Great chapter by @BenGidley about ‘failing better’ when doing participatory research. So much to think about, including Gidley's call for researchers to create “contentious participatory spaces”... https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvfrxs30.12

To attend to who is included and excluded, and to recognise that truth is always partial and representation always incomplete.

From my own perspective of researching with younger children and youths, I am thinking about the “injunction to participate”. My failure to adequately attend to unequal dynamics of power...

And my flawed ways of understanding ‘community’ (including “reaching too quickly for cohesion”) and those who constitute it (including those deemed to be ‘outside’ community and therefore automatically excluded).

As I struggle to do some messy writing about conservatoire-trained musicians working in socially-engaged participatory music-making, I now have three words on a post-it-note: contention, uncertainty and failure.