By Raymond Hyma and Javier García Martínez.
2. Javier García Martínez (biography)
What happens when participatory, relational, and action-oriented inquiry meets the institutional architecture of the PhD: tight timelines, individual authorship, and demands for methodological certainty? What does it mean to pursue participatory and action oriented research as a PhD project inside the university system?
We are PhD candidates in a university alliance connecting Australia and the UK, navigating participatory and action-oriented commitments across two institutional contexts. We noticed that much of the literature about participatory doctorates is written retrospectively, once the thesis is submitted and the mess has been tidied into a coherent story. Our contribution is different: we write from the middle, while decisions are still being negotiated, while constraints are still shaping the work, while we are still learning how to stay accountable to participatory values in real time.
So, what are we learning so far?
1) Participatory PhDs intensify identity tensions, and the PhD often insists on a single role.
The institutional category “doctoral researcher” doesn’t fully hold the multiplicity of who we are and who we are becoming.
For Raymond, entering the academy after long-term practice made identities collide (practitioner, academic, funder, colleague), while the PhD structure often required a more singular and legible researcher identity.
For Javier, researching online peer support spaces while also carrying lived experience created another tension: being marked as “researcher” can restrict how one participates, shape trust, and even block access to communities when disclosure changes the relational field.
What we take from this: Participatory doctorates require not only methodological creativity, but ongoing ethical work around who we are allowed to be in relation to the people we hope to research with.
2) “Only one name on the cover” is not a small detail, it structures what co-production can become.
Both of us encountered early warnings about the PhD’s demand for sole authorship.
This constraint shaped our projects differently: Javier was warned early that his dissertation would carry only his name; one supervisor even pointed to a prior “participatory PhD” that fell apart over authorship, making sole authorship feel less like a formality and more like a hard boundary around co-production.
Raymond faced pressure to reclassify a deeply collaborative approach, his action research method Facilitative Listening Design, as merely an “intervention” to be studied rather than the core of knowledge making; he resisted, instead negotiating authorship across multiple outputs so community partners could be named and recognized beyond the thesis.
What we take from this: Workarounds (eg., co-authored outputs beyond the thesis) can support recognition, but they also highlight a hard truth: the PhD remains an individual credential even when the knowledge is collectively made.
3) The most relentless tension may be time: “relational time” versus “academic time.”
Participatory and action-oriented research unfolds through iterative cycles, trust building, and responsiveness to community rhythms, what we call relational time. The PhD, by contrast, runs on academic time: milestone reviews, ethics approvals, and submission deadlines that rarely flex for relational realities. This mismatch shows up everywhere, from delayed ethics approvals that compress fieldwork windows, to the fear that scholarship funding timelines will force the research to serve the degree rather than the degree serving the research.
What we take from this: Staying accountable in participatory and action-oriented doctoral work often means learning to negotiate between two clocks, and naming that negotiation as an ethical, not merely logistical, problem.
4) Ethics review is often where participatory commitments get translated into institutional legibility.
One of the clearest places we felt the clash between participatory and action-oriented logics and institutional expectations was the ethics review process. Ethics procedures often assume a research design that can be specified in advance and managed through standardized protections (eg., scripted interactions, formal consent, anonymity), whereas participatory and dialogic inquiry can require responsiveness to what emerges in real time and recognition of participants as agentic partners.
In Raymond’s case, ethics review was ultimately navigable, but it still required negotiation over what “appropriate” consent and anonymity should look like when participant-researchers are known, named, and invested in being recognized.
In Javier’s case, ethics review became a major bottleneck: he was asked to pre-define what he would share in online dialogic encounters before those relationships and conversations existed, and the process significantly reshaped the participatory character of the project by constraining how he could show up and interact in the field.
What we take from this: Ethics review is not just a procedural hurdle; it is a governance site that can actively shape (and sometimes narrow) what participation can mean in a PhD, especially when inquiry depends on relational responsiveness and co-produced knowledge.
Conclusion
Our reflections are based on a process of duoethnography: a dialogic inquiry grounded in co-reflexive interviewing, months of correspondence, and the practice of co-authoring each other’s narratives. This became a meaningful reflective action in itself: a way of “thinking with” one another, staying close to unfolding realities, and building the kind of critical friendship that participatory work often requires.
What has your experience been in undertaking participatory or action oriented work inside a doctoral program, or supervising it, or reviewing ethics applications for it, or trying to make space for it institutionally? Do you have other reflections to share?
To find out more:
Hyma, R. and García Martínez, J. (2026). Still in the Thick of it: A Duoethnographic Account Navigating and Challenging the Institutional PhD through Participatory and Action‑Oriented Research. Action Research. p: 1-21. (Online – open access) (DOI): https://doi.org/10.1177/14767503261443972.
