Still in the Thick of it: A Duoethnographic Account Navigating and Challenging the Institutional PhD Through Participatory and Action-Oriented Research

Abstract

Choosing to undertake participatory and action-oriented research within the constraints of a doctoral project remains relatively rare. Yet an increasing number of graduate students are challenging traditional trajectories and academic systems by pursuing degrees with proposed research grounded in such approaches. This article draws on duoethnographic inquiry between two PhD candidates enrolled in a joint doctoral program across institutions in Australia and the United Kingdom. We offer a collaborative account of our ongoing journeys in real time rather than retrospectively, tracing how we navigate challenges while also identifying opportunities. Our methodology is grounded in dialogic exchange, written correspondence, and the co-authoring of each other’s narratives, practices that blur the boundary between method and action. By situating our writing within the immediacy of the doctoral process, we foreground the complexity and uncertainty of negotiating institutional demands while remaining committed to participatory and action-oriented values. In doing so, we open space for broader reflection on how doctoral study can be reimagined as a site of collective learning and transformation. Ultimately, this contribution affirms that participatory and action-oriented research is not only possible within doctoral programs, but can also catalyze new ways of challenging and reshaping the institutional cultures in which it is embedded.

Introduction

What does it mean to undertake participatory and action-oriented research as a PhD project within the university system? What pressures, constraints, and possibilities arise when such work unfolds in real time, within and against institutional structures that often prioritize conventional academic approaches? This article emerges from duoethnographic inquiry conducted between two doctoral candidates, Javier and Raymond, both of us who are undertaking our third year in joint PhDs through an alliance between Monash University in Australia and the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. As we navigate participatory and action-oriented research approaches within transcontinental academic systems that do not always make space for such methodologies and worldviews, we explore the challenges our doctoral projects face and the opportunities they offer. While there is a growing body of literature on participatory and action-oriented doctoral work, most is written retrospectively by researchers who have already completed their PhDs. What makes our contribution unique is that it is situated firmly within the messiness of the process itself: something that action researchers often learn to navigate quickly! We are reflecting from the middle, not the end. We are engaging with each other as peers, navigating shared institutional constraints and personal commitments to research grounded in participation, community collaboration, and action.

Javier began his PhD with an intention to pursue participatory research with peer-support online communities for mental health, users often facing stigma as co-producers of knowledge. This approach was informed by prior community work, past research in digital ethnography, and his commitment to amplifying marginalized perspectives in mental health research. Ultimately, however, he encountered institutional and ethical hurdles that shaped a less participatory path than envisioned. These challenges, including faculty concerns and a difficult experience with the ethics process, led him to adjust his approach. Raymond, by contrast, brought his longstanding action research practice for peacebuilding into his PhD after leaving a prior doctoral program at another university, where he felt the institutional environment was at odds with his commitment to relational accountability and responsiveness to community concerns. His project is rooted with longtime co-research partners from his prior decade of community-based action research in Southeast Asia. Despite encountering challenges, he has maintained his commitment to continue an action research PhD project with his community partners.

This article aims to raise both structural challenges and the often-unspoken struggles of conducting participatory and action-oriented doctoral research. We begin with a literature review examining graduate student accounts alongside broader studies of such approaches in the academy. We then outline our duoethnographic methodology drawing on co-reflexive interviewing and correspondence. We share our findings constructed by each of us narrating the other’s account, which highlight emerging themes from our doctoral journeys. These include issues of identity, authorship, relational dimensions, ethics review processes, and time constraints. We ultimately turn these insights back onto our institutions and more broadly onto postgraduate education. In doing so, we demonstrate how established principles of participatory and action-oriented research intersect with the learnings we generated through this study itself. By reflecting together now, still in the thick of it, we hope to open new possibilities for how doctoral research, and the institutional cultures that shape it, might be imagined and practiced differently, even as we make our way through our own PhD journeys.

Accounts in the Literature: Graduate Studies and the Odd One Out

Participatory and action-oriented research has gained increasing visibility within academic spaces, prompting renewed reflection on its compatibility with doctoral study. Such inquiry has been taken up by earlier pioneering students who, over the past two decades, have shared reflexive accounts of conducting research as part of their doctoral journeys in collaboration with communities (Burgess, 2006; Fisher & Phelps, 2006; Gibbon, 2002). Most of these accounts have been written retrospectively. Motivations to pursue such research vary, but for graduate students, they often include building relationships beyond the academy (Argenal, 2022), aligning research with personal values and worldviews to bridge scholarship and practice (Gittins, 2019; Klocker, 2012), or cultivating an academic identity rooted in human connection or social justice (Tshelane, 2013). Such research can also foster professional development in educational settings by creating opportunities for students to articulate their perspectives, collaborate with peers, and participate more fully in collective processes (Sokhanvar & Salehi, 2018). We each pull from different aspects of these drivers that stem from our individual backgrounds and experiences both as emerging scholars and longstanding community-based practitioners.

