Participatory Research with Museum Practitioners: A reflection on the process

This research explores the process of a Participatory Research (PR) project that brought together university researchers with museum practitioners to create reflective tools that can be used to better understand real practical challenges. This project followed Bourke’s (2009) definition of PR, viewing the process as a collaborative endeavour between researchers and practitioners in all steps of the way including project planning, research design, data collection and analysis, and distribution and application of research findings. In this project, we ran three main workshops with small group meetings in between, which were audio and video recorded and subsequently transcribed. These were then analysed to capture the PR process using James and Shaw’s (2023) Heuristic Framework as our analytical framework while using deductive and inductive techniques. Our analysis focused on understanding the dynamics between researchers and practitioners in this PR project in order to better understand how to conduct PR projects in this context. Our analysis offers a refined model that can be adapted and used with museum practitioners while identifying areas that need further attention in the process of PR. We included an important phase of reflection, and we offer recommendations for those who would like to take a PR approach in their research.