Introducing the voices of the community

As Williamson argues, promoting and privelleging, “the voice of community [in ways that] are respectful of local or indigenous practices and are culturally safe” (2007 p.2) are crucial components of engaging and collaborating with communities in the research process. Using this as the guiding star for our research project, the academic team decided that we needed to build on the preliminary research planning meeting with the community (see Methodology page). Our purpose throughout has been for the community to participate in the design, implementation and evaluation of the research process.

Community/acadmic partnerships

Knowledge sharing with media production partners

Partnerships between academics and community participants, which seek to understand and share knowledge of inequalities and social injustice whilst promoting community voices have been described in a number of ways. Rural appraisal, participatory rural appraisal, action research, participatory action research, participatory research and feminist practice of action and community research (Lykes and Crosby, 2014) are among the most common descriptors found in the literature. Whatever their label, these types of research partnerships all depend on sensitive communications if they are to be both effective and sustainable.

Interestingly, it has been suggested that the communication processes found in community-based participatory research approaches,e.g. community conversations, are akin to those found in alternative media,  traditional African communication systems and folk media. Further more, it is suggested that these are indigenous to many African communities (Tesfaye, 2013).

The image here depicts a scene from the project in which songs, music and stories play a significant role in involving the community in Participatory Development Communication (Bessette, 2004) and are captured through community media practices.

Achieving our aim

When we started to plan and design this project with the community partners that CM4K was working around early 2019, we agreed the aim should be:

• to use community media tools and practices to co-produce, document and archive survivor stories about modern slavery in Migori County, Kenya (with particular emphasis on early marriage and child labour) in order to build public awareness and influence policy development for change to combat modern slavery.

With this in mind, the content presented in the sub-menus for this page portrays the voices of the community from each stage of the research cycle as findings. These then are the stories from the community – drawing from the wider community networks in and around South Kanyajuok. They are presented  in a range of forms:

• Community converstaions
• Dialogue from the community representatives participating in the research and community media practice training undertaken during the Participatory Learning Workshops (PLWs).
• A range of community stories in varied community media formats. (These are explained on the specific pages).