A significant body of literature has examined the ways in which participatory and action-oriented research approaches clash with institutional structures. Rooted in principles of collaboration, reflexivity, and social transformation, these approaches often confront institutional logics that prioritize efficiency, individual achievement, and conventional markers of research excellence (Auerbach et al., 2022; Dedotsi & Panić, 2020; Kramer et al., 2021; Millar et al., 2025). The traditional format of the PhD has been widely identified as a structural challenge for candidates seeking to integrate co-produced knowledge within its conventional parameters (Fisher & Phelps, 2006; Lambley, 2024). Collective ownership, a core value in participatory and action-oriented research, often stands in contrast to doctoral programs that center the individual candidate as the sole producer and owner of knowledge. Some doctoral researchers describe the need to justify their community-engaged work in terms that are legible to disciplinary gatekeepers, often reshaping how knowledge is framed and by whom it is recognized (Gilfoyle, 2024). In response to these tensions, scholars have developed frameworks and strategies to support participatory and action-oriented research in doctoral education and within the broader context of the academy. Khanlou and Peter (2005), for example, offer guidance for ethical review boards assessing participatory action research (PAR). Alfaro-Tanco et al. (2023) present a reference framework to guide universities in designing PhD theses grounded in action research, highlighting both the incentives for institutions and the value for university-industry collaboration. They are not alone in advocating for doctoral programs and research that align with the academy’s increasing emphasis on community and industry engagement (Alpert et al., 2023; Pratt et al., 2024; Trott et al., 2020).

One of the clearest sites where institutional and participatory logics commonly clash is the ethics review process. These approaches often center empowerment and participation from outside the academy, with goals of collective impact that may conflict with conventional scholarly protocols (Lake & Wendland, 2018). Southby (2017) argues that the contradiction between participatory research and academic processes becomes especially visible during ethics review in relation to assumptions about vulnerability of participants, who in participatory research are often involved in the process. Klocker (2012) similarly describes confronting institutional norms that sought to distance children in her study from her own research process but counter-argued that it would have been unethical not to engage them in her project—an argument that ultimately secured ethics approval. In other cases, however, doctoral candidates report that ethics procedures reshape their projects in ways that dilute their participatory character (Lake & Wendland, 2018), or that supervisors steer them toward more conventional designs to avoid risk or delay (Felner, 2020). Ethics review processes are not uniform across institutions. Some actively support participatory approaches, drawing on reviewers with relevant experience and methodological expertise (York et al., 2021). Atalay (2022) distinguishes between ethics designed to protect participants as research subjects and ethics that conceptualize research with community members, which requires guidance outside the norm.

Some PhD students with intentions to undertake participatory research later shift or adapt their projects due to institutional constraints. Armstrong et al. (2012), suggest modifying aspects of PAR as a way to make PhD research more participatory while remaining compatible to the structure and demands of degree requirements. Southby (2017), p. 137 did precisely this in his PhD, acknowledging that he had to “step back the participatory continuum” and instead aim to conduct the research “as participatorally as possible.” Others who persist throughout their graduate studies often develop strategies to remain aligned with participatory values while navigating institutional barriers. For instance, Burgess (2006) addressed hierarchical tensions inherent in her commitment to PAR by drawing on Reason and Torbert’s (2001) first-, second-, and third-person action research framework, which she used to balance personal reflexivity, collaborative engagement, and wider dissemination. Ryan et al. (2025) suggest that inclusion need not be all-or-nothing, but can be adapted to a moderate, context-sensitive level and be both meaningful and acceptable, even amid high academic expectations and scarce resources.

Undertaking a participatory and action-oriented PhD within the university system often entails negotiating tight timeframes, limited resources, contradicting institutional norms and complex relationships, together with the messiness that arises when conducting research from within the academy in partnership with those beyond it. Gibbon (2002) advocates for university administrators to support existing external relationships that students might connect with through their research as many struggle to build the relationships necessary for participatory and action-oriented research within the limited timeframes and pathway of the PhD. Those with prior professional or community experience who enter doctoral study with established networks may have a greater chance of developing successful collaborations than those without. There are also increasing empirical accounts from those who have tapped into peer support in university settings. Guerrero and Dobson (2024) emphasize the value of support in addressing the isolation often experienced during doctoral study, particularly within relational research approaches. Drawing on the concept of “communing,” in which researchers develop their practices and self-understandings through mutual engagement and reflection (Sisson et al., 2022), they underscore the importance of academic community in navigating uncertainty, using student-led reading groups as example. Similarly, van Paassen and Pešec (2025) draw on their doctoral experiences as action researchers to analyze how engaging in cycles of inquiry through leading an action inquiry group at their university supported the cultivation of reflexive capacity within their institutional contexts. This article builds on such propositions as we “commune” together to make sense of our experiences as they unfold in the present through systematic reflection and co-documentation.

