From 25 to 27 June 2025, IFSH is organising an international workshop on the promises and challenges of participatory research in an age of multiple, complex, and interconnected crises in the conctext of its “Doing Peace!” program, a multi-annual research program in which IFSH researchers experimented with participatory and practice-oriented methods in peace and security research.
Faced with multiple crises and increasing social and political complexity, proposals to rethink and redesign the relationship between science and society are gaining ground. Participatory and transdisciplinary research, action research, citizen science, and real-world labs emphasize new forms of collaboration between researchers and citizens or practitioners. Practicing engagement “all the way down,” companionship, and “co-laboration” with societal and political stakeholders, these approaches aim to do research with people rather than about them. This new paradigm has been met with enthusiasm for its innovative way of interacting with society. But it also raises questions about research ethics, access to and exploitation of local knowledge as well as power and inequalities in co-creative processes of knowledge production. This holds all the truer for the study of crisis responses in fields such as security policy, peacebuilding, climate adaptation, and humanitarian governance that are marked by high power imbalances between involved actors and stakeholders.
The workshop will focus on three broadly defined thematic areas
Uncertain futures and temporalities of the polycrisis
Spatialities of peace and conflict
Technologies and practices of security
The workshop aims to provide an environment for creative and thought-provoking interdisciplinary debates on the benefits and challenges of participatory research.
Participation / Call for Paper
If you are interested in participating in the workshop, please find a full Call for Papers here. Travel and accommodation will be covered for workshop participants.
Please submit an abstract of 250 words by Friday, 21 February 2025, to doingpeace2025@ifsh.de.
Workshop organisers
Holger Niemann (niemann@ifsh.de)
Delf Rothe (rothe@ifsh.de)
Ursula Schröder (schroeder@ifsh.de)