Mind the gap: Thinking through a participatory action research project in Eastern Uganda

Abstract

This article originates from a sense of dissatisfaction with the outcomes of a participatory action research project we undertook in Eastern Uganda, concerned with land and water access. We are proud of the research: its design, the process we engaged in, our conduct, the relationships we formed, and our endeavour to engender meaningful change. And yet we are left wondering what the project actually achieved. To better understand this dissatisfaction, we review the literature that constitutes the context for the project – participatory action research, scholar activism, and decolonising methodologies. We bring this literature into conversation with our own project in order to shed light on the gap between aspirations and outcomes. Our hope is that this critical exploration, and the advice we offer, contributes to a better understanding of the possibilities and limitations of both participatory research and of Westernised research in the Global South.

Introduction

Scholar activists and decolonial thinkers have for decades been attempting to reshape the contours of Western research practice. Recent years have seen these efforts experience a degree of popularity. For example, the more widespread promotion of participatory and arts-based approaches in the social sciences and the rise of a university-wide decolonising discourse that necessarily has a bearing on research methodologies. On one hand, such moves signal that change is afoot. On the other, more radical and alternative practices are being subsumed and repurposed by a neoliberal higher education system for its own ends. That is, liberatory discourses and practices now form part of a stock from which often well-meaning researchers draw. While the promise is a change to the status quo, the result may instead be the re-instantiation of unequal and unjust power dynamics associated with the systems and traditions in which these researchers are working.

Between these two points – change and reproduction – lies the space where the majority of attempts to practice research differently unfolds. For many, the question is likely to which end of this spectrum do their efforts most readily contribute?

In this article, we engage critically with a 2-year participatory action research (PAR) project we undertook in Eastern Uganda, concerned with land and water access. At the time, all three of us were early career academics working for universities in Uganda and the United Kingdom. It should be noted that we are proud of the research: its design, the process, our conduct, the relationships we formed, and our endeavour to engender meaningful change. And yet we are left with a sense of dissatisfaction, wondering what the project actually achieved. To better understand this gap between aspirations and outcomes, we return to the literature that constituted its context. We then bring this literature into conversation with our project in an attempt to glean the sources of our dissatisfaction.

Our intention is to stir debate by foregrounding dynamics typical of much participatory research and of Westernised research in the Global South. By attending to these dynamics, which run across personal, epistemological, and structural registers, we conclude the article by offering advice to those who, like us, attempt to use participatory research to challenge unjust systems and practices.

The Politics of Believing project

The methodology we discuss in this article forms part of a 2-year PAR project called The Politics of Believing (hereon the ‘PoB project’). It was awarded as part of an early-career researcher fellowship programme at the University of Sheffield, funded by the United Kingdom’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). The GCRF was a 1.5-billion pound 5-year public funding programme between 2016 and 2021, partnered with the seven UK Research Councils. The UK Research and Innovation website describes the goal of GCRF as supporting ‘cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries’.

The PoB project had an operating budget of 30,000 pounds, while the GCRF covered the salary and related costs of the lead author at the University of Sheffield. The salaries of the two co-authors were being paid by their institution, Makerere University, with the PoB project covering the time for one co-author (Lillian) to plan and deliver the storytelling workshops. The lead author was assigned full time to the PoB project but also designed and taught on modules in the University of Sheffield’s Geography Department. The two co-authors balanced their involvement on the project with their roles as assistant lecturers at Makerere University. The project itself was concerned with the challenges and injustices rural communities in Eastern Uganda face in accessing land and water. While this was the general remit, the specific entry point was the role played by different knowledges and worldview beliefs in shaping the social arrangements that mediate access to land and water. That is, the ways in which people’s understandings and beliefs about the world inform and legitimise relevant social practices, relations, and institutions.

Not only did the PoB project seek to understand land and water dynamics but it also aimed to take a position against injustices different community members faced in relation to them. In this sense, we rejected any notion of researcher neutrality or objectivity. Instead, we aimed to work with project participants to identify, communicate, and challenge land and water injustices. The approach taken was multidimensional, combining social science research, participatory and people-centred approaches, arts-based methods, and the use of digital technology (outlined below). In order to investigate the relationships between different knowledges, social practices, and land and water governance, the PoB project employed a theory called institutional bricolage (Cleaver, 2012).

The people

The PoB project was people-centred and valued working with a select number of participants and their communities for the duration of the research. It aimed to establish meaningful and trusting relationships with these participants, as well as between members of the research team. In this section, we provide a brief overview of who the different people involved were.

We start with the four project communities, with two located in each of Budaka and Mbale districts, Eastern Uganda. Despite their relative proximity, the communities differ from one another in distinct ways. Key differences relate to geography, for example, a hilly area versus a lowland location adjacent to wetlands. To culture and language, which includes speakers of Lugwere, Lumasaba, and Luganda. To religion, where various so-called ‘traditional’ religions are practised alongside different denominations of monotheistic religions (mainly Christianity and Islam). And to economic activities, where subsistence and small-scale commercial agriculture is the mainstay of most people’s livelihoods, although other activities such as local trade and brickmaking are practised. Women and children are responsible for collecting water for different domestic uses from sources that include handpumps, spring wells, rivers, and wetlands.

The PoB research team comprised five people – a lead researcher, two co-researchers, and two field assistants. The lead researcher was an early career academic who had been awarded the project funding as part of a post-doc research fellowship scheme being offered by the University of Sheffield. He is a white man who was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in several countries before moving to the United Kingdom as a teenager. His relationship to Uganda is through his experience as a post-doctoral researcher on a previous project on rural water supply. The first co-researcher was an early career academic and an Assistant Lecturer at Makerere University. She is from Eastern Uganda and her research focuses on agriculture, natural resources, climate change, and gender. The second co-researcher was an early career academic and Assistant Lecturer in Applied Theatre at Makerere University. She is from South Western Uganda, with experience in community-based participatory research using theatre and other creative and participant-led approaches. At different points in time, the PoB project also employed two local field assistants who played an important role in supporting the development of the research, including acting as translators and liaising with research participants.

The phases

The project methodology consisted of a collective planning and design stage followed by three phases intended to generate learning about land and water social dynamics in Eastern Uganda, while building relationships, learning from and communicating the lived experiences of community members, and shining a light on related injustices. Here, we briefly detail the project phases and salient features of the research process.

It is worth noting that a large portion of the project overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic. This naturally became a central structuring determinant to the way in which it proceeded. It is also worth noting that all participants were compensated for their involvement either with monthly stipends (community diary keepers and storytellers), in kind (community participants involved in other participatory research activities, who on each occasion received packs containing seeds, soap, salt, sugar, and snacks), and with per diems and a lunch (participants of the planning and design workshop and interface workshops).