Methodology: Duoethnography, Correspondence, and Critical Friendship

Much of our own work aligns with the participatory worldview described by Heron and Reason (1997), which holds that knowing is not solely conceptual but emerges through the interplay of experiencing, expressing, theorizing, and doing. This extended epistemology reflects how we understand knowledge to be co-created in relationship with others. It also signals our methodological stance in this piece, which draws on “withness-thinking” (Shotter, 2005, 2006) and its emphasis on relational responsiveness and the immediate moment. Withness-thinking invites researchers to engage alongside others in scenarios that are unfolding with, not about, those involved (Shotter, 2012). We view this study, conducted as an action-oriented inquiry with each other and within our ongoing doctoral research, as an example of withness in practice, while our understanding takes shape as we respond in real time through the process. We also draw on our own ethnographic experiences: Javier through his work in online spaces using digital ethnography (García Martínez, 2025), and Raymond through his use of collaborative autoethnography to conduct comparative analysis of research methods (Hyma & Pratley, 2026).

To explore and make sense of both our lived experiences and the broader structural dynamics of undertaking a participatory and action-oriented PhD within the institutional conditions that shape our everyday research realities, we adopted a duoethnographic methodology. Duoethnography foregrounds dialogic engagement between two researchers who analyze and write together in conversation. Their intersecting or diverging perspectives on a shared area of interest become a perpetual space of meaning-making and data generation (Burleigh & Burm, 2022; Norris & Sawyer, 2012). Central to this approach in making sense of our own lived experiences is the concept of the “critical friend” in action research (Stenhouse, 1975), with particular emphasis on the importance of critical friendship during the doctoral experience (Stump & Gannon, 2022). In what they refer to as the “choppy waters” of research, Hari and Nardon (2025) offer the metaphors of “kayaker” and “swimmer” to capture how one researcher may accompany and guide another through turbulent moments of PAR inquiry—what they call “the swim” itself. Building on their aquatic imagery, we extend the metaphor to include the fast-moving rapids of such research undertaken often within the limited timeframe and institutional confines of a PhD. Here, the challenge is not only to stay afloat in turbulent waters, but to complete the excursion before hitting the final waterfall, which for us, equates to thesis submission. It is within this journey that the accompaniment of a critical friend, with a life jacket in hand, is not only valuable, but at times feels essential.

Our collaboration was sparked by a shared interest in participatory and action-oriented research within our joint doctoral program, bringing us into conversation across the Monash-Warwick community and leading to joint efforts with peers and faculty to propose a conference on navigating such approaches within the academy. Alongside this wider initiative, our own conversations deepened, and we began comparing our personal experiences of doctoral research in our shared universities. This exchange led us to design questions for one another that drew on our curiosities and invited structured reflection and dialogue. In preparing for our first formal exchange, we began shaping a methodological approach and refining its details, which not only strengthened our understanding of one another’s research, but also clarified our shared intention to challenge and advocate for change within the university systems in which projects like ours unfold.

Following our initial recorded co-reflexive interview, we turned to the correspondence method (Harris, 2002; Rautio, 2009) to extend reflection. Recognizing that certain insights might not have surfaced in our first encounter, letter writing offered a way to revisit and expand evolving threads while simultaneously generating further data in real time complementing our duoethnographic intentions. The correspondence method, in our adaptation, involved exchanging emails over a period of four months. While acknowledging the particular value of handwritten letters in the method (Stamper, 2020), we chose email given our locations on different continents and our sense that its immediacy to sustain ongoing dialogue would enable a more productive flow of communication. These back-and-forth exchanges allowed us to follow up on our initial encounter, pursue emerging curiosities, and react to how we saw our own narratives evolve. Unlike autoethnography or reflexive journaling, correspondence invites communication directed toward another person with an expectation of a response (Clandinin & Connelly, 1998), a natural extension to duoethnography. This enabled us to articulate our experiences with greater intentionality, generating narratives that were personally meaningful and enriched by the new insights arising from our ongoing dialogue.

As our exchanges unfolded, we experimented with co-authoring each other’s narratives rather than our own. While this differs from conventional autoethnography, where the authority of one’s own voice is typically prioritized, this practice not only offered insight into how our experiences were interpreted, but also opened a second layer of reflection through shared meaning-making. Each drafted narrative was shared with its original speaker, and subsequent letters in our correspondence ensured that iterative versions remained true to their intent while still carrying the imprint of the collaborative process and ultimately a deeper mutual understanding of each other. The process progressed through relational engagement, reflecting these same principles of withness-thinking. Following over a year of online interaction, reflection, analysis and writing from different continents, we had the opportunity to meet in person for the first time shortly before completing the initial manuscript for submission. This stage allowed us to consolidate our reflections in shared physical space and to ground our research findings more relationally in our collective voices. Following deep engagement by our anonymous peer reviewers who returned the manuscript highlighting opportunities for further action, we continued our duoethnographic dialogue and experimented with additional actions at our institutions grounded in the findings of this work. This process resulted in a concluding iteration that more fully reflected our evolving duoethnographic practice and the possibilities of reflection and action while still in the thick of it.

