By Alex Japonais, Jorojina Elishal, Israel Wabikamb’, Rammy Sadat, Jay, Aron Tesfai, Glenda Santana de Andrade, Jane Freedman
Abstract
This article emerges from a series of participatory and creative
research workshops that we participated in as organisers/researchers
and participants/co-researchers. The workshops were part of an
ongoing research project on young people’s experiences of migration
and (im) mobility across borders. Research for the project is ongoing
in five countries – France, Greece, the UK, Canada and South Africa –
and this article is based on part of the research carried out in
eThekwini-Durban, South Africa. We wanted to co-write this article to
try and move towards a fuller co-creation of knowledge, going beyond
just participatory activities and research and bringing participation
into the space of dissemination of knowledge within academic spaces.
We write from our different positions as three researchers of different
backgrounds and five participants/co-researchers who took part in the
workshops. We hope that this attempt to co-write an article will show
our different perspectives on the research process and allow us to
highlight the different outcomes, results and forms of knowledge
produced for all of us. It is rare that participants in research get to
comment afterwards on how they felt during the research process,
but we feel that this is a vital step in doing research that is less
extractivist and which takes seriously the question of restitution of
research results.