Collective planning

The planning and design stage of the project engaged with two land and water justice organisations, a number of government representatives, and academics at Makarere University who were relevant to the project’s remit of land and water access in Uganda. This period included one main workshop where the broad project idea and overall approach was presented and discussed. Separate meetings were held with some of those who attended the workshop. While the topic of the project did not change, this engagement process helped to shape its scope and to ground the research questions in the study’s different social contexts.

Phase 1: Participant diary keeping and qualitative methods

The first project phase was 1 year in duration, combining participant diary keeping with a mix of qualitative and participatory social science methods. The intention was to develop a rich spatio-temporal understanding of people’s relationships to land and water in their community, embedding these dynamics within their wider lives and livelihoods. In total, eight diary keepers were employed across the four villages: five women and three men. Diary keepers recorded daily or weekly entries that related to their experiences of owning, managing, accessing, and using land and water. They were also encouraged to write about other events and processes that build up a picture of their day-to-day lives and of life in their community.

Over the course of the year, the research team also carried out a range of qualitative and participatory social science methods with groups and individuals in each of the four villages. This took place at the start of Phase 1 and then every 3 months following this. The methods undertaken during these quarterly visits were interviews and focus groups, seasonal calendars, transect walks, gendered resource mapping, and gendered institutional mapping. In this way, the individual experiences and reflections of the diary keepers were situated within the wider dynamics of their communities.

Phase 2: Participatory arts-based methods and the creation of digital tools

In the next stage, the intention was to include the original project diary keepers as part of small groups from the four study communities. These groups would work with the research team in a series of theatre and storytelling workshops. However, as the COVID-19 restriction on gatherings would not allow for this, it was instead decided to only use the storytelling method and to invite the same eight diary keepers to participate as two groups of four.

The workshops with the diary keepers built on the learning of Phase 1, with participants identifying, creating, and performing a story based on land and water challenges or injustices they had faced. Taken together, the topics decided on by the storytellers were the denial of land rights to women and children (two stories); land boundary conflicts; the consequences of land deterioration caused by overpopulation, overuse, and poor management practices; the socioeconomic consequences of a Government ban on farming in local wetlands; health-related issues and conflict caused by a scarcity of clean water (two stories); and the relationship between variable rainfall patterns and people who practice witchcraft in the village. As later discussed during feedback sessions, this was a transformative process for both participants and researchers, leading to shared forms of understanding, expression, and empathy on difficult issues that are central to people’s lives in Eastern Uganda.

The final stage of Phase 2 involved using video and audio recording to turn performances of the land and water stories into digital learning and elicitation tools that could be used during the interface workshops in Phase 3. The project also employed four professional voice artists to record an English version of the stories as an audio file that could be used for English-speaking audiences (with an international audience in mind and because English is widely understood in the public sphere in Uganda).

Phase 3: Interface events

Phase 3 centred on the concept of the ‘social interface’, which occurs where different and often conflicting lifeworlds or social fields intercept. According to Long (2001), it is at social interfaces that individuals and groups typically articulate their own knowledge systems and worldview beliefs vis-a-vis those holding different understandings and beliefs, and in relation to concrete issues. Social interfaces were therefore posited to be productive sites for the PoB project to develop learning about different knowledges and beliefs of the people that use, manage, and govern land and water in Eastern Uganda. These interfaces were created with the aid of the digital tools developed in Phase 2, based on the eight land and water justice stories.

First, during two interface workshops, staff from district and local government were invited to view and discuss several of the digital stories. Understandings and beliefs regarding the land and water issues in question were elicited in often lively discussions as event attendees sought to elaborate upon and justify their positions on the issues contained in the stories. At the same time, the workshops helped to raise awareness about the challenges of rural Ugandans among participants whose official positions afforded them relative degrees of power.

A second set of interface events was undertaken in four different communities in the two study districts. Here the digital tools (land and water stories) formed the basis of interactive theatre-based techniques involving community groups in performance and discussion. These community performances often developed organically, enrolling others from the audience as extras and extending into more elaborate sets that employed a range of props. The discussions that followed raised sensitive land and water topics that overlapped with issues including unjust gender and family dynamics, government corruption, state violence, and competing explanations for climate, weather, and land events that were undermining the ability for rural communities to live well. At the same time, the format of the theatre-based techniques maintained a degree of separation that allowed for relatively open discussions on difficult topics, while maintaining the general safety of those involved.

Finally, the tools were also used as the basis for a live prime-time radio show on Bugwere FM in Budaka district. The show provided a means for debating and disseminating several of the land and water stories through an ‘expert panel’, a studio audience, and a call-in session for listeners to share their thoughts. At the end of the project, the digital tools were also shared with a land justice organisation in Uganda to support their advocacy work with rural communities. Moreover, one of the stories was aired on a UK radio programme exploring tales of climate change around the world.

An agenda for radical research

The thinking and ethos that underpinned the design of the PoB project took place in university environments where we were exposed to histories of Western research in the Global South and to possibilities for practicing research differently. This included our involvement in reading and study groups that drew attention to the co-constitution of a Western rationalistic knowledge paradigm and the colonial endeavours of European powers, particularly from the Enlightenment period onwards.

Our various engagements with participatory and creative methods constituted part of a growing awareness not just of a critique of this history, but of research practices that even promised to counter it. In this section, we provide an overview of this intellectual environment.

Coloniality and the objects of knowledge

Quijano (2007) has charted the development of rationality, the Enlightenment knowledge paradigm par excellence, to both the rise of European modernity and to European colonialism. In this formulation, what he calls ‘modernity/rationality’ was constituted as ‘part of a power structure that involved European colonial domination over the rest of the world’ (p. 174). That is, rational European science and philosophy emerged in the context of an expansionist and extractivist agenda whereby (mainly the elites of) Western nations set out to conquer large swathes of the globe. This pillaging of overseas territories helped to fuel a process of socioeconomic restructuring in Europe along capitalist and urban lines (Marx, 2013 [1867]).

For Quijano and other decolonial thinkers (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018; Wynter, 2003), the European paradigm of rationality that established itself in this milieu constituted part of a ‘coloniality of knowledge’ that was instrumental in creating an ethno-racial and geographical ordering of the world (see also Césaire, 1950). This ordering was hierarchical, spatial, and, as Massey (1994: 6) discusses, characterised by a set of dualisms containing a ‘privileged signifier in a distinction of the type A/not-A’ (Subject – object, Being – non-being, Rational – irrational, Us – them, West – the rest, and so on). Or, as Nyamnjoh (2004: 164) has characterised this mode of thinking:

The world is perceived and presented as dichotomous: there is the real and the unreal. The real is the rational, the natural, the physical and the scientific; the unreal is the irrational, the supernatural, the religious, the metaphysical and the subjective.

