Constructing narratives of continuity and change - Canterbury Christ ...

Presentation of papers - 2.10pm - 3.40pm
2.10pm to 3.40pm – Room 1
Jo Oliver
Senior Lecturer, Canterbury Christ Church University
What am I creating?
Voices from the inside of third sector working with children, young
people and families
This paper narrates a research journey towards the completion of an auto/
biographical doctoral study about collaborative working in service provision for
children, young people and families. It sets out to explore the interplay of voices
expressing stories of resilience, creativity and responsive resistance, in a climate of
austerity measures that predicate change. The voices belong to people who work
within the so-called ‘third sector’ and the paper explores the stories that ‘connect
the big and intimate pictures’ of contemporary service provision. The research
methodology promotes collaborativity and the dialogical approach created
spaces for reflection and deliberation that is often lacking in the target driven,
outcome focussed, funding starved contexts that my collaborators find themselves
working within. Thus, the function of research interviews as transformative
spaces, influenced by place and relationship as crucial for learning, knowing and
managing change, is reflexively explored in this paper.
As auto/biographical research, the study asserts the voice of the researcher, which
has evolved through the research and is rooted in ‘shackles of silence’ formed
in childhood, thus notions of vocality and silence are interchangeable concepts.
Echoes of the voice of the researcher alongside the voices of research collaborators
are conveyed in this paper, ‘illuminating corners’ (Stainton-Rogers, 2003) and
talking from the inside.
Dr Alison Ekins
Canterbury Christ Church University
‘It’s all about me.....?’ Complex understandings of the positioning of
the researcher within the research process
This research paper examines that complex relationship between the research self
and the research process (Fine, 1994) through two different perspectives.
The first perspective examines completed doctoral research, where the complex
issue of the inter-relationship between researcher and research area and
participants involved was finally resolved in the submission of the thesis.
The other perspective focuses on the tensions experienced in the initial planning
stages of the research process, and how fundamentally the initial decision making
processes relating to methodology and process are linked to deep reflective
questioning of the researcher themselves.
It is in the discussion of the tensions experienced through the research process
relating to the role and positioning of self that the two researchers have reached
understanding of the deep impact of this upon all aspects of the research process:
22 Constructing narratives of continuity and change