Project
Becomings
engage · learn · reimagine · grow
Reimagining recovery narratives following adversity
Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR)
Working with people as co-researchers to explore whose knowledge counts, how power shapes research, and what becomes possible when knowledge is created together.
What Is FPAR?
Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) is a way of approaching research that seeks to create knowledge with people, rather than doing research on them.
In more traditional research, researchers often decide the questions, collect information from participants, analyse what they have been told and decide what the findings mean. Participatory research tries to change this relationship by recognising that people who have lived through an experience hold important knowledge about it too.
The feminist part of FPAR asks us to pay particular attention to power. Who gets to decide what counts as knowledge? Whose voice is heard? Whose experiences have historically been overlooked? It also asks researchers to think critically about their own position and the power they continue to hold within the research.
This does not mean that everyone suddenly has equal power, or that the researcher disappears from the process. Instead, FPAR involves continually noticing, questioning and negotiating these relationships.
In Project Becomings, this meant working with survivors as co-researchers rather than approaching them simply as research participants.
Co-researchers helped shape how recovery was explored, contributed knowledge through conversation and creative practices, reflected on emerging ideas, and influenced how the research was eventually shared with the public.
Why FPAR In Trauma And Recovery Research?
Research about trauma has often been shaped by clinical and professional understandings of what trauma is, what recovery should look like and which kinds of knowledge are considered important. Yet people living with the effects of trauma may understand and experience recovery in ways that do not fit neatly within these established ideas.
FPAR offered a way to begin from lived experience rather than assuming in advance what recovery should mean. Instead of asking survivors to fit their experiences into a predetermined model of recovery, the research created opportunities for co-researchers to question existing ideas, identify what mattered to them and influence the directions the research took.
This was particularly important because trauma can involve experiences of powerlessness, silencing and having decisions made by others.
Research can unintentionally reproduce some of these dynamics when researchers decide what questions matter, how people should respond and what their experiences ultimately mean. A feminist participatory approach does not remove these power differences, but it asks us to notice and continually work with them.
It also allowed different kinds of knowledge to matter.
What someone knows about recovery may come through conversation, but it may also be felt through the body, encountered through relationships, expressed creatively, or become apparent through the process of doing and making. Taking lived experience seriously therefore meant creating research that did not rely only on people's ability to explain their experiences through words.
For Project Becomings, this opened space to ask a different question: rather than only asking “What helps someone recover from trauma?”, the research could also explore how we come to know what recovery is in the first place — and who gets to participate in producing that knowledge.
FPAR In Project Becomings
In Project Becomings, participation meant that co-researchers could influence the research as it developed, rather than simply taking part in activities that had already been decided for them.
Ten adult survivors of childhood trauma took part as co-researchers over the course of the project.
Together, we explored experiences and understandings of recovery through conversations, creative practices, workshops and activities between sessions. The direction was deliberately able to change in response to what was emerging.
For example, the first body-mapping workshop was not simply used to answer a fixed research question. After creating the body maps, we looked together at what was emerging and used a World Café activity to identify themes that co-researchers felt needed further exploration. These conversations helped determine the focus of later workshops.
One of those themes was the inner child. Its importance became noticeable partly because co-researchers talked about it, yet it was largely absent from the body maps they had created. Rather than treating that absence as “no data”, we became curious about it. The group identified the inner child as something that mattered and chose it for deeper exploration in a later workshop using clay and other embodied and playful practices.
Co-researchers also influenced how their experiences and creative work were represented and shared. This extended participation beyond simply providing information: their decisions helped shape what was researched, how the project developed and, ultimately, the public exhibition. As the Project Becomings booklet explains, the intention was to carry out research “with them” rather than “on them.”
FPAR therefore did not operate as a set of steps that were decided at the beginning and then followed. It created space for the research to respond to what co-researchers noticed, questioned and felt mattered as the project unfolded.
Power, Ethics And Researcher Positionality
Working participatively does not mean that power differences disappear. As the researcher, I still held particular responsibilities and forms of power — including responsibility for the research design, ethical processes and ultimately the doctoral research itself. FPAR required me to remain attentive to these differences rather than assuming that calling people ‘co-researchers’ automatically made the research equal.
My own position within the research was also important. I entered Project Becomings not only as an academic researcher, but as someone with lived experience of childhood trauma and recovery. Rather than attempting to position myself as separate or neutral, I recognised that my experiences, assumptions, emotions and relationships inevitably became part of the research encounter.
This sometimes involved researcher self-disclosure — sharing aspects of my own lived experience where this felt relevant to the research relationship. Disclosure was not treated as simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’. It could create connection, reciprocity and opportunities for more mutual forms of vulnerability, but it could also shift boundaries, influence what was shared and create new ethical questions. This meant continually considering why I was disclosing, for whom, and what that disclosure might make possible or constrain.
Ethics therefore extended beyond gaining consent or following an approved procedure. It was something that had to be continually negotiated through relationships: attending to comfort, choice, vulnerability, boundaries and the changing needs of co-researchers as the project unfolded.
Being reflexive meant recognising that I was not outside the research looking in. I was part of the relationships and encounters through which knowledge was being produced. Making that position visible became part of trying to conduct the research with care, accountability and openness about the complexities of doing participatory trauma research.
What Did FPAR Make Possible?
FPAR made it possible for Project Becomings to develop in directions that could not have been fully known in advance. Rather than beginning with a fixed definition of recovery and asking co-researchers to respond to it, the research could change as different experiences, questions and ways of knowing emerged.
This created space for aspects of recovery that were sometimes difficult to recognise through dominant clinical narratives. Bodies, relationships, creativity, vulnerability, play, environments and experiences across time could become part of how recovery was explored and understood. Co-researchers could also question the language and assumptions surrounding recovery itself, rather than being asked to accept an existing definition.
Participation also changed who could contribute to producing knowledge. Lived experience was not treated simply as information to be collected and interpreted by a researcher. Co-researchers helped identify what mattered, shaped subsequent areas of exploration and contributed to how the research and creative work were eventually encountered by others. The project describes this commitment as carrying out research “with them” rather than “on them.”
Importantly, what emerged was not always what had been expected. For example, themes arising through the body maps and collective discussion influenced what was explored next, including the group's decision to investigate the inner child more deeply. The booklet records how this theme was important to co-researchers despite being largely absent from their initial body maps — an absence that itself prompted further exploration.
Perhaps most importantly, FPAR allowed recovery to remain open to questioning. The aim was not to replace one fixed account of recovery with another, but to create conditions in which different knowledges could meet, assumptions could be challenged, and new possibilities for understanding and practising recovery could emerge.
Explore The Research
Project Becomings and its participatory approach are explored in more depth through the doctoral thesis and publications arising from the research.
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