Narrating the PhD in Process: Reflexive Accounts of Challenge and Possibility

Who are we? Colliding Identities in Academic Research

The infrastructure of the thesis of the PhD needs to be challenged from this very Western, individualistic idea that it's one person generating knowledge…we don't generate knowledge by ourselves in a PhD (Raymond, Interview, 5 May 2025)

For Raymond, the PhD process has been an intensification of a long-standing identity negotiation, forcing him to navigate overlapping and often conflicting roles. This hybridity became most palpable upon his entry into the academy. After a decade as a practitioner, the PhD structure suddenly repositioned him in his community standing. It did not just add a new identity; it actively complicated his existing ones. From practitioner, to academic, to funder, to colleague… These multiple identities proved to be complex and sometimes colliding. Amongst them, the academic requirement to be “sole author” forced him into a paradox. His PhD thesis requires him to be the academic author, a role that asserts individual intellectual ownership, analytical primacy, and a strong, singular voice. He is thus constantly performing a delicate balancing act: facilitating the creation of knowledge while also asserting his authority over that same knowledge to satisfy institutional demands. His struggle is not to choose one identity over the others, but to find a way to let them co-exist, however uneasily, and to navigate the inevitable tensions with ethical transparency toward all his communities, both academic and personal. Academic institutional processes, however, do not formally acknowledge the multiplicity of identities beyond the singular role of “researcher.” While protecting the researcher’s own privacy and autonomy beyond their academic role, we must also recognize instances where their identities, lived experiences, and self-narratives extend beyond academia.

When I first read Javier’s account of what essentially amounts to an “identity crisis” in my PhD, I was really surprised how he picked up on my multiple hats and this ongoing challenge to be the sole author without me ever actually saying it in our discussions. Javier, however, is his research, because he engages in it as someone with lived experience of the topic. Yet the title of “researcher” sometimes marks him as different from those he strives to research with rather than about. He struggles with terminology, often defaulting to “participants” as the most readily understood, though he dislikes its reductionism. While he is drawn to the term “collaborator,” he feels it misleading in the current writing phase of his thesis, where sole authorship prevents genuine co-writing. His participants also hold diverse identities of their own, such as psychiatry survivors or neuro laborers, which he is careful not to impose unless individuals self-identify as such. Ultimately, he prefers simply to call them “people I talk to” (Interview, 4 May 2025), the only commonality being their experiences with antidepressants. At the same time, occupying the position of researcher in public online spaces restricts him from sharing his own experiences as a member of the community he studies. It has also foreclosed opportunities, as some communities have refused him entry once disclosing his role, while in others he has been made to feel like an outsider or even an adversary. Though his institutions clearly identify him as researcher, his identity within the communities he both belongs to and studies is fraught with tension, as it is blurred and not always the one he would choose for himself, but one he feels he must assume.

Only One Name on the Cover: Authorship and the Structural Limits of Participatory PhDs

Like me, Javier was warned at an early stage in his PhD that his thesis was to be under his authorship only. One of his supervisors recounted a previous experience with a student who had attempted a participatory approach to their PhD, but ultimately failed to carry it through because of authorship problems. Javier accepted the authorship conundrum embedded in the PhD system. In our correspondence reflecting on his decision to modify his original intentions to conduct participatory research, he wrote to me, “The low point was realizing that to get approval, I had to strategically reduce the participation I had proposed. Dialing down my involvement to a more observational role was a pragmatic but painful decision” (Correspondence, 17 September 2025). But as we engaged more deeply in our duoethnographic dialogue, it became clearer that Javier had innovated in many other ways to honor his participants and the knowledge they were co-producing, even if their names would never appear alongside his on the thesis. He organized online meme-making workshops in which authorship of the memes was left to the group to decide. The memes became a medium through which participants could reflect on their experiences with antidepressants, and were intended as co-created expressions rather than data extracted from them. While the discussions around the memes were transcribed and included as part of his thesis data, the memes themselves remain theirs. Javier has also attempted to explore ways to trace these memes online, to see whether and how they circulate, and whether authorship remains attached. In this way, he developed his own method for navigating the academy’s requirement of sole ownership and created spaces where co-production could still be practiced, even if not officially recognized in his PhD. The memes stand as a counterpoint to the thesis, as outputs that reflect a different kind of shared and negotiated authorship situated within the community.

