The ‘third space’: innovative participant-researcher configurations in co-creative, participatory research practices from a feminine perspective financed by VLIR

The challenges of female participants living in violent neighborhoods and female researchers working in challenging circumstances where they can potentially be exposed to violence or harassment have turned our gaze towards rethinking the spaces we navigate in when we conduct participatory research in communities. In community-based projects we visit the communities when and where possible and we leave them again when conditions are suboptimal or to engage with collected data.  Consequently, we separate the academic space from the community space, often defined as ‘the setting’. 

When active in the field, we create a window between both types of spaces for researchers to travel from one zone to the other at certain moments in time. We spent time in communities to gain trust. Not seldom, the risk of being exposed as ‘the one with HIV’, or ‘the one that got an abortus’ etc. lies with the participant that engages with us. This may unintentionally lead to further stigmatization of the participants once the topic of interest of the researcher is identified by community members. Females are more affected by such stigmatization due to their lower status in many of the communities. In this project we wish to experiment with what we label as the creation of ‘a third space’. In this project, this third space is both the medium through which we will learn to understand a problem like non-compliance with therapy ánd the goal of the project.