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Contribution short abstract

I carried out my fieldwork in a context of structural violence and participation fatigue. Therefore, I adapted my data generation methods to avoid replicating extractive dynamics that fail to generate meaningful outcomes for participants who have suffered historical marginalisation.

Contribution long abstract

I found a fieldwork context marked by participation fatigue, in which people had been consulted numerous times and seen nothing meaningful happen as a result. The residents of Chaparral, my fieldwork site in rural Colombia, shifted from interacting with the state primarily through the National Army to experiencing extensive intervention by social and political actors. Following the signing of the Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP guerrilla army, the communities in Chaparral regularly encountered civil servants from different government agencies, academics, NGOs, civil society organisations and cooperation agencies in their territories. During the interventions organised by these actors, people spent time and money that could have been invested in their families and work, yet nothing changed significantly.

In this context, applying my originally planned participatory methods risked reproducing extractive dynamics. Therefore, I moved promptly to the participatory action research (PAR) stage of my research process and relied more on participant observation and in-depth interviews to obtain richer details of the participants' experiences and knowledge, without requiring them to engage in lengthy research processes from scratch. During the PAR phase, I facilitated a workshop where we collectively designed a community project on food security and reducing the environmental impact of chemical fertilisers. The group drafted a project proposing home gardens and greenhouses to protect crops during harsh winters, and the production of organic fertilisers from food waste and harvest residues. In this presentation, I will explore how I adapted my pre-fieldwork plans to the context of Chaparral.