Critical collaboration: exploring the (im)possibilities of critical research interventions

For my PhD, I conducted an ethnographic study of an educational NGO in Delhi, which provides free English and personality development training for disadvantaged young adults. Through this fellowship, I seek firstly to increase the impact of my PhD, and secondly to better prepare myself for an academic career by developing key skills that will shape my future career.

While the academic output will allow me to increase the scholarly impact that my research has had to date, the engagement activity with the NGO will allow me to increase the instrumental impact of my PhD by communicating my PhD findings in an innovative way that allows for mutual input and dialogue. Given the critical stance of my PhD, my findings may provoke tense conversations with the NGO.

Therefore, I will also undertake an evaluation of this engagement with the NGO, in order to assess the challenges and possibilities encountered. This will allow me to reflect on the effectiveness of the strategy used to communicate findings, and thereby hone my skills in engaging non-academic audiences in research, which will have lasting effects on how I design my research in my future career.

Following Tupas et al.'s (2010) engagement with ELT teachers in South-East Asia, the objective of this engagement with the NGO will be to strive for mutual input and dialogue. This requires a particular approach: rather than simply presenting my PhD findings to the NGO, I will conduct engagement workshops with material based on my thesis findings, where participants can engage in their own analysis and discussion.

The first milestone of the fellowship (Oct-Dec) will be the development of the engagement workshops, and careful identification of participants from the NGO (15 participants, 3 groups: teachers, students, management) with the support of my mentor, whose experience in implementing similar endeavours will be of utmost importance. During this time, I will also engage in teaching on the MA TESOL/Applied Linguistics course and will participate in UCL training workshops on in collaboration with stakeholders in order to prepare myself to engage with the NGO and reflect with them on potential improvements for their practice.

The second major milestone (Jan-Feb) will be the delivery of the engagement workshops with participants from my PhD fieldwork, and follow-up interviews with select participants to gain insight into their reflections on the effectiveness of the engagement workshops. The workshops will take place in person in Delhi or online, depending on the COVID restrictions in place.

Following the workshops, I will continue to work alongside the NGO by attending online meetings in order to assist them in the implementation of the changes they seek to make.

The third major milestone (Mar-Aug) consists of the preparation and production of further academic output and building networks. One aspect of this is the evaluation of the process of engaging with my PhD participants to communicate my thesis findings. By adopting an innovative approach to impact that allows for knowledge exchange and collaborative reflection on solutions, and subsequently undertaking an evaluation of this impact process, I seek to build on an emerging conversation on researcher intervention in critical research (Kraft & Flubacher 2020).

Drawing on my reflections on this engagement activity, I will present at the conference panel that I will organise at SS24, after which I will begin organising a journal special issue on the theme of 'critical collaboration'. In addition to this dissemination, I will share my PhD findings with a wider audience through podcast appearances and webinars at international universities.

In the final months, I will begin to prepare a monograph proposal for the Routledge Research in Education series, based on my PhD thesis and the process of communicating my findings.