This i2Insights contribution is a slightly modified version of: Hyma, R. and García-Martínez, J. (2026, May 11). Reimagining the PhD in the Thick of It. Website: Action Research+. (Online): https://actionresearchplus.com/reimagining-the-phd-in-the-thick-of-it-by-raymond-hyma-javier-garcia-martinez/.
Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) Statement: For the original blog post (that this i2Insights contribution is based on), OpenAI ChatGPT (GPT-5.5) and Microsoft M365 Copilot (GPT-5) were used for copy-editing purposes only, including language polishing and improving clarity and phrasing. All outputs were critically reviewed, edited, and verified by the authors, who take full responsibility for the final text. (For i2Insights policy on artificial intelligence please see https://i2insights.org/contributing-to-i2insights/guidelines-for-authors/#artificial-intelligence.)
Biography: Raymond Hyma MA is a joint PhD candidate at the Global Peace and Security Centre at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, in Coventry, United Kingdom. He has a professional background in applied participatory and action-oriented research in peace and conflict contexts. His current research examines how collaborative research can function as both knowledge production and peacebuilding intervention, reconfiguring how people understand, engage with, and transform conflict through inquiry processes involving conflict parties as the researchers themselves.
Biography: Javier García Martínez MA is a joint PhD candidate at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick in Coventry, United Kingdom and the School of Social Sciences at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He has expertise in science and technology studies (STS) and medical anthropology. His research investigates medical technologies, interventions, and infrastructures, focusing on how they shape everyday practices of knowing, valuing, and experiencing health.
Thank you for sharing this thought-provoking piece. As someone nearing the end of a participatory PhD with adults with learning disabilities, so much of it resonated with my own experience. The tensions around relational time, researcher identity, and co-created knowledge sitting within a thesis bearing a single author’s name all felt very familiar.
It also made me reflect on whether participation is more than a methodology… perhaps it is an ethical stance. In my own research, some of the richest knowledge has been co-created through relationships, creativity and communication that extends beyond words.
Thank you for articulating these challenges so well. I’d love to continue the conversation and hear your thoughts on participatory research in contexts where communication is not primarily verbal.
Wonderful insights, Lorena! I agree that participation can be stance over methodology, and forms part of a series of decisions to make when approaching research. I always clarify with my academic colleagues who don’t necessarily engage participatory and action-oriented research that for me, PAR is not a method but rather an approach to research, which will ultimately impact the methods you decide to use. I have done quite a bit of arts-based and multimodal participatory research before starting my PhD, and I found that some of the non-spoken forms of knowledge were the most transformative in the intergroup conflict contexts where I work (check out one of my favourites: https://wpmcambodia.org/project/art-for-peace).
In my current PhD project, one of the most interesting findings has emerged over the last year in a focus group I had with 20 co-researchers from two sides of a polarised conflict where their groups are virtually not communicating any longer. When asking about knowledge and their conceptualisation of what we have co-produced together over the last several years in our collaboration, they highlighted that their ‘friendship’ was in fact the biggest knowledge contribution. They elaborated that in the current conflict, their sustained communication and relationships as they publicly mobilise and disseminate our research is completely countering the narratives in both their countries that they can’t work together or continue to be friends. I feel that symbolic demonstration of knowledge co-production as the knowledge itself is fascinating and still trying to wrap my head around it as I frame my final empirical chapter around it. I’m also nearing the end of my thesis. I can really see that what’s happening outside of the thesis is probably what I’ll be talking about in years to come because the thesis’ end date makes it impossible to capture the possibilities and the potential of this kind of work, and the ongoing knowledge production it contributes hopefully far beyond what began as a collaborative project.
Thanks so much, Lorena, I really appreciated your reflection, and I completely agree with both you and Raymond that participation can be understood less as a method and more as an ethical stance or orientation towards research.
The only thing I would add to the conversation is that this also raises questions about what we assume the “output” of participation should be. In academia, we often default to thinking that collaboration should lead to a research-centred output: a paper, thesis chapter, report, framework, or dissemination activity. But participants or co-researchers may want something else entirely from the collaboration, or may not be especially interested in “research” as such at all.
For me, taking participation seriously means not assuming in advance what the collaboration is for, or what kind of output should matter most. The meaningful outcome might be a relationship, a practical change, a creative artefact, a space for reflection, a sense of being heard, or something that does not translate easily into academic language.
So I think one important challenge is to avoid imposing a research-centric imagination of value onto participants. We often assume that everyone wants to co-produce “knowledge” in the ways academia recognises, when sometimes what people want from the collaboration may sit elsewhere, or may exceed those categories altogether. That is also why I found Raymond’s example of friendship as a knowledge contribution so powerful.
