Prof Flora Cornish

This course is available on the MSc in Applied Social Data Science, MSc in Gender (Research), MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation, MSc in Gender, Policy and Inequalities, MSc in Inequalities and Social Science, MSc in International Social and Public Policy (Research) and MSc in Social Research Methods. This course is freely available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. It does not require permission. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

This course has a limited number of places (it is controlled access). Priority will be given to students on the MSc Social Research Methods and MSc Applied Social Data Science.

How to apply: For information on how to apply for a place on this course, including deadlines, please see this page

This course develops students' abilities to become reflective, critical and skilled participatory researchers. Participatory research engages people with direct experience of an issue as co-researchers. It respects diverse forms of knowledge, producing knowledge and actions that are both locally-led and methodologically sound. The rich tradition of participatory research has much to contribute to contemporary demands for greater epistemic justice, from “co-production” to “decolonisation”. However, it is challenging to do participatory research well, and its immediate impact can be limited by issues of power and scale. Being a participatory researcher requires a critical conceptual understanding, a portfolio of collaboration and facilitation skills, resilience to complex social situations, and the ability to apply participatory design principles to new social contexts – all of which this course aims to develop, through a mixture of interactive lecture sessions, experiential workshops, discussion of key examples, and weekly writing tasks. Students engage in experiential learning through participating in and facilitating participatory research activities such as group deliberation, power mapping, zine making, walking methods, collaborative mapping, citizen science, participatory data analysis, role play methods and action planning.

The course engages with diverse social contexts, global locations, and examples from across the social sciences. In weekly writing tasks, students reflect on their own learning and make connections to a topic suitable for participatory research of their own choosing. The course is assessed through a portfolio of these writing tasks.

30 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

This course is taught in the interactive lecturing format. There is no distinction between lectures and classes/seminars; there are "sessions" only, and the pedagogical approach in each session is interactive.

Portfolio (1500 words) in Winter Term Week 5.

Students submit 2 entries of their project plan portfolio for feedback. 

• Chevalier, J. M., & Buckles, D. (2013). Participatory Action Research: Theory and Methods for Engaged Inquiry. Routledge.
• Chilisa, B. (2019). Indigenous Research Methodologies. SAGE.
• Coleman, R., Jungnickel, K., & Puwar, N. (Eds). (2024). How To Do Social Research With …. Goldsmiths Press.
• Cornish, F., Breton, N., Moreno-Tabarez, U., Delgado, J., Rua, M., de-Graft Aikins, A., & Hodgetts, D. (2023). Participatory action research. Nature Reviews Methods Primers, 3(1), 34.
• Fine, M. (2018). Just Research in Contentious Times: Widening the Methodological Imagination. Teachers College Press, Columbia University.
• Marzi, S. (2023). Co‐producing impact‐in‐process with participatory audio‐visual research. Area, 55(2), 295–302.
• Smith, L. T. (2021). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (3rd edn). Bloomsbury Publishing.

Portfolio (12%, 1200 words) in Spring Term Week 1.

Portfolio (88%, 3000 words) in Spring Term Week 1.

Portfolio 1: Submit 6 entries of a weekly reflective learning log (approx 200 words per week) (12%)

Portfolio 2: Submit 4 entries of a portfolio constituting a participatory research project plan (total 3,000 words) (88%)