Centering the geographical imaginations of research participants in narrating speculative futures

Abstract

In this commentary, I consider how geographers narrating speculative futures might risk disempowering their research participants. Reflecting on my work with community cultural organizations, I discuss the importance of centering participants and their geographical imaginations of their own futures in qualitative research projects. I then consider restructuring researcher-participant voice in the narration of speculative futures, and my use of future-focused questioning.

Introduction

As geographers, our writing has the power to narrate compelling possible futures. Regardless of subdiscipline, musing about possible futures is a creative act that brings them into imaginative existence. Geographers often write narratives that describe past circumstances producing the present, highlight the conditions and concerns of the now, and speculate what might come to pass in the possible futures of their subject matter. Here, the task turns to the anticipatory practice of narrating futures that are yet to exist. This speculation is shaped by theories, data, and cannot be unbound from scholars’ geographical imaginations and positionalities (Anderson, 2010; Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021; Oomen et al., 2022). Anderson (2010) calls upon geographers to attend to the materiality of scholarship as an affective medium through which possible futures are made present, and to reflect on the habits of thinking that shape assumptions around the future. In this commentary, I consider not only speculative futures as a cross-disciplinary subgenre explicitly theorizing potential futures, but also the smaller-scale narrations of speculative futures generated as a byproduct of academic research where prognostication is a convention of research translation.

A growing interest in public-facing research mobilization and knowledge translation is seen in recent research and the priorities of granting systems (Arbuckle, 2020). As action-oriented, community-centered research becomes increasingly regarded as best practice in the social sciences (Caniglia et al., 2021; Castleden et al., 2012; Shannon et al., 2021), routine products of such work become more commonplace: policy papers, institutional best practice toolkits, public education projects, and more. These, in addition to more traditional academic outputs like presentations and manuscripts, are where the stories born of research are told. While they may not be painted with the artful brush of speculative fiction or futurisms literature, the products of geographical research nonetheless feature a depth of narration and prognostication that should not go unconsidered. As qualitative researchers highlight the importance of empowering research participants (Kesby, 2007; Ross, 2017), contemplate the hazards of extractive research (Igwe et al., 2022; Kouritzin and Nakagawa, 2018), and encourage deep consideration of researcher positionality (D'Silva et al., 2016; Folkes, 2023; Robinson, 2020), so too should we consider how speculation about the future of the places and communities we study should not be abstracted from participants’ voices. Rather, we can engage in research and communication practices cognizant of narrator power and employ future-facing lines of inquiry to center participant's geographical imaginations of their own futures.

Disempowerment through speculation

Qualitative researchers often save speculation about the future for their third act. After presenting the background and results, we shift to writing the ‘big picture’, the theoretical ponderings, the dire warnings about our collapsing world and what will happen if capitalism, climate change, or current politics go unchecked (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021). Or, we might envision idealistically, presenting the utopias that could come to exist if only we could ‘fix’ the systems that structure the world (Mitchell and Chaudhury, 2020). As researchers, we are often a device through which the voices of our participants are recorded, and as narrators the speaker through which they are played. In this position of power, we are the filter that controls the selected sound bites, volume, and distortion of those voices. Any envisioning of the future is problematic if participant voices are not resonant. To narrate dire futures without sufficient engagement with the positionalities that shape our presumptions risks crafting uncritical or voyeuristic damage-centered research (Tuck, 2009). Efforts to provide importance, emotive weight, or urgency to research findings can stigmatize and strip the knowledge, experiences, hopes, and agency of people at the center of those futures from the narrative (Theriault and Kang, 2021). Even to speculate positively carries risk if disconnected from the people shaping those futures. If we narrate utopian potentials, but remove the contemporary hopes, geographical imaginations, and actions of those who are actively living and creating what will become the futures we envision, our speculation becomes disconnected. This disconnection not only devalues the lived experiences of the individuals with whom we work but also limits the practical value of our speculations for creating beneficial change.

This is not to say that speculative futures are not an important part of a geographer's work, nor am I arguing that researchers need always provide hope in the presentation of their work. However, I wish to highlight a growing body of work that asks us to deeply consider our own positionalities and geographical imaginations as researchers while also decentering ourselves in our work in order to prioritize alternative imaginings of the future that our participants may present (Folkes, 2022; Reyes, 2020). Critical consideration of researcher positionality is the necessary precursor to communicating participant-centered speculative futures. As Mitchell and Chaudhury (2020: 310) open their critique of Eurocentric futurisms, ‘It is often said that the “end of the world” is approaching – but whose world, exactly, is expected to end?’ A growing body of literature calls for a decolonization of the ways we speculate about the future (Dalley, 2018; McEwan, 2021; Mitchell and Chaudhury, 2020). It identifies the need to make room for non-hegemonic perspectives which can offer futures imagined outside colonial geographies and systems of violence and oppression that may be tacitly considered ever-enduring. We can make practical decisions as researchers to create space for broader futures by empowering participant voices in narrating speculative futures.

