Complexities of Negotiating Power When Re-Constructing Stories About Lone Mothers

Abstract

Building social inclusion was the primary theoretical and practice goal of a group of researcher/ academics who partnered with lone mother research assistants in participatory action research. One outcome was the creation of a video recording that was based on a day in the life of a lone mother receiving income support. The work of creating and sharing the video recording became the lightning rod that focused the partners' attention on the complexities of negotiating power in the well-intentioned but problematic struggle to reconstruct stories about lone mothers. The distinct voices of individual authors are honored in this shared story about our journey. Keywords lone mothers, participatory methods, power relations, women in poverty Brenda: How dare all these academic types-you know who you are-take my life, my horrible wretched life, and use it to further your agenda. My life of poverty and destitution, my life of suffering, my life of having to eke out an existence for me and my children, my life of frustration, my life of sadnessof not being able to adequately provide for my children, and use it to write papers and show people who should already know how absolutely gut-wrenching-awful poverty is, to realize that they maybe would/ should think before they act. My Story/Our Story/Shared StoryDiana: Researchers who engage in studies with (or about) single/lone 1 mothers' experiences are implicated in the construction of those stories. The academy and published works are often the institutional spaces where these stories are collected, scrutinized, deconstructed, and disseminated for wider consumption and often without the benefit of lone mothers' active and meaningful

What “Coproduction” in Participatory Research Means From Participants’ Perspectives: A Collaborative Autoethnographic Inquiry

“…In spite of the democratic commitment in participatory research to making space for co-researchers' experiential, embodied knowledge, these reflexive analyses of co-production are almost always written by the academic researchers alone; analyses of co-production carried out and written collaboratively by academic researchers and co-researchers are very rare exceptions (e.g. Arieli et al, 2009;Groot et al, 2019;Gustafson et al, 2016Gustafson et al, , 2019Schipper et al, 2010). As Gustafson et al (2019, p. 21) put it, "the hierarchical processes of writing and the traditional rules for knowledge production that organize the structure and textual form of scientific knowledge are reinforced in the publication arena.…”