Who are the Experts? Co-Research with workers and communities

Please join us for a Masterclass on Co-researching methods with workers and communities with Dario Azzellini, Autonomous University of Zacatecas, Mexico. The masterclass will be held on the 11th of June between 3.00 to 5.00 pm in PP1, in Mile End Campus, Queen Mary University of London.

Co-research, action research, participatory research and several more terms refer to research in which the researcher engages supposedly with some kind of collective knowledge production. But what is what, and what makes sense for whom? How can they be intertwined with methods as observation and fieldnotes, oral history, interviews (individual and focus group), and visual methods? Furthermore, there are several issues that I would like to consider and we as researchers should hold as constant questions throughout all of our work and discussions. These issues are those of class, “race,” gender relations, power, position, subjectivity and ethics. Methods are inherently relational and, as such, they are produced through and embedded in hierarchies of class, race, gender, ethnicity and nationality that should be reflexively addressed, though they can never be “resolved.” These hierarchies will produce tensions, and how you deal with those tensions will define your work. I will be giving insights from my experience with participatory research.

Dario Azzellini is Political scientist, sociologist, author, and filmmaker at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas (Zacatecas, Mexico). He lived in different Latin American countries and is now based in the USA, Mexico and Berlin. His studies focus on labour, social movements, self-management, sustainability and just transition and global political economy. He has conducted research into social transformation processes for more than 30 years with a special focus on Latin America and Europe. He has published 11 films, and more than 20 books and 100 journal articles and book chapters, many of which have been translated into various languages. He authored Communes and Workers’ Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below (Brill 2017), co-authored Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work: When Workers Take Over(forthcoming), and co-edited the Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work (2023). More information is available on his personal website at: www.azzellini.net.