When Raymond narrated my account of navigating authorship constraints, he noted how clearly it illustrated a broader infrastructural tension: the quiet but constant negotiation between facilitating collective knowledge-making and being required to claim it as individually authored, the same underlying tension he was experiencing in his own research. Raymond’s research is a profound embodiment of action research. His methodology, Facilitative Listening Design (FLD), inverts the traditional research model by reimagining the researcher-researched roles and participation (Hyma, 2026), positioning community members as the primary researchers who are trained to conduct conversations within their own communities and collaboratively analyze it. This process is not merely a method of data collection but a transformative intervention. The knowledge generated is inherently collective but Raymond described his initial discomfort bringing this into a PhD thesis structure:

It felt like I’m using them. It felt so extractive to me. Not only am I sucking their information and then generating, producing my own knowledge from it, but I’m asking them to do all the work so that I can study them (Interview, 5 May 2025).

He was advised to excise the FLD component from his PhD methodology to the status of intervention that his “empirical” research methods (autoethnography, interviews, focus groups) would then study. For Raymond, this meant effectively erasing the collaborative labor and intellectual contribution of his community partners from the core claim of new knowledge. He resisted this, arguing that his PhD project was the conduct of the FLD method with other methods designed to understand the effects of that central, collaborative endeavor. His resolution was a negotiation of authorship across different outputs. The PhD thesis itself remains under his name. He and his community partners, however, simultaneously co-authored an academic journal article on findings generated through FLD (Hyma et al., 2026). Furthermore, they have published a book with ten authors and the names of the entire 25-person research team (Thanasin et al., 2025), and produced films and a webinar series, forms of knowledge mobilization that likely hold greater value for participant-researchers themselves. In this way, Raymond honors the co-produced nature of the work by ensuring community authorship is recognized even as he navigates the solitary requirement of the dissertation. This approach acknowledges a hard truth: within the current system, the PhD remains an individual credential, but the knowledge it seeks to represent remains collective.

Relational Openings: Supervision and Institutional Inclusion of Research Communities

Javier has double the supervision I do, having started with four supervisors. All of them have conducted research with some level of participation with communities and are aware of the potential for extractivism. For him, his team has been supportive in different ways. They recognize he is pursuing something quite different within the academy. Rather than trying to prevent him, they have encouraged and even expressed excitement about his exploration of participatory approaches. At the same time, they have consistently cautioned him about structural limitations, particularly around authorship and ethics, and encouraged him to ensure that whatever he does, he is able to defend it. As Javier explained to me:

Their advice during my PhD has been a pragmatic one coming from their own academic experience; understanding the difficulties of this approach within the academic institution and, in a sense, “safeguarding” that my PhD journey does not become a “painful” and “unfeasible” one within the timeline and workload constraints (Correspondence, 17 September 2025).

This practical but open supervisory approach has created space for him to navigate institutional expectations and minimize risk while still holding onto some of his participatory ethos.

When Raymond drafted my supervisory journey, he noted how strongly it was marked by institutional caution. I had been warned by my supervisors that entering the online communities before obtaining ethical approval could be interpreted as “gathering data” without authorization. Although this advice came from an ethics of care, it also revealed how difficult it is to build new research relationships once a PhD project has already been formally defined, as any engagement must be justified within an existing institutional frame. The same act of joining these spaces outside my role as a PhD researcher would not have carried the same implications. Set alongside Raymond’s experience, where longstanding community relationships preceded the PhD, this contrast shows how supervision can either help institutions accommodate existing partnerships or require new ones to be continually justified from within the doctorate itself. His story is less about overcoming supervisory constraints and more about how supervisors can actively broker deeper inclusion for community partners. What stands out is how his supervisors, though not action researchers themselves, chose to engage directly and substantively with his community network through concrete and powerful forms. One of Raymond’s supervisors facilitated the formal affiliation of his community partners with their research center. This relationship evolved to the point where the supervisor and one community partner co-designed and conducted research beyond the scope of Raymond’s PhD. Equally significant was the approach of his other supervisor, who immersed herself in a collaborative writing project with six of Raymond’s community co-researchers. Many of these partners came from marginalized backgrounds with no formal academic training. Rather than imposing a traditional academic voice, she embraced the role of a co-learner and a theoretical interlocutor, working to weave their lived experiences and insights into a co-authored academic journal article with them (Hyma et al., 2025). These actions represent best practices that are still far too rare. Raymond’s supervisors did not merely tolerate his participatory approach; they used their institutional role to actively practice it. By affiliating community partners and co-authoring with them as peers, they have performed the very “shifting of power” that participatory and action-oriented research approaches advocate.

