A note on restitution, narrative intervention and outreach

Over the past twenty years, I have developed with my colleagues what I now name transdisciplinary narrative interventions as a way of working with stories in research. In PREFER, we have mobilised this approach as part of the way we conduct research and engage with the communities involved.

The starting point is quite simple. Narrative methods produces stories. Through interviews, life stories, films, photographs, conversations and other forms of fieldwork, we gather stories about people, places and the changes they are going through. But these stories do not belong only (at all) to the research project. They can also become resources for the people and communities who have shared them with us.

The way we implement this varies from place to place. Sometimes we work with people to produce a film or a song (San Miguel de Sema and Nugatsiaq for instance. Sometimes we produce books of local stories, as we are doing in Tiệm Tôm and Venecia, or work towards an illustrated book about the development of Phú Lễ. We are also exploring children’s books and other forms that can remain in the communities and circulate beyond the research itself.

There is no particular moment at which restitution has to happen. In some cases, something is produced before another stage of research; in others, it comes out of the research process; sometimes it happens after the fieldwork. What matters is that it is part of the relationship, rather than something added at the end because the project has to “give something back”.

This is important to me. Restitution is not transactional. A book, a film or a song is not compensation for someone’s participation in research. The point is rather to create something together, or to return something in a form that can have a life of its own. What this means in terms of respect, empowerment or emancipation is necessarily local. We cannot decide this in advance from the university.

This is also why I consider narrative intervention part of both the method and the ethics of PREFER. The intervention changes what happens during the research, what stories can circulate, and sometimes what questions can subsequently be asked. At the same time, it makes us responsible for what happens to the stories that people have entrusted to us.

There is, finally, another dimension to these restitutions. They are also a way of reaching audiences beyond the communities with whom we work. The stories of Tiệm Tôm or Phú Lễ, for example, can be resources locally while also allowing people elsewhere to discover how a place has changed, what matters to its inhabitants, and what we are learning from working there.

So the things presented in this section have several lives. Some are primarily for local use, some are research outputs, and some are also outreach. Often they are all three. What connects them is the idea that research should not only take stories out of places; it should also create possibilities for stories to travel back into them, and beyond them. Please keep this in mind when visiting this section