Conference Agenda

Empowerment is considered a key concept in social and educational sciences for self-determination and social participation (Rappaport, 1981). However, participatory research in particular shows that empowerment is not only an individual practice, but also a deeply political, epistemic, and relational one. This paper analyses pitfalls in empowerment-oriented participatory action research (PAR) processes and shows why empowerment groups can only succeed if researchers themselves engage in reflection on their capacity for action: “disposal over one’s life conditions through participation in the societal life process” (Holzkamp, 1983, p. 241) – as subjects who reflexively work on their own situatedness, privilege and vulnerability.

The empirical starting point is participatory empowerment research groups with educationally disadvantaged girls with a migrant background in vocational schools (PowerMii). The girls often distance themselves from the role addressed, ‘needing to be empowered’. But who would openly admit not leading an autonomous life or call upon academics to empower them in moments of powerlessness? This raises a more fundamental question: Who, if not we as academics, must first find the courage and clarity to empower ourselves—stepping out, in Holzkamp’s sense of action-potency, from societal constraints? As researchers, we must confront our own vulnerability and fear of disciplinary mechanisms if we are to model the very agency and imagination for social change that we implicitly expect from the girls.

Drawing on Empowerment-Research-Groups with migrant girls, this paper identifies three tensions: the reflexive pitfall (researchers’ own need for meta-subjective empowerment), the institutional pitfall (empowerment cannot be delegated to individuals within unchanged school structures), and the narrative pitfall (empowerment requires narratability of structural experiences).

The paper argues that empowerment in ‘dark times’ can only be understood as a dialogical practice in which researchers and young people—especially in the context of migration—jointly create political-narrative spaces that transcend individualized notions of empowerment toward societal change.

The method of dark listening (Motzkau, under review), was developed to explore the permanent crisis in UK child protection practice, evident in troubled listening spots indicating this to be a crisis of listening (Motzkau & Lee 2022). In 2024/25, participants (20 UK social workers) self-recorded audio diaries, reporting day-to-day experiences of listening and being listened to within professional practice. Data excerpts were re-recorded by actors and turned into an audio collage. The collage is played to groups of Social Workers at Listening Workshops using ‘silent disco headphones’, so the group listen simultaneously yet separately. The instructions to those participating are as follows:

“First, the collage is constructed to be immersive; it is an intervention that is meant to suspend and interrupt the way we are used to listen, that is, our cultures of listening; this can allow us to notice and reflect on how we usually listen, and what guides our sense making, and what, as a result, we might not hear. This means, listening to the collage helps us become aware of and examine the cultures of listening we are embedded in; it encourages us to listen to our own listening.

This is what the artist and poet Lavinia Greenlaw, who inspired this new approach, calls ‘dark listening’: listening to what we cannot hear. This happens when we pause to listen to what remains dark within our own listening practices; allowing us to hear the things that we usually edit out, that we have no time or bandwidth for (inevitably). So ‘dark’ does not point to something negative/bad/unpleasant hidden within (as the common association might have it), but it simply points to what is obscured, remains invisible, tuned out, not attended to, because of the way the cultures of listening we are embedded in steer what we can hear, what we feel able to attend to.

Second, the collage presents an audio version of our initial findings/impressions. The collage is a way of sharing these with you, to invite you to participate in further discussion and analysis of the issue of listening in social work, how to transform it, and the way we have researched it so far.”

During the session we will share data from Listening Workshops and discuss the value of the approach as participatory action research.

This presentation examines how theoretical insights can emerge from a critical participatory action research (CPAR) process by drawing on a four-year CPAR process conducted with migrant women in Austria. The project investigates the entanglement of wage labour, care labour, and administrative burden—three domains that participants experience not as separate spheres but as mutually reinforcing pressures.

Building on feminist scholarship on the “second shift” (Hochschild) and recent work on administrative burden (Herd & Moynihan), TRIPLE SHIFT introduces a conceptual reframing that captures the simultaneous, cumulative, and psychosocial dynamics of these overlapping responsibilities. While existing research often isolates specific groups or relies on institutional ethnographies and secondary data, the CPAR process at the center of this project has pushed us to move beyond fragmented approaches and to conceptualize wage labour, care labour, and administrative burdens as intertwined. By working collaboratively with migrant women as community researchers, our project generates situated, intersectionally grounded knowledge about how structural burdens are experienced, navigated, and imagined.

Our paper explores how CPAR generates theory by recapitulating our shared research process that included both research-based and arts-based participatory contact zones. We illustrate how arts-based methods render inner images, emotional textures, and alternative imaginaries visible (and speakable/graspable?) that conventional research designs tend to overlook. By centering participants’ expertise, our talk explores how CPAR can generate