Ethics Approval and the Sanitization of Co-Research Design in the PhD

Raymond’s encounter with the ethics review process was surprisingly smooth, an outcome that surprised even his supervisors given the deeply participatory and transgressive nature of his proposal. The central ethical tension in his project revolved again around the FLD method. A core tenet of FLD is that community researchers conduct conversations within their own communities without recording devices, note-taking, or signed consent. As he explained:

…the whole idea of the FLD method is that they have no papers in their hands. They don’t have recording devices…They sit down, they have coffee, drink tea, and have a conversation with people…Except for that consent part, which was eventually accepted…ethics passed it and felt that it was a good methodology… (Interview, 5 May 2025)

Raymond argued that obtaining signed forms would be culturally inappropriate and would introduce suspicion, fundamentally altering the dynamic and integrity of the method. The committee eventually accepted this, trusting the established protocols. In a separate ethics review for another analysis on past FLD work, another significant hurdle surrounded anonymity. This research involved reconvening community partners from past projects with whom he had co-authored books and reports. In this context, anonymity was neither possible nor desired; despite their community roles, they are considered fellow researchers and their expertise and lived experience are the cornerstone of the research. The ethics committee required negotiation on this point, but ultimately accepted that for certain participant-researchers, named recognition was a matter of respect and accurate representation, not a risk to be mitigated.

When Javier used the word “smooth” to describe my ethics review in an early manuscript version, I had to chuckle. I certainly hadn’t thought it was smooth at the time when I was preparing it with my supervisors who were notably worried about it passing through. However, after listening to his story, I didn’t intend to push back on his adjective choice. Quite in contrast to my own experience (although acknowledging we each applied for ethics approval at different universities), what Javier refers to as his “intense” ethical review process turned out to be the most challenging part of his PhD journey to date. First, he was advised not to engage with his intended online communities prior to receiving ethics approval to avoid any perception of premature data collection, hindering his ability to build relationships by prioritizing institutional process over relational considerations. Then, his intention to reflexively engage with his participants not only as a researcher, but as a person with lived experience, became a bottleneck to approval. As part of his methodological orientation to participatory research, his plans to embed his own experiences within the online platform sharing mental health challenges and antidepressant use with other members provoked considerable debate. Javier was required to describe in detail what he planned to share with participants in advance. This proved impossible, as the online conversations had not yet occurred and were intended to unfold through natural, dialogical engagement. The committee highlighted the risk Javier posed by speaking outside of his defined role as the researcher, to which he responded that this constraint would prevent him from speaking freely in the very spaces he had planned to engage in as a participant himself. This element of the review process significantly delayed his project by seven months, leading him to make the pragmatic decision to “dial down” the participatory level of his research and instead adopt a more detached, observational role within the online dialogues to avoid further amendments. Now, as he conducts his online fieldwork, he continues to follow the ethical protocol outlined in his final approval. However, he notes that it has been a major constraint on his research and has fundamentally shifted his original participatory intentions to do research with those he is studying to the more traditional form of researching about them instead. In a subsequent conversation about this issue, we agreed that, in retrospect, we would have approached our ethics reviews differently following these further years of experience in both academia and the practice of our unfolding research projects. Javier reflected that he would have secured collaboration and involvement with the online communities from the start and been more assertive with the ethics committee reviewer, who he felt was not familiar with his ethnographic and participatory approaches. I, on the other hand, noted that I might have taken an approach more focused on the ethics of mutual care and the agency involved in recognizing participant-researchers as partners. Feeling that my co-researchers had lost recognition and their own voices through anonymization, I would have sought further guidance on the implications of anonymity within this research paradigm.

The Tyranny of the Timeline: Relational Time Versus Academic Time

A fundamental and perhaps irreconcilable tension in our work lies in the clash of temporalities. Although some institutions may provide adjustments for PhDs involving participatory and action-oriented research, ours do not. As recipients of full-time doctoral scholarships, we are limited to three-and-a-half years of funding, with a maximum allowance of four years to complete our PhDs, a full-time institutional limit that applies regardless of whether a student is funded or self-funded. As Raymond points out, his research operates on what might be called relational time, a slow, iterative, and open-ended process dictated by the rhythms of community trust, collective action, and the organic unfolding of conflict transformation. Our PhDs, in contrast, are governed by academic time, a rigid, linear, and accelerated schedule of ethics approvals, milestone reviews, and final submission deadlines. This temporal mismatch is not a minor logistical hurdle but a constant source of ethical and methodological pressure. Raymond’s entire project is predicated on deep, pre-existing relationships built over a decade. This long history is what made his research possible, allowing him to bypass the tall challenge of trust-building within the three-and-a-half-year window. He is acutely aware that his ability to even attempt this work is a privilege of his prior life as a practitioner, a luxury not afforded to those entering the field anew. Yet, even with this head start, our university timelines exert a powerful, often distorting, force. As Raymond starkly put it: “...if communities want to change things and do things differently…I'm going to do it. I'm going to have to do it…So time just becomes the crucial issue” (Interview, 5 May 2025). Yet, in our joint PhD structure, the doctoral timeline offers no such flexibility. A sudden shift in research direction or a need to extend the process to honor community priorities could be catastrophic within the fixed terms of our scholarship limits and degree program. This pressure creates the fear that the university timeline and time-sensitive scholarship funding will ultimately force the research to serve the degree, rather than the degree serving the research and the community. Raymond’s work, therefore, exists in a state of perpetual negotiation between these two clocks. He must constantly measure the slow, meaningful progress of relationship-building against the relentless tick of the academic countdown, a tension that defines the very possibility of doing action research within the confines of a PhD.

