust remain pivotal. Screening is imperfect, and laboratory facilities are overstretched. So the UK National Blood Service uses a “donor health check” questionnaire to identify would-be donors whose “lifestyle and medical history” puts them at greater risk of having contracted a transfusion transmittable viral infection (www.blood.co.uk/can-i-give-blood/donor-health-check). This triage of potential donors is designed to limit the volume of infected blood entering this fallible system. Donors are trusted to answer a range of questions, including whether they have recently had a tattoo, travelled from a region of high HIV prevalence, or had sex with someone known to have HIV. They are also asked, “Are you a man who has ever had oral or anal sex, whether or not a condom was used, with another man [hereafter MSM]?” Answering “yes” to these questions currently results in a six month, 12 month, or lifetime deferral. Permanent deferral of MSM is controversial, and the government has just announced a change …