Empowering participant futures

If narrating speculative futures of the places and communities we work with risks supplanting our own vision – our own geographical imaginary – and eliding that of participants, one solution is to ground our conjecture in the expressions and lived realities of the people and places with which we work. The importance of prioritizing participants’ own visionings of the future became central to my ongoing doctoral research studying the experiences of community cultural organizations in several Canadian cities. I wanted to learn about the operations of these organizations and the challenges they faced as they navigated marginalizing municipal culture and heritage landscapes. As I began to engage with these communities, I was unsurprised by what participants shared with me about their experiences: financial challenges, structural racism, capacity issues, cultural competency barriers, and overwhelming worries about the survival of their collectives. Critically, this is not where my questions or the narrative of these communities ended.

Though the specific shape of the question relied upon our conversation, asking about participants’ hopes, dreams, and visions for the future proved to be the most powerful line of inquiry. What solutions did they see? And what new constructive relationships did they desire? I began to ask: ‘What are your hopes for your community’? ‘You’ve shared these challenges, what do you think might help’? ‘What would it take to make that happen’? ‘If we could pretend the financial/spatial/structural issues weren’t here for a minute, what would you want to create for your community’? ‘What would you like to see 20 years from now’? Though it might initially seem naive to ask participants to set aside the very real, impactful, and often painful limitations of the challenges they articulated, the answers they provided were not quixotic. Often, their answers began with a rearticulation of the challenges that would prevent their goals and desires from being actualized. However, rather than being limited to expressions of impediment, these questions allowed participants to speculate, explore possibility, and infuse the conversation with their visions for the future of their communities.

Knowing how my participants envisioned the future told me a great deal more about how they experienced the present than if I had only asked about their recent challenges. I was struck by the depth of possible solutions participants identified. They ranged from radical systemic shifts in hegemonic power to requesting small changes to municipal funding structures. Though I, as a sole researcher, indeed cannot dismantle the systems of colonial hegemonic power that underlie many of these challenges, by discussing possible solutions and the hopes of my participants I can shape my research translation practices to offer more benefit to the communities in question. Instead of writing a manuscript narrating the at-risk future of these communities and going no further, I can produce research that highlights participants’ own envisionings of their potential futures, not only fraught but also lively and expectant. By prioritizing participants’ speculation about their own futures and asking what they might need to create them, I can better de-center my own conjecture in this work. I can mobilize my research to the municipalities of my study cities through conversations, reports, or toolkits that highlight the expressed needs of participants and which might have contemporaneous benefits for their communities. The narrative of this research thus becomes less a dire prediction of only persistent struggle and collapse, and more hopeful of the many possible futures that both researcher and participant could work towards.

Again, I do not intend to insist that there is always hope or clear solutions when working with communities experiencing struggle. Indeed, if the communities we work with are without hope, or cannot identify solutions, this is significant and should be represented in kind. Rather, I am suggesting that as geographers our research practice can be improved by grounding the futures we predict in-place, in the lived contemporary experiences of those who will create them. By empowering participants to speculate on their own futures, we center their experiences rather than extracting or steamrolling them, opening pathways to actualizing those futures.

Employing future-focused lines of questioning can allow participants to point directly to possible solutions, strategies, actions, and advocacy, that might help their communities produce their desired futures. When engaging in qualitative research that will involve narration of speculative futures, we can ask ourselves:

1. Reflexivity and positionality: What are the personal and collective socio-spatial positionalities that bring you as a researcher to this work? How does this shape your desired outcomes for the project? Who will benefit from those outcomes?

2. Impact: To whom does the labor of your research fall and who is benefitting? Have you provided participants with the opportunity to comment on the outcomes of your research and the potential futures they envision? How responsive and collaborative are your research translation practices?

3. Longevity: What is the timescale of any risk or benefit to the places or people involved in your work? How will any material outcomes be supported financially, operationally, and structurally, into the future and who is benefitting? Where/upon whom is any future burden placed?

More than a simple consideration of positionality or ethics, what I’m advocating for in this commentary is a recognition that we, as researchers, cannot deign to narrate the near or far futures of our participants if we have not first asked them about their own imaginations thereof. There are practical interventions we can use to de-center researcher speculation about the future, and instead prioritize the imagined futures of the people and places we study from their own perspectives. This begins by ensuring that we ask participants how they envision their future. In this, we must also abandon our need for certainty, or a unified vision of the future, and engage with possible futures in the plural to allow space for a multiplicity of speculative futures imagined by participants. In research that narrates experiences of struggle, marginalization, or conflict, we must strive to source solutions or strategies for creating new futures from those inside the experience, rather than supplanting our own. As researchers, it is our responsibility to maintain awareness of our power as narrators and to empower participant voice in our methodologies to learn what futures they envision for themselves.