The disciplines that followed in the wake of this knowledge paradigm – not least Geography, Ethnology, Anthropology – operated hand-in-hand with the elaboration of the European colonial project (Lewis, 1973; Livingstone, 1993; Radcliffe, 2022). Thus, a reciprocal relationship emerged whereby Western rationality was both informed by and founded on colonial processes of exploitation and domination.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2018) has expounded on the ‘ontological exiling’ these Western disciplines helped to engender in Africa as part of a colonial apparatus that systematically subjugated, distorted, and erased those ways of knowing and doing that were not of the dominant European cultures (see also De Sousa Santos, 2018; Thiongʼo, 1986). The spaces left by these ‘epistemicides’ allowed for Western rationalism to ‘invade the African mental universe’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018: 885). One mechanism for doing so was Africa’s colonial-era universities. Originating as extensions of elitist metropolitan institutions, these universities set out ‘to recruit the brightest and the best of young men from the colonial classes, to train and prepare them to become a new elite destined to serve the colonial state and govern “the natives”’ (Mama and Barnes, 2007: 2). This process was not homogeneous, with pockets of critical and radical scholarship existing in postcolonial African universities in different times and places (Daley, 2023). However, as Asante (2020) has argued, in general terms this was – and is – an intellectual landscape where theories, philosophies, and attitudes about research and knowledge in Africa are dominated by a ‘Pan European Academy’.

While Rodney (1972) recognised as central to these colonial education systems the promotion of a ‘capitalist individualism’, Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2021) highlights how after independence they became part of the process for embedding African societies in the ‘European game’. During the Cold War, this process was complemented by an increasing turn towards positivistic and a-political research agendas, pushed through by international finance institutions in an environment of economic austerity (Daley and Murrey, 2022). Nyamnjoh (2004: 173) has argued that education and research have therefore continued to play a pivotal role in the articulation of Euro-centric forms of knowledge in Africa – it has ‘tended to be an exercise in self-evacuation and the devaluation of all that took pre-colonial generations wisdom, cultural creativity, and sweat to edify’.

The neoliberal present

What has been inherited from a colonial past is today filtered through the prism of the neoliberal university, with its elite image of the ‘world class’ institution. In countries around the world, a market logic has taken hold of university systems (Burawoy, 2016; Busch, 2017; Mamdani, 2007). This logic substitutes utility for those things that have traditionally been associated with learning and education (Kumar and Acharya, 2021; Schrum, 2019). It is a logic that instrumentalises the functioning of the university, rendering students as clients and degrees as capital for leverage on an open job market (Mavelli, 2014). New metrics and systems of reporting, accounting, and assessment are forced onto academics by a class of middle management – with a general trend to put the cart before the horse.

Mbembe (2016: 39) suggests that, in the neoliberal present, the very idea of what ‘the university’ is might have shifted. That it may be ‘an entirely different apparatus’ with ‘an entirely different rationality’. He points out that:

Today, global markets are in many ways shaping university reforms worldwide. Contemporary changes in higher education are based on the deepening of functional linkages between higher education and knowledge capitalism at a time when capitalism has become thoroughly transnational and ruling classes worldwide have become partially denationalized . . . in an economy that is knowledge based, innovation based.

General trends can be observed in this situation. On the side of academic staff the neoliberalisation of universities worldwide has engendered both growing precarity and workloads, leading to burnout and poor mental health (Loveday, 2018; Maisuria and Helmes, 2020). On the side of students, the result is often a high debt burden and an unhealthy concern with grades and assessment (Loveday, 2018; Maisuria and Helmes, 2020; Rustin, 2016). Such trends, however, mask geographies of difference. For example, Daley (2023: 5) notes that ‘while Western universities experienced a form of creeping neoliberalisation, in many African universities its impact was immediate and blunt’. Moreover, the transnational character of knowledge capitalism and the emergence of a ‘global knowledge economy’ does not detract from the fact that the centre remains Europe and North America (Kostrykina et al., 2018).

A growing literature discusses market and market-like changes to universities – economisation, marketisation, financialisation – as ‘academic capitalism’ (Jessop, 2018; Slaughter and Leslie, 1997; Slaughter and Rhoades, 2004). These changes have had significant impacts on the nature and conditions of academic research (Kenny, 2017; Loveday, 2018). This is particularly so for early career researchers, where the university’s aim to reduce long-term labour costs and increase the flexibility of their workforce has resulted in the burgeoning of short-term, fixed-term, and hourly work contracts and the serialisation of post-doc research positions that offers little job security (Gill, 2010; McKay and Monk, 2017; Raynor, 2019).

With this shift has come the need for early career researchers to act like entrepreneurs, working long hours to build and promote their own brand while securing funding and demonstrating ‘impact’ at an early stage (Sang et al., 2015; Tekeste, 2025). Moreover, research under academic capitalism now takes place through the logic of ‘projectification’, which emphasises short timeframes, pre-set milestones and deliverables, and a clearly delineated internal hierarchy (Dollinger, 2020; Nästesjö, 2025). Ylijoki (2016: 11) argues that this ‘fast and flexible project format is a perfect match with the need to conduct solution-focused, one-off research in transitory interdisciplinary teams with competitive external funding’.

Taken together, the mores and strictures of the neoliberal university, the ever-present pressures to publish and compete for research funding, and the short timeframes and itinerance of research projects all combine to assert the power of the dominant academic system over everyday research practice (Bhambra et al., 2018).

PAR as resistance and transformation

It is in this context of the marketisation and globalisation of higher education, and a history of European colonialism, that development geography research now takes place. As detailed in section ‘The Politics of Believing project,’ our project in Eastern Uganda sought to employ participatory arts-based action research in combination with a suite of qualitative social science methods. With PAR as the general thrust of the approach, its remit and ethos were also influenced by contemporary discussions on scholar-activism and decolonising research methodologies. To this extent, we had in mind a research design that challenges the historical trends of Westernised research as outlined above. Later in this article we interrogate this ambition. Here, we review the literature that constituted the context for our project.

PAR itself is a term that includes a great diversity of practices, contexts, methods, and influences (Kindon et al., 2007; Reason and Bradbury, 2008). What tends to unite this diversity is a broad commitment among practitioners of PAR to counter the well-known tendencies for research to be extractive, for it to fail to be properly relevant to the people positioned as its objects, and for it to fail to be steered in its aims and ambitions by those people (Fals-Borda, 1987; McIntyre, 2007). Many authors also address these points as part of their theses for decolonising methodologies. Not least Smith (2012: 3) who, reflecting on her formative experiences in New Zealand of research with indigenous communities, writes about ‘its absolute worthlessness to us, the Indigenous world, and its absolute usefulness to those who yielded it as an instrument’.

Indeed, the apparent crossovers between PAR and decolonising methodologies have led some to argue that the former is a vehicle well suited to decolonial aims (Caxaj, 2015; Lenette, 2022; Omodan and Dastile, 2023). However, participation alone certainly does not guarantee decolonising outcomes (Fredericks and Adams, 2011). Chevalier and Buckles (2019: 3) underline this point when they warn of ‘how risky it is to make generalizations about PAR and the importance of qualifying a description of an approach with details on a particular body of knowledge, set of issues and specific cultures’. Moreover, long-standing critiques highlight how participatory approaches can be co-opted by elites, reproduce researcher authority under the guise of participation, or place burdens on resource-scarce communities with little tangible benefit (Arnstein, 1969; Cooke and Kothari, 2001; Stirrat, 1997).

