Emergent Methods in Community-Engaged Research

This workshop for scholars at any career stage focuses on using emergent technological methods with populations experiencing new forms of inequality and alienation due to marginalization by global markets and impersonal policy subsystems in ways that prevent collective organizing, create legislative invisibility, and generate mechanisms of inequality that long-standing research approaches are poorly suited to address. Likewise, community-based researchers often encounter challenges in understanding phenomena not amenable to quantitative measurement, particularly around community process, social location, and time. These dynamics create methodological gaps that mixed-methodologists address through promising power-sharing and emergent technological approaches, but the strategies employed are not well understood by the systems governing research infrastructure. The workshop will present best practices for resolving common ethical and IRB tensions, data-use agreements, and managing expectations around public-facing emergent methods. The presenters will draw from case studies in child welfare, unconditional cash, and time-use research. Case study one focuses on using online collaboration tools for building consensus and collective vision during two participatory action child welfare projects. The second focuses on data-visualization of aggregate spending data from unconditional cash experiments co-created with elected officials, community organizers, and local stakeholders. The third highlights how a mixed-methods app-based data collection strategy was used to resolve methodological challenges when studying time-use, economic mobility, and unpaid care work. Hour one will focus on strategies for mitigating the community and infrastructure challenges commonly encountered with emergent methods. In hour two, participants will have the opportunity to workshop and troubleshoot their own projects with facilitators.