I really appreciated how Javier framed my dilemma as one between “relational time” and “academic time.” From the moment he first drafted this tension in our evolving manuscript, I have drawn on that language in conversations with my university, in research presentations, and when speaking more broadly about my PhD. Javier waited seven months to gain ethics approval, preventing him from engaging with his communities until quite late. Unlike myself, who could build on longstanding relationships, he had to start from scratch by entering online communities, identifying himself as a researcher, and persuading people to engage with his study. Javier envisions sharing his writing with the communities he interviewed, seeking their interpretations and feedback. Yet he is acutely aware that there may be little time before the PhD clock runs out. With several drafts to complete, followed by supervisors’ reviews, revisions, and preparation for final submission, it is understandable why he doubts the feasibility of such engagement within the timeframe. While his participants will have the opportunity to read his work, particularly those who expressed this wish in their consent, their role in shaping it beyond the narratives they contributed may be far more limited than Javier’s initial aspiration for a co-created account of online realities.

Discussion: Living Participatory and Action-Oriented Principles as Tools in Process and Practice

Our experiences are reflected in our methodology and demonstrate how participatory and action-oriented research principles themselves can become tools for navigating and challenging the contradictions within a PhD. Practices such as critical friendship, withness-thinking, relational accountability, peer communing, and responsive duoethnography did not simply inform our methodology; they became forms of sustenance and resistance that allowed us to keep working, reflecting, and acting on when institutional norms pulled against our values. Approaching our doctoral journeys in this way positions participatory and action-oriented research not only as a set of ideals to which we aspire, but as a living repertoire that could be drawn upon in moments of blockage, compromise, and fatigue. As such, our own orientations offer us practical responses within the messiness of our choice to conduct this kind of research within the academy: sometimes enabling us to toe the line, sometimes pushing us to reimagine participation, and sometimes offering little more than the assurance that we are not alone. What follows is an exploration of these principles as enacted tools, illustrating how they have helped us persist within, and occasionally shift, the research cultures in which we are situated.

Critical Friendship as Sustenance

Throughout our PhD journeys and our methodological choice to make meaning together, critical friendship (Hari & Nardon, 2025; Stenhouse, 1975; Stump & Gannon, 2022) has served as an everyday tool for reflection and growth. Our exchanges, through recorded dialogue, correspondence, and informal conversations, created a space where we could articulate the pressures of timelines, the frustrations of ethics review, or the limitations of sole authorship—and have those experiences mirrored back through the lens of another who understood them intimately. In later correspondence, Javier recognized that the ongoing dialogue had done something immediate in his own work:

I had a supervision meeting today about my methodology chapter, and I realized how helpful our conversations have been for my PhD process. I wrote a first draft without realizing how much of it tried to simplify and “sanitize” the unavoidable messiness of my journey, a sanitization that my advisors actually warned me against. Although it wasn't my intention at all, I had positioned myself as an outsider to my own research methods, portraying the methodology as something already finished, one that didn't reflect the struggles, negotiations, and victories along the way (Correspondence, 25 September 2025).

This process has not only provided comfort and accompaniment, but has supported us in our journeys, pushing us to think critically within the messiness of participatory and action-oriented research while clarifying our own values as we conduct this work within the confines of the institutional PhD. In this sense, critical friendship has become a practical enactment of our own research principles, allowing us to test out ideas, reframe setbacks, and experiment with ways to preserve the ethos of participation within structures not always designed to fully embrace it. In coming together to inquire into these tensions and ultimately carry out this co-reflexive study, we have generated a space of shared meaning-making and a chance to challenge ourselves within our critical friendship.

Thinking “With” as Responsiveness in the Moment

Shotter’s (2005, 2006) withness-thinking has offered another way of working through the contradictions of institutional demands and participatory commitments. For us, it has meant cultivating a capacity to respond in the moment, to remain open to what emerges in dialogue with others rather than relying only on pre-determined plans. Withness-thinking reflects this very process and the formation of this article, engaging in duoethnographic inquiry and co-authoring a manuscript in the middle of our doctoral research. We decided to think with each other, with others involved in our research, within the context, and respond to it as it unfolded. This orientation has also supported us when rigid structures threatened to close down possibilities. For example, when ethics protocols demanded specificity about interactions that had not yet occurred, or it was advised to separate the PhD project from co-produced inquiry with partners, we imagined how relational responsiveness could still be practiced within constrained parameters. We improvised as things unfolded. Javier took to meme-making workshops with participants while Raymond adapted co-authoring with his partners. Sometimes this has meant adjusting our research encounters in ways that do not fully match our original intentions but that still challenge traditional journeys of the PhD in both our institutions. Other times it has entailed reimagining how co-production can look like beyond the constraints of PhD outputs and prescribed ownership. Withness-thinking, then, has been a driver, reminding us that our research is always unfolding and contingent, and that responsiveness is itself a practice of resistance within systems that reward closure, certainty, and individualism.