Despite these critiques, PAR remains a collaborative endeavour grounded in participation and relationship building. These relationships are shaped by shared principles concerning conduct, problem definition, expectations, roles, and pathways to change (Chevalier and Buckles, 2019; Kindon et al., 2007; Pain et al., n.d.). This change is typically pursued through iterative cycles of planning, action, and reflection, with each cycle informing subsequent ones. As Walter (n.d.: 4) notes, PAR is inherently self-evaluative, requiring continual adjustment of both research problems and practices.

Geographers have contributed to PAR by foregrounding its spatial, relational, and political dimensions. Participation is always situated within specific places shaped by histories of colonialism, marginalisation, and injustice, rendering the knowledge produced through PAR inherently place-based (Kesby, 2000; Pain and Kindon, 2007; Sanderson and Newport, 2007). At the same time, PAR operates across multiple spaces, opening new arenas for political engagement (Mason, 2015; Pain et al., 2007). Post-structural and feminist geographers have drawn attention to the power-laden nature of these spaces (Kesby, 2005; Pain, 2004; Valentine, 2007), emphasising that PAR itself constitutes a form of governing power that delineates possibilities for action (Kesby et al., 2007). While this carries risk – such as the reassertion of researcher authority – it also highlights the productive potential of power to enable change and transformation (Askins, 2018; Caretta and Riaño, 2016).

Post-structural feminist geographers also emphasise the instability of subject positions within PAR spaces. Drawing on thinkers such as Butler and Foucault, they reject the notion of pre-existing, unified subjects, instead understanding subjectivities as produced through discourse, spatial relations, institutions, and research practices (Gannon and Davies, 2005). Participation thus becomes a site where subjects are made and remade, applying to researchers and participants alike (Cameron and Gibson, 2005; Gibson, 2024). This challenges earlier emancipatory assumptions within PAR that participation can simply reveal authentic voices and ‘give voice’ to others (Cahill, 2007). At the same time, feminist scholarship foregrounds embodiment, affect, and emotion, recognising that participation is shaped by the relationships between bodies (e.g. as gendered, racialised, and classed), as well as by vulnerability and lived experience (Askins, 2014; Chesnay, 2016; Robertson, 2017).

Geographers also highlight the scalar dimensions of PAR, moving beyond an exclusive focus on the local scale as the privileged site of authentic knowledge (Pain et al., 2007). Scales are instead understood as produced and contested through multi-scalar relations, shaping both knowledge production and social action (Mason, 2015; Shaw et al., 2024). This perspective strengthens PAR’s capacity to link grounded participation with broader structural critique and transformative action (Kindon et al., 2024). Over time, collaborative PAR processes may extend into longer-term alliances and networks oriented towards social change (Aguiar et al., 2023; Cornish et al., 2023; Rahman, 2008), constituting forms of multi-scalar movement building that require sustained trust, time, and labour (De Wit et al., 2021; Duncan et al., 2021; Porada et al., 2024).

This shift towards research with people, rather than on or for them, represents a break from positivist and empiricist traditions (Jacobs, 2018; Swantz, 2008) and is central to decolonising methodologies. Decolonial geographers argue for recalibrating knowledge production processes in part through a reckoning with whose knowledge counts, how different knowledge systems are engaged, and to what ends research is conducted (Naylor and Jazeel, 2025; Radcliffe, 2017; Radcliffe and Radhuber, 2020). Yet Keane et al. (2017: 12) identify a paradox in Indigenous knowledge research that critiques Western hegemony while often judging itself by Western epistemic standards.

PAR seeks to address this tension by shifting allegiance from universities towards communities, though such shifts are inevitably partial. PAR researchers and scholar activists must therefore navigate the tensions of a dual allegiance, representing often widely diverging demands and expectations (Chevalier and Buckles, 2019; Derickson and Routledge, 2015). From a decolonising methodologies perspective, the dual allegiance of university and community also poses a serious challenge to the potential to realise substantive moves towards its ends (Chilisa, 2020).

Alongside the valorisation of experiential and plural knowledges, much PAR research stresses the importance of the different skills and capacities held by those involved in the research process. More established PAR approaches emphasise dialogue and the exchange of skills rather than idealised notions of ‘authentic’ community knowledge (Cornish et al., 2023). A PAR approach entails the coming together of people with different skills, capacities, and experiences to address a question or problem. Key though is that this problem is relevant to the people or community in question, not least because they have been fundamentally involved in its conception, just as they remain involved in all stages of the research process (Fals-Borda, 1987; Hall et al., 1982).

For decolonial writers, as for feminist and queer geographers, difficult questions still remain regarding researcher positionality and purpose. In her seminal book Decolonising Methodologies, Smith’s main contention is not for examining research methods per se. Rather, the concern is with such issues as why a certain piece of research is being conducted in the first place, why a given research question is appropriate, and why it is appropriate for a particular researcher to ask it. This is a position supported by Zavala (2013: 57), who argues that ‘where the research grows from and who funds it matters as much as if not more than the kinds of research methods’ (emphasis original).

The point here is that just by their very involvement, even well-intentioned scholar activists and PAR practitioners have the potential to re-instantiate historical power dynamics characteristic of much Westernised research. When undertaking research on memories of the 1948 Nakba (Catastrophe) in the Palestinian refugee camps and communities of Damascus, Al-Hardan (2014), drawing on Haraway’s (1997) concept of diffraction, critiques reflexivity as insufficient for troubling researcher power. Instead, knowledge generated by research emerges as diffraction patterns emanating from, while simultaneously elucidating, a ‘history of interaction, interference, reinforcement, difference’ (Haraway, 1997: 273). Based on this re-reframing, Al-Hardan (2014: 66) argues that:

Our ‘truth’ claims can therefore be thought of as a diffraction pattern of the coloniality of power/knowledge, in other words, as diffracted through the conditions in which our research unfolds. These conditions are a central part of these claims and these claims are partial and always located in historical and political realities.

Barad (2007) further develops the concept of diffraction through their theory of agential realism, arguing that research is an ‘ethico-onto-epistemological’ practice in which matter and meaning are entangled. Knowledge, subjects, and objects do not pre-exist research encounters but emerge as the material and discursive intra-act and are diffracted through our research practices. These practices are therefore ‘socio-material enactments that contribute to, and are part of, the phenomena we describe’ (Barad, 2007: 26).

