Overview

Starting from a reflection about the epistemological and biopolitical value of collaborative research practices, this workshop proposes to collectively discuss the use of ways of knowing drawn from experience in the production of knowledge in the areas of biographical research in the social sciences and in psychology.

We propose to invite the questions, interests and difficulties that the participants in the workshop present in dealing with their experiences as researchers and participants in their own research paths, such as: what is the place of experience in their strategies of production of knowledge? What ethical and/or epistemological effects does the knowledge drawn from experience impose to their work? What are the theoretical and practical challenges that they face in their concrete practices in considering experience as part of their academic production?

Such collective discussion will be itself guided by group managing strategies deriving from two collaborative methodologies, the biographical workshops and the cartography approach. That is, the workshop will be conducted in accordance with the theoretical-practical assumptions of the methodologies with which the respective moderators work and which are both based on the gathering of concrete experiences in the sharing of the production of knowledge.

Throughout the discussion and according to the needs of the group, the theoretical assumptions and practical aspects of each of these methodologies will be presented, illustrated with concrete examples of research conducted by the moderators – in the case of the biographical workshops, based on research with migrant participants, and, in that of the cartography, on a participative research-intervention in the area of mental health.

The biographical workshops are a collaborative work instrument, based on the voluntary participation of subjects available to share their biographical experiences about pre-established themes and in group. They are a method inspired in the formative developments of biographical research, namely the francophone school dedicated to the lifelong training of adults (Pineau, 1986; Josso 1991), and, more recently, in the hermeneutical philosophy of Richard Kearney (2015), based on the narrative exchange between subjects that accept sharing their life experiences with regard to specific themes (war, religious, cultural conflicts etc.). The cartography, in turn, is based on the proposals of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1995), according to which knowledge is experimentation and production of subjectivities, and not the representation of given realities. It is a research method that takes into consideration the inseparability between entre knowledge, intervention and care, problematizing the notions of “subject” and “object” (Passos, Kastrup, & Escóssia, 2009; Passos, Kastrup, & Tedesco, 2014).

At the end, we propose a written exercise: a collective narrative of the experience of the production of knowledge undertaken in the workshop. We will try and elaborate a joint document synthesising the knowledge produced by the participants of the workshop about the methodological challenges of the inclusion of ways of knowing drawn from experience in academic production.

This event is organized as part of the Methodologies Cycle "Roda de Saberes". The workshop will be conducted by Elsa Lechner (Researcher, CES) and Letícia Renault (Post-doctoral Researcher, CES).

Contact: rodadesaberes@ces.uc.pt