Thanks for sharing. I found similar difficulties during my own doctoral research. In the end, I shifted away from calling it “action research” and just opting for practicing participatory principles and redefining my relationship as one of co-collaborators. I did this due to some institutional gatekeeping that prevented me to talk to young people early on as I was now an “academic”.
To be participatory, I aimed for “peace research by peaceful means”, refining my methods to be embodied and moving away from just words. This is why I developed my own “food-as-method” approach which I’ve discussed in Hungry for Peace (https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-hungry-for-peace.html)
You raise many interesting questions. I look forward to academia contending with its own power relations and how we must deconstruct these existing hierarchies if we are to be relevant.
Thanks, Elaine. I am a big fan of your food-as-method approach! I think your shift to reframe and adapt participation within the PhD is quite similar to Javier’s, and reflects a lot of the literature by PhD students who have completed their degree and reflect back. In the full article, we discuss this as stepping ‘back the participatory continuum’ and being ‘as participatorally as possible’ (Southby, 2017) – a real consideration in the process when all the aspects you mention unfold in institutional and doctoral life. I’ve been quite stubborn in sticking to what I consider a genuine participatory and action-oriented PhD project, with the challenges and possibilities that entails. I was just having a conversation with a colleague in a presentation yesterday sharing my own experience of terminology and framing of this kind of research in academic spaces. I have found (institutionally, conference presentations, within my field [International Relations]) that using language such as participatory methods or co-operative research has generally received better responses than action research or community-based inquiry, for example. I worry, however, when we begin to talk about methodologies involving participation or co-operation as inclusion rather than partnership with action-oriented goals, we risk allowing participation into research processes to become performative or to meet expectations to engage or include communities in research rather than to co-lead or partner in ways that are more equitable than traditional research. I think there is certainly a trend now for participatory methods, for community engagement, for impactful research across academic spaces and institutions, but we need to be aware what happens when we begin including impacted communities or those affected by the topic of study as secondary within academic research, rather than fostering or supporting research initiated or led by such communities or people who might approach or invite us to engage instead. Thanks for the thought provoking comment!
Hi Raymond and Javier,
Thank you so much for sharing your experiences which resonated deeply with me. As a new PhD researcher planning to embark on participatory work within the PhD, these have been really useful pointers to think about and to look out for. The need to run two separate timelines is real and needing to think about overcoming the need to explain the fluidity and emergent qualities of the research design is also very real and necessary for new PGRs (postgraduate researchers) to think about early. This article is especially useful for practitioners or people contemplating embarking on a PhD involving participatory research. It is definitely more consuming than a typical PhD and this is often not recognised. In turn, a participatory PhD researcher would receive less support and find the journey more isolating and arduous than a typical PhD which is already a lonely journey. There is also a difference between PhD researchers embarking on participatory research as part of a larger research project with a team versus a solo-PhD effort.
Thank you for highlighting these challenges so other researchers could be more prepared and supported in their research journeys!
Hi November, thanks for this comment and for sharing your own experience at such an exciting (but surely daunting!) moment of your PhD. I often have said that I don’t know how I could have ever done such a PhD without bringing the already decade-long relationships with me into the project when I began. But I do hear of others who seem to manage developing and building such relationships within the timeframe, with a thesis about it to boot! In regard to your comment about the lonely and isolating aspect, my experience has been a bit different. I often tell people I have the most un-lonely PhD around! I work very closely with 25 other community members in Cambodia and Thailand, see them often, probably communicate with several of them at least once a day, and now share some meaningful friendships in which we can switch from project talk to family or everyday life talk in the same interactions. So in contrast to what I often hear about as the very lonely PhD experience, I might even promote the participatory and action-oriented PhD to counter that if being lonely and isolated is something you want to avoid! But yes, 100%, in terms of time, I think it is so much more consuming than a PhD that doesn’t incorporate participation or community involvement beyond typical fieldwork.
Hi November, thank you so much for this thoughtful comment. Just to add to Raymond’s response, I think the experience can really depend on the community you are joining, the histories already present in that space, and how the relationships unfold over time.
But echoing what Raymond said, I also found that doing this kind of research brought a sense of company and understanding that I had not expected at all. Although participatory PhDs can certainly be demanding and isolating in institutional terms, the relationships that emerged through the fieldwork made the process feel much less lonely in other ways.
Since my fieldwork ended, some participants have continued to reach out with no research-related purpose, but simply to have a chat or check in. I can genuinely say that friendships have been established through the fieldwork, and that has been one of the most meaningful and unexpected parts of the PhD for me.
So while I completely agree that participatory research can be more consuming and less institutionally supported than many other PhD routes, I also think it can create forms of connection, care and mutual understanding that are rarely captured in the formal account of the thesis.