Moreover, research encounters entangle with a wider research apparatus, which includes the institutional environment (Barad, 2007; Fox and Alldred, 2023). It is within the research apparatus that agential ‘cuts’ take place: particular practices, approaches, decisions, and interventions that shape or give rise to realities, rather than simply representing them (Barad, 2014). These cuts are moments of differentiation within ongoing entanglements, temporarily making determinate what counts as object, as data or evidence, as knower, as resource, as nature, and so forth. Agential cuts are therefore never neutral, underscoring the inherently ethical dimension of research practice (the ‘ethico’ of Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology) (Barad, 2007; Barla, 2023).

We can see, then, how a diffractive framing brings together the literature on PAR reviewed in this section, especially as it relates to the contributions of geographers. This includes the attention given to the productive power of practices, to the mutability of subjectivities, to the ethical dimension of research, and to the importance of examining material and discursive entanglements as they relate to questions of space, place, and scale.

Participation. Research. Action?

In this section, we bring the literature reviewed in section ‘An agenda for radical research’ into conversation with our experiences on the PoB project (section ‘The Politics of Believing project’) to better understand the reasons underlying our discontent. We structure the discussion around four categories derived from this literature: (1) entanglements, (2) reciprocity and autonomy, (3) knowledge politics, and (4) diffraction patterns. It is worth noting that these categories are distinct but not discreet. They form threads that weave together through the remainder of the article.

Entanglements

Here we explore the entanglements that occurred within and across the spaces and places of the PoB project. To begin with, the importance geographers give to the scalar dimension of PAR implores us to consider how the apparently local spaces of the project entangled with a wider research apparatus. It was within this apparatus that the researchers were trained and educated, where the project was conceived, where norms and standards for conducting research are institutionalised, where rules and timeframes are set, and where incentives exist for how and why to conduct research. So, what were key features of this apparatus? To answer this question, we briefly outline the broader funding and academic institutional environment.

The PoB project was funded by the UK Government’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) and administered by the Institute for Global Sustainable Development (IGSD) at the University of Sheffield. Regarding the University of Sheffield, its website speaks of being a ‘world-leading university’ with a ‘global reputation’, creating impact in part by ‘collaborating with household-name multinationals’ and ‘bringing innovative research to the market’. At the same time, Sheffield University’s IGSD positions itself as an ‘international centre of excellence’. The claims, then, are of global excellence, relevance, and reach. Of course, this positioning is not specific to the University of Sheffield. Rather, as discussed in section ‘An agenda for radical research’, it bears the hallmarks of a higher education system that has become marketized and globalised. Or, recalling Mbembe’s (2016: 39) words, that ‘the university is being re-founded and is being rescaled with the purpose of better turning it into a springboard for global markets’.

In Uganda the PoB project partnered with Makerere University, where two of the authors were working at the time. Makerere is widely regarded as one of Africa’s most prestigious universities and has been labelled the ‘Harvard of Africa’. Mamdani (2007) documents how neoliberal reforms in the 1990s and early 2000s introduced marketisation and a pursuit of global excellence at the expense of local relevance, mirroring trends in UK higher education. These reforms built on Makerere’s longer history as a colonial institution, established as a technical school in 1922 under British rule. Like many African universities, Makerere closely models European institutions in its culture, epistemology, curricula, and use of the English language. As Badat (2023: 12) argues, such universities are often associated ‘with reproducing the colonial and neo-colonial social order . . . rather than contributing to equitable and democratic societies’. ¹

In the case of the GCRF, which funded the PoB project, its raison d’être concerns this idea of a ‘global challenge’. The epistemological implications of this are important. Thinking in terms of global challenges promotes, even demands, a form of solution-oriented knowledge production analogous to a Western medical model of diagnose-and-cure. While challenges clearly exist everywhere, key questions remain: who defines these challenges, who is tasked with addressing them, and how? Equally important are the limits of diagnosis – what structural critiques and knowledge claims are permitted? As Noxolo (2017: 343) argues, the GCRF promotes a ‘colonialist approach . . . that views knowledge as something to be extracted and applied’, prioritising measurable ‘impact’ while calling into question its willingness to listen to and learn from indigenous worldviews and experiences.

Taken from this perspective, despite its grounding in a PAR approach the PoB project sits within an institutional and funding environment that on the face of it goes against more liberatory, radical, and decolonising forms of research. However, our Baradian framing alerts us to the fact that this wider environment entangles with and is diffracted through the spaces of the PoB project. These processes are highly relational and contingent on the project’s research practices, participants, and ‘local’ discursive-material context.

In project spaces, key differences concerned the identities of researchers and participants. Here the critiques of post-structuralist feminist geographers alert us to the spatiality of identity and social power, and against any static or essentialist reading. For example, the lead researcher’s identity as a white, Western, male academic, an English speaker, and project lead, did not simply shape the outcomes of the research, as much writing on reflexivity suggests (Barla, 2023). Instead, his identity was either reinforced or reconstituted through ongoing intra-actions with participatory methods, Ugandan academic colleagues, research participants, and community and government interface events. In certain spaces (e.g. with government officials or academic elites) the lead researcher’s whiteness and Western academic authority were amplified. In other participatory spaces, these same traits were often partially destabilised, giving way to other subject positions.

For the two co-researchers, their subjectivities likewise shifted in different spaces and times. This was a complex dynamic relating to their positionings as both insiders (e.g. Ugandans with gendered experiences of land and water) and outsiders (e.g. with their affiliations to Makarere University and to the big city environment of Kampala). For the research participants, instead of being ‘community members’ with fixed identities, the entanglements of the PoB project revealed how different aspects of peoples’ identities were reinforced or reformed as they interfered with one other. For example, gendered identities (wives, mothers, husbands, fathers) interfered with leadership roles (village chairperson, religious leader), claims to land and water, and willingness to speak publicly. Ethnic identities (Bagisu, Bagwere, Baganda) also surfaced unevenly, sometimes foregrounded in land histories, sometimes backgrounded in favour of shared agrarian struggles.

These shifting subjectivities were themselves part of the wider array of material-discursive and social conditions that intra-acted as they were diffracted through the project’s research practices. Participant diary keeping, for example, engendered ongoing intra-actions that, instead of reflecting a singular reality, entangled everyday land and water practices with forms of reflection, emotion, and imagination. Data collection and analysis became blurred, as were subject positions such as researcher and researched. Likewise with the participatory mapping and storytelling approaches, which saw gender, land tenure, water access and authority entangle and emerge together. This gave rise to artefacts such as maps, testimonies, and digital stories which themselves had productive effects in other spaces. For example, in the interface events with government officials and rural communities, technology, voice, authority and accountability intertwined. Officials were positioned as listeners, not just decision-makers, while the community theatre methods based on the land and water stories allowed participants to inhabit and interrogate multiple subject positions.

