“Everybody’s talking about doing co-design, but to really truly genuinely authentically do it […] it’s bloody hard”: Radical openness in youth participatory action research

Abstract

Guided by the work of bell hooks, this study uses her concept of ‘radical openness’ as an innovation for multi-party facilitation teams negotiating different roles, positionalities and understandings of youth participatory action research (YPAR). We explore the challenges we negotiated as facilitators in YPAR as they materialised in weekly reflections. We write as a team of two project leaders, three researchers and a project manager. Data comprised recordings of collaborative meetings, weekly reflections and focus groups. Two themes captured the challenges that we experienced and reflexively negotiated. First, we uncovered our own biases and assumptions through critical reflection and dialogue between comrades. Second, as a facilitation team we were able to negotiate authenticity and accountability in relation to project governance and reporting. Radical openness enabled us to identify and mitigate power relations as a team, collectively deepening our consciousness and research praxis. We all proved willing to acknowledge what we each did not know and use our imaginations to see things from each other’s perspectives. Based on our experiences, we suggest that multi-party facilitation teams consider how radical openness can help to cultivate spaces of dialogue between comrades to disrupt hegemonic and colonised views in YPAR.