Together in Research: collaboration and relationships between researchers and social movements. Learning from South African experience.

The proposed research explores the day-to-day relationships that have developed between South African researchers and social movements from the last years of Apartheid (1980-) to the present, in order to understand how these relationships have given rise to distinctive forms of collaboration, based on shared knowledge production and plural understanding of societal problems, which have underpinned pioneering action-research projects, and which are still at the hearth of South African transformative research praxis.

Drawing on extensive archival research, narrative interviews and participant observation, TiR will provide an in-depth ethnographic and historical analysis of the debates, relational modes and research methods that shaped the collaboration between researchers and movements in Nelson Mandela Bay (NMB), South Africa, and will create an original Repository of Transformative Research Practices.

Based on collected data, and using elicitation and performative techniques, South African researchers and members of social movements will be involved in a self-reflective practice focused on their personal and collective experience.

This practice will be the starting point of a process of collective writing that will translate the salient elements of South African transformative research praxis into ethical and methodological guidelines.

By sharing and discussing these guidelines with Italian academic community and social movements, TiR aims to foster a dialogue on research-movement collaboration in order to innovate transformative research praxis in Europe and beyond.

The ER will learn-through-research and strengthen the theoretical and methodological knowledge on participatory and performative action research at Nelson Mandela University, NMB (South Africa) and UNITO, Turin (Italy), and will receive training in visual methods and in participatory video making through a secondment to the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester (UK).