As noted already, however, these ‘local’ participatory spaces in Eastern Uganda were never outside the global institutional apparatus. Rather, they were intra-actively produced through it. The diaries, maps, stories and performances thus became sites where global academic regimes intra-acted with local land–water relations and participatory research processes, producing not only new subjectivities and possibilities, but also tensions. Rather than viewing this as a failure of PAR ideals, a diffractive reading suggests staying with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) of these entanglements. It foregrounds responsibility: not to purify participation from global power relations, but to make visible how participation is always already shaped by them.

Reciprocity and autonomy

The PoB project placed a good deal of emphasis on building trusting reciprocal relationships with the research participants and their wider communities. Participants were encouraged to engage critically with one another through the use of participatory and creative methods that foregrounded their situations, experiences, languages, and ways of knowing the world. Through the approach outlined in section ‘The Politics of Believing project,’ the project fostered solidarity and understanding within and between the groups of research participants as well as with the members of the research team. Moreover, while the PoB project was concerned with land and water issues, it did not specify at the outset what these would be. That is, the participants on the project decided what issues were most important and what stories to tell about them.

However, while reciprocity and autonomy were values promoted by the PoB project, there were clearly limits to this. In no small part, this followed from our training in the wider research apparatus and the way that the expectations and demands of this apparatus shaped the conception and development of our project. For example, the GCRF Fund, as with other funding bodies in the UK, placed a strong emphasis on ‘research excellence’. The sense is that striving for excellence requires an ability to demonstrate theoretical and methodological sophistication at the funding application stage. This helps to explain why the research questions and design of the PoB project had largely been decided upon prior to engaging with the project communities – imposing an orientation, a theoretical stance, and mode of relating that shaped the spaces of our research encounters.

The PoB project was therefore not in keeping with the PAR ideal of research participant involvement in all stages of the research process, from its conception and design through to the use of the knowledge it generates. Although not conforming to this ideal, it was nonetheless clear that the objectives of the project were highly relevant to the communities we worked with. That land and water are the cornerstones of lives and livelihoods borders on a truism, and no more so than in rural Uganda.

So, how likely would it have been for the PoB project to gain funding and institutional support for a significantly more open-ended and community-embedded approach to developing and doing research? Here again it is instructive to return to the broader research and funding environment. It appears reasonably clear that this environment limits the forms of open-endedness and substantive engagement through which communities come to shape, or even define, the research. Returning to Noxolo’s (2017: 343) critique of the GCRF, she notes that ‘the mindset behind the fund is disturbingly colonialist’. This includes a trend in UK Government discourse away even from the notion of ‘partnership working’ in overseas research (which Noxolo, 2006 has also critiqued) and towards a situation where the UK is the one ‘“driving” global development initiatives and “tackling” challenges’ (Noxolo, 2017: 343).

Moreover, this same research environment often undermines the forms of continuity needed to realise the ideal of self-determination for the participants involved in research. Time and resources are scarce in a context where ‘value for money’ and demonstrable ‘impact’ are demanded within set timeframes, funding cycles, and Western university and funder standards. This typically prevents the forms of relational work needed to navigate considerable asymmetries in power or to meaningfully account for ontological and epistemological differences among those involved in the research. ²

The increasing neoliberalisation of higher education only serves to accentuate the constraints on self-determination. Of the many difficulties this brings, one well demonstrated by the PoB project is job precarity and the effects this has on the continuity needed for meaningful PAR research. For example, at the end of the PoB project the lead researcher, now with 6 years of post-doctoral experience and ostensibly ‘achieving’ in the UK university system, became unemployed and entered into many months of demoralising job applications and interviews. With extreme competition for places, often between candidates from all parts of the world, opportunities are sought that may be quite different from previous research experience. In this case, such a trend is evidenced by that fact that the lead researcher now works in France, not the United Kingdom, and is undertaking research in northeast Brazil, not eastern Uganda – a situation far removed from the geographical, social, and institutional dynamics of the PoB project.

Yet it is a story typical of the itinerance of Western academic research. It suggests a form of ‘challenge hopping’ whereby researchers in Western institutions skip across places and people in the course of making their careers. Where, however, does it leave the participants and communities of the PoB project? What of the forms of social engagement and change that the project had begun to realise? The so-called ‘impact’.

Knowledge politics

Radcliffe (2017) has argued that Geography must ‘engage with “southern” knowledges in ways that challenge [it’s] colonial legacies under a broader responsibility to making knowledge differently’. This is a position that chimes with the stance of many who undertake PAR research in the Global South. It is one that rests upon ‘unlearning and re-imagining how we construct, produce, and value knowledge’ (Thambinathan and Kinsella, 2021: 4). Here we consider to what extent this imperative was achieved on the PoB project, and discuss some of the implications and underlying dynamics.

The PoB project foregrounded the beliefs and knowledge of the research participants. The methodology was designed so that the dairy-keepers-cum-storytellers would decide the topics that they felt were most relevant and the appropriate ways of expressing them. Moreover, during the interface workshops (see section ‘The Politics of Believing project’), the PoB project sought to understand how different knowledges and beliefs were drawn upon in the process of the participants in the workshops justifying their position on land and water issues. What came out of this concern with epistemological openness was a realisation of the interpenetration of the numinous, the social, and the material in the lives and experiences of the communities involved in the research. A world more enchanted than the one permitted by the binaries of Western rationalistic thought (Nyamnjoh, 2004) and related forms of research. Social practices, land and water availability and access, environmental change, and its causes were diffracted through the actions of God, ancestors, spirits, and magical practices.

The PoB project retained a critical understanding of the role of these knowledges and beliefs in shaping social dynamics and, by extension, questions of land and water access. This included examining ways that the invisible realm entwined with and upheld the everyday social order. How, for example, beliefs about the supernatural world shaped the gendered, generational, and other relational dynamics that see women burdened with the tasks of working the land and collecting water. To this extent, then, the knowledge and beliefs held by the participants did not fundamentally challenge the design or approach taken by the research team. Rather, they were incorporated into an existing theoretical framework. That is, this knowledge remained the object of the research rather than a means of transforming it, of constituting it. This would appear to go against both the PAR and decolonising imperatives that shaped our initial aspirations for the research.

It is worth thinking through this predicament a little further. We discuss two points. First, the question of appropriateness. As already discussed, the PoB project had an explicit social justice orientation. To understand the workings of the rules, norms, and practices that govern access to land and water, it employed a theory called institutional bricolage. This theory has been developed in no small part through research undertaken in several African countries, including Uganda (Cleaver et al., 2021). At the same time, it is essentially a Western theory that sits within a Western knowledge tradition. Without going into detail on the theory and its evolution (see Cleaver, 2012; Cleaver and De Koning, 2015; Hall et al., 2014), we argue that it has the potential to add something useful to an understanding of the power relations that animate the land and water dynamics in question. That is, this theory has a degree of appropriateness that justifies its use in the context of the PoB project. Of course, others may disagree. Indeed, we note how a theory developed by Western academics and tested in African contexts accords with critique of the divisions of intellectual labour between Africa and the West, as highlighted in section ‘An agenda for radical research’ (see also Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018).

The second point we raise here concerns the forms of knowledge that, according to the methodology employed by the PoB project, appeared to be salient aspects of the land and water governance dynamics being researched. In particular, we note that religious knowledge and beliefs were central to people’s understandings of events and processes, while also shaping social relations and practices. These religious beliefs appeared to be syncretic. That is, monotheistic religions, denominations of Christianity and Islam in particular, combined with other rationalities, including what has been labelled by some as ‘African Traditional Religion’. Moreover, we often witnessed disagreements between project participants, and community members more generally, as to the truth or validity of each other’s claims and accounts. That is, there was no single or agreed-upon version of reality that all members of a community adhered to when it came to understanding the land- and water-related phenomena in question. In fact, there appeared to be a diversity of these. Differences in ontological claims were subject to scrutiny by others, and sometimes, as was witnessed in the diaries, to self-reflection and questioning of one’s own understanding of things.

Our epistemological openness led us over difficult ground. Rather than revealing entirely different ‘worlds’, as accounts of the ontological turn would have us imagine (Palecek, 2022), we were confronted with something both different and yet familiar. That is, the lives and lifeworlds of the community members involved in the research were unique and yet, in different ways, resonated with each of us. Moreover, exactly how each of us, researchers and participants alike, make sense of the world appeared to also be characterised by both commonality and difference.

Diffraction patterns

In the final part of the discussion, we return to the concept of diffraction. Earlier, we considered the spaces and places of our research project, the wider research apparatus, and the ‘differential entanglements’ (Barad, 2007: 281) that occurred as the discursive and material intra-acted and were diffracted through our research practices. Barad (2007) argues for how these practices matter – how ‘the world is materialized differently through different practices’ (p. 89). Here, then, we look at diffraction patterns that were created by our practices on the PoB project. We do so by considering three areas: shifting subjectivities, knowledge generation, and meaningful change.

As we have discussed above, initial encounters on the PoB project revealed many differences within and between the research team and participants. This followed not only from our radically different material conditions and socioeconomic statuses but by structural forms of authority attached to science, whiteness, gender, the English language, and to the imaginary of the West in the context of Uganda’s colonial history. From this perspective, diffraction patterns emanating from the PoB project would likely resonate with Al-Hardan’s elaboration of the workings of the coloniality of power/knowledge (section ‘An agenda for radical research’). And indeed, as researchers ‘structurally positioned within the academies of the former/current imperialist powers and their allies’ (Al-Hardan, 2014: p. 61), at the end of the project, we remain ‘globally mobile knowledge producers’ much more than we are ‘community-based activists’.

In this vein, although the subjectivity of the lead researcher did oscillate within and across different project spaces, in the main their role as project ‘head’ and institutional representative of a Western university endured – it was hard to shake off. So, while in certain spaces the lead researcher was able to take up positions of ‘witness’ and ‘listener’ with respect to the land and water injustices explored on the project, he often remained both an authoritative and a relatively awkward presence in the room.

However, it was precisely the coloniality of power/knowledge that we, as researchers aware of this dynamic, were seeking to mitigate. Although this ambition appeared hardest to realise for the lead researcher, for the two co-researchers, and for the project team as it came to be regarded as a whole, our participatory and creative methods did see a re-working of more traditional researcher-researched subject positions. This shift was most clearly realised during the storytelling workshops and related live performances. During this time, the development and sharing of stories based on particular land and water challenges brought participants and researchers into new forms of relationship. With a strong emotional and emotive dimension, the process helped to foster solidarity and trust among those involved, opening up nascent subject positions as ‘co-researchers’ and ‘co-conspirators’ in the struggle against these challenges. However, these new subjectivities were fragile and felt contingent on the spaces in which they were emerging.

With respect to knowledge generation, the overall design of the PoB project was itself diffracted through a research apparatus that included the imperatives and incentives of the wider academic and funding environment. The PAR ambitions of the project entangled with expectations of delivery, impact and international credibility, diffracting participatory practices through reporting requirements, fixed timeframes, and pre-defined outputs. Thus, alongside our endeavour to undertake a PAR project, we felt compelled to ensure that the research generated rich knowledge on community land and water dynamics that accorded with our ideas of academic excellence.

We have already discussed how this aspiration led to deciding well in advance on particular research questions, a recognised body of theory, and a set research methodology, without the input of research participants. While this can rightfully be questioned from a PAR perspective, an outcome of the research design we draw attention to here is the huge amount of data that were generated. In particular, a central component of the first of the project’s two allotted years was participant diary keeping. This aspect of the project resulted in reams of information, and required much energy and coordination to achieve.

In and of itself the participant diary keeping method was not a ‘failure’. Indeed, it went very well and produced many fascinating insights and understandings – not only on land and water issues but of life for the diary keepers and their communities more generally. The diary keeping stage was also important for developing relationships with research participants that served as a foundation for the storytelling workshops to come. Yet the reality of the situation is that a majority of the data generated by diary keeping remain under-analysed and hardly used. At the end of the project, we as early career researchers quickly became swept up in new demands to find employment, to teach under uncertain working conditions, to publish previous writing commitments, and to cope with changes in our personal lives. In short, we were over-extended. Project time in the neoliberal university (see section ‘An agenda for radical research’) has not afforded the scope to meaningfully engage with and publish much of the research data.

Now we reach the sharp end of the stick: PAR that pushes against the broad sweep of history to enact meaningful change in the world. Thambinathan and Kinsella (2021: 6) argue that ‘a transformative praxis involves reflexivity, community-engaged research, reciprocity, and action’. This suggests both the incorporation and culmination of the points raised in this discussion. The PoB project recognised that in Uganda the land and water inequalities and injustices of today cannot be disarticulated from its colonial past and the contemporary workings of capitalism (see, for example, Nakayi, 2018; Wiegratz et al., 2018). It adopted a non-neutral stance, with the intention to work with participants to identify injustices and intervene in the systems and social dynamics giving rise to them. Our impression is that the diffraction patterns left by these activities laid the foundation for longer-term work that promised to engender a degree of practical change.

This is evident in the different interface workshops. Workshops with government staff acted as a springboard for wider engagement, challenging misconceptions and biases raised by the project’s storytellers. At times, they generated constructive conflict among the participants. Community interface workshops, by contrast, opened up topics that were rarely discussed and fostered aspirations for change. For example, one workshop had a powerful impact on participating women, several of whom reported that it enabled them, for the first time, to confront men in their village over harmful gendered practices. They subsequently requested support to establish a women’s group. Following the radio event in Budaka district, the station manager also requested a follow-up programme due to strong listener interest, reflecting the value of raising conversations that rarely enter the public domain.

However, in the context of the lifespan of the PoB project, and with no further funding (or employment, in the case of the lead researcher), the potential to build on this foundation was lost. In section ‘An agenda for radical research’, we highlighted the cyclical nature of PAR research, with iterative processes of problem definition, action, and reflection feeding into each other during the evolution of a programme of research. Clearly, the institutional and funding environment of the PoB project circumscribed this process at what appears to have been a crucial time, undermining substantive longer-term engagement and change.

