Setting up the workshops

June 7th, 2023
 

When I began planning my creative workshop at community organisation X, I was keenly aware of stepping into a tightly knit community as an outsider. My conversations with the managers quickly moved beyond the practicalities of dates and room layouts; they became reflective dialogues about trust, responsibility, and the risks of my role as an external researcher.

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One manager stressed, with striking intensity, the importance of feedback. I had always considered feedback important, but the urgency in her voice reframed it for me. She described, almost wearily, the many occasions on which communities had been asked for their time and thoughts, only to be met with silence afterwards. People never heard how their input was used, or even if it was acknowledged. Over time, she explained, this lack of follow-up had worn communities down. What should have been moments of empowerment had instead become sources of frustration and disengagement.

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Her words stayed with me. They resonated with a fear I had carried since the earliest stages of my research: the fear of becoming just another academic who extracts stories and insights, only to disappear without giving anything meaningful back.

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The manager’s reflections helped me to understand engagement fatigue in sharper focus. It wasn’t simply a professional hurdle for me to navigate; it was something that touched the community deeply, creating barriers to trust. I began to wonder whether my own work might, unintentionally, add to this fatigue — or whether I could help to break the cycle. I found myself thinking not just about methods, but about relationships: how would I ensure that participants felt valued, that their contributions did not vanish into the void of academic writing but were recognised, acknowledged, and shared back in ways that mattered to them?

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As our conversation unfolded, it turned naturally to the question of trust — a subject that had been quietly haunting me since I first conceived the workshop. Would community members trust me enough to engage in open and honest conversations about Paisley’s urban spaces? Could they believe that my intentions were genuine, and not another exercise in tokenistic consultation?

The manager’s reassurance came as a profound relief. She told me that they would never have endorsed my project had they doubted my intentions. Her confidence in me felt like a weight lifting. It was not simply permission to proceed — it was a validation of the care and respect I had tried to bring into my approach. That moment reminded me that trust cannot be demanded; it must be offered, reciprocated, and nurtured.

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The managers also expressed their appreciation for my flexibility in scheduling and structuring the workshop. What seemed like small adjustments on my part — changing timings, adapting activities to suit different needs, reshaping the order of sessions — mattered deeply to them. These were not just polite acknowledgements; they were affirmations that I was listening, that I was willing to meet them on their terms.

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Looking back, I see now that this experience was as much about my growth as a researcher as it was about community participation. The workshop was not only a space to gather data but also a mirror, showing me my own assumptions and pushing me to refine them. I learnt that genuine insight rarely emerges from a rigid plan. It surfaces instead in those moments when I loosen my grip, when I accept the unexpected turns introduced by participants.

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Of course, this flexibility comes with unease. Opening yourself to unpredictability means accepting that things may not go as expected, and that can create anxiety. But I have begun to wonder whether “going wrong” is even the right way to frame it. Often, what feels like deviation is in fact a different form of knowledge emerging — one that cannot be captured in tidy schedules or bullet-pointed agendas.

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It is in these moments of adjustment — when participants’ voices redirect the flow, when new questions arise spontaneously, when the workshop becomes more conversation than script — that the research feels most authentic. That is when it stops being simply my project and becomes something shared, something co-created.