Can a Service User Ever Be Just a Researcher and Should They Want to Be? Taking Account of Complex Identities in Practitioner Research

Abstract

This discussion addresses complexities of identity and knowledge and their emerging importance as a result of growing interest in participation in social work and human services more generally. Thus lived experience and experiential knowledge are centrally addressed. The author's own overlapping identities are a starting point for this analysis, which highlights the importance of an intersectionalist approach to this development and the need to take account of issues as they affect people both as service users and workers and with dual identities. The contribution is written from and draws on the author's experience from the perspective of a survivor/service user researcher with a long-term background of undertaking collaborative, participatory research, including with practitioners and exploring and seeking to develop coproduced research and praxis—particularly from the position of user-led organizations. It also draws on his experience developing survivor and user-controlled research. Rather than relying on dominant models of disability and distress it also draws on user-led analysis and conceptualizations. As well as placing an emphasis on inclusive involvement, it seeks to put involvement research in broader ideological context, acknowledging relations with conflicting forces of neoliberalism and new social movements (NSMs).