A key effect of this situation is the difficulty for the communities involved in the research to exercise autonomy and self-determination. The PoB project was granted 2 years in which to develop and deliver a piece of research that ostensibly contributes to addressing a global challenge. With no allotted lead-in time, and a formal severing of relationships on completion of the project, it is nearly impossible to institute and evolve the sorts of social dynamics through which the communities involved in the project could define and lead its agenda. Moreover, there were no provisions for sustaining what had been achieved during the research programme. Such things as newly developed shared understandings of the context and issues, deepening relationships with rural communities, and potential avenues for realising change all came to an abrupt halt when the project ended. Cornish et al. (2023: 10) capture this predicament well when they note that ‘grant funding for one-off projects over a year or two (or even five) is rarely sufficient to create anything sustainable, reasserting precarity and short-termism’.

Conclusion

In this article, we have attempted to understand the reasons for the dissatisfaction we felt with the outcomes of our PAR project on land and water access in Uganda. To do this, we brought the project into conversation with the literature that constituted its context – including literature on PAR, scholar-activism, and decolonising methodologies. It has been an attempt to engage honestly with our research practice, without resorting to navel gazing and without attempting to absolve ourselves from the systems and situations we describe. Up to now, this exercise has helped to make sense of what happened, and what did not, during the PoB project. We conclude by offering advice based on these insights. While this advice is aimed most directly at early career researchers, we imagine it may also be of some use to researchers at other stages of their careers.

First, it is clear that the wider institutional and funding environment played a crucial role in delimiting key components of our PAR process. Not least, it effected a degree of short-termism and researcher itinerance that disrupted the evolving iterations of a typical PAR process. In this environment, the dual allegiance to community and university ultimately saw our allegiance to the latter prevail. As early career researchers operating in a context of job precarity, our commitment in the end was to the next opportunity – be that a research position in France or PhD scholarships in Uganda and the United Kingdom. This being said, the diffraction patterns we attended to in the previous section suggest ways in which we would approach things differently were we to undertake the process again.

To start with, in an attempt to meet our own expectations of the academic excellence demanded by funders and universities, the entire project was geared too much towards methodological sophistication and the generation of data. Instead, we would orient more of the project towards relationship building with specific individuals, groups, and communities, and to a more collective development of the research agenda. For example, in the discussion section, we noted our unease about the use of a theory whose development and application appeared to accord with the critiques of decolonising writers regarding the lopsided divisions of Global North–South intellectual labour. While we nonetheless argued for the appropriateness of this theory, why not put this to the test by using it as a basis to co-theorise (e.g. during theorising retreats) with research partners and participants in Uganda? And while we also argued in the discussion for the appropriateness of our research questions, why not present these to, and develop them with, the communities we worked with? The same goes for the project’s methods.

This more engaged and sustained approach to working with others would have helped to dismantle epistemic hierarchies at the foundational level of the project. It could have been achieved by allocating a good proportion of the time and budget away from the first year of research activities as originally conceived. At the same time, while looking to reduce the volume of data we generated, we would be more strategic about how data that are generated go towards one or two quality journal articles that align with the practical and political commitments of the project. While this level of output would likely suffice to meet funder and university expectations, it also recognises the potential for ‘peer-reviewed science’ to support and legitimise social struggle and direct action (Chatterton et al., 2010). This suggests a need to rethink how the workings of the university might sometimes serve the ambitions of socially engaged research, rather than taking the view that it is always opposed to it.

Our point, then, is that the pressures and expectations of the neoliberal university and wider funding environment are real and must be accounted for. Yet, there is probably more scope than we realised to diffract the language and standards of this apparatus through project practices that do a better job of centring and sustaining engagement with communities, civil society organisations, and academics across different stages of the research process.

It is precisely these relationships that inform the second piece of advice we offer here. In retrospect, our relationships with actors beyond the project communities – particularly civil society organisations – were insufficient. Although we sought to engage two such civil society organisations at the beginning and end of the project, these relationships were not sustained. Greater involvement in day-to-day planning and practice would likely have fostered more substantive partnerships, shaping the research process and creating pathways for future action beyond the presence of the research team. Such temporal and scalar links are especially important given the constraints of project-based research.

Additional mechanisms to sustain action could have included allocating budgetary support to community initiatives that arose from the project, while making more formal their links to relevant government, civil society, and research institutions (e.g. through collaboration agreements). Moreover, physical absence need not preclude ongoing engagement: social media and digital platforms make it feasible to maintain contact and participate in virtual spaces that connect relevant actors, while helping to embed these relations in collective-action networks. For researchers committed to societal change, this represents a relatively straightforward means of maintaining some level of engagement while serving as a bridge to future funding opportunities, should they arise.

Our experiences on the PoB project showed that a PAR approach can shift subject positions away from traditional research hierarchies, creating a basis for meaningful collective action. Although across different spaces some people’s identities shifted more easily than others, the ways in which subjectivities evolved in relation to the project’s participatory methodology highlight a key strength of PAR. In hindsight, we would have paid more explicit attention to subjectivity by embedding reflexivity into everyday research practice, for example, through routine reflexive journaling and by recording interactions across project spaces (who sets agendas, who speaks, who decides). Rather than treating subjectivity as an individual concern, we would frame it as a matter for collective enquiry, making roles and constraints explicit and creating space for collective reflection. Such an approach would help to surface shifting subject positions and power relations during the research process.

Then we come to the remit of our project, which forced us to engage with the calls for embracing the worldviews, knowledges, and beliefs of non-Western people. While in general terms we certainly endorse this position, we caution against the potential for such calls to promote new forms of othering by simplifying and misrepresenting those in question. One serious failing of this can be an inability to appreciate how during a PAR project different forms of knowledge uphold iniquitous power dynamics within a community or social group. In this respect, Cameron and Gibson (2005: 318) point out that ‘local or indigenous knowledges . . . may replicate existing social and economic conditions, while “imported” or “outsider” knowledges (including expert knowledge) may offer new insights that challenge the current order and provide the basis for transformation’.

We conclude by returning to the quandary presented in the ‘Introduction’. The range of insights we have developed in the interim help to explain the sense of dissatisfaction we experienced after our project had ended – the gap between expectations and outcomes. Regarding these expectations, however, we also take heed of Gopal’s (2021: 889) point that research should not be treated ‘as a metaphor for a process of much greater reach and heft’. To transform contemporary injustices, to enact radical change, and to decolonise, these are ambitions that entail large-scale social movements and system-wide struggles. While research and academia have roles to play, our expectations for our praxis should be tempered by the forms it can take and the contributions it can make. To this end, we hope that the dynamics we have explored in this article, and the advice we offer, prove useful.