Relational Accountability, Participation, and Honoring Our Partners

Relational accountability was not simply a principle we cited but is a lived commitment that shapes how we are navigating our PhDs and challenging their conditions. It requires us to remain attentive to the relationships at the heart of our projects, even when academic pressures have pulled us toward efficiency or output. In practice, this has often meant prioritizing the time and care needed to build and sustain trust with the communities we engage with, even if it might slow down our progress within our university timelines. Participation, in this sense, could not be reduced to a methodological technique of our chosen research approach. It was a relational orientation that required us to be answerable not only to supervisors and future thesis examiners, but also to those whose knowledge and lives are entwined with our research. Upholding relational accountability has often involved subtle negotiations with institutional structures. At times, this meant defending decisions that privileged community priorities over neat academic milestones, just as Klocker (2012) argued to include child participants in her own PAR approach when challenged during ethics review. At other times, this meant absorbing the strain of carrying dual responsibilities to both academy and community, mirroring other PhD candidates who adapted participation in their doctoral projects to align more closely with institutional expectations (Armstrong et al., 2012; Southby, 2017). Through it all, we have aimed to honor all our partners, from community participants and external organizations to those within the institution, particularly our supportive supervision teams. This demands reciprocity, responsiveness, and a willingness to situate ourselves ethically within the complexity of plural and intersecting relationships.

Communing and Peer Support From Within the Academy

Our duoethnography did not unfold in isolation. Alongside our critical friendship and co-writing, we sought solidarity in broader networks of peers who were similarly invested in participatory and action-oriented approaches. One example was our collaboration with colleagues at both Monash and Warwick to develop a conference proposal directly addressing the challenges of undertaking participatory and action-oriented research within the academy. Although the proposal was not selected, the process itself was generative. It gave us a space to articulate shared struggles and recognize ourselves as part of a wider culture of researchers working with similar commitments inside rigid systems. As Guerrero and Dobson (2024) emphasize the importance of peer support through “communing” (Sisson et al., 2022) within the academic community, our collective efforts to “commune” and raise this conversation within the university system is but one example. Yet this dialogue must take place as much within the academy as in community and practice if efforts to transform university culture are to be taken seriously.

Taking Action Through Our Duoethnographic Practice and Reviewer Challenge

Our act of writing together was itself a form of action within our PhD context. Following the initial submission of this manuscript, our peer reviewers invited us to step back, reflect on what we had written, and consider how we might act within our institutions to effect change–all while working through a journal that itself operates within these same systems. As Raymond found himself in the mid-candidature review of his PhD at the same time, he decided to take up this challenge and use the milestone to reflect on the article’s findings, asking the panel where he might initiate such a conversation within the university. The response was positive, with offers to present to his wider department and to consider a future workshop as part of graduate student development. At his other institution, after discussing insights from this duoethnographic experience and his desire to engage with participatory and action-oriented methods within his discipline, a professor offered to host an expert workshop to explore how such approaches might respond to recent debates in a key journal beginning to engage with cooperative research. Likewise, in between this manuscript's review and resubmission, Javier found himself unexpectedly involved in an interdisciplinary initiative on participatory research at his primary institution, where he was invited to present at a session on non-extractive approaches in transnational PAR. Inspired by a reviewer’s comment that reframing certain aspects of the manuscript could “signal a shift from what might be perceived as a ‘complaint’ to taking institutional action,” he used the opportunity to raise the particular challenges and opportunities of undertaking such research within a PhD, drawing on his own experience. The response was not only enthusiastic but quickly became a central topic of discussion among participants, from early-career researchers to more established scholars, who shared their own challenges of navigating academic infrastructures while working with participatory methodologies, particularly around ethics applications and funding.

These actions to engage our institutions in responsive ways demonstrate that awareness and advocacy can emerge through everyday openings of academic life, at different levels of disciplinary and organizational interaction. While our actions may appear modest, the movement from duoethnography to situated response, strengthened by a more empirically grounded articulation of our PhD experiences and prompted by anonymous review, illustrates how change can be pursued within institutional constraints. For doctoral researchers in particular, this suggests that action need not only take the form of sweeping reform, but can emerge through responsive engagement within the cracks and contingencies of academic structures and routine activities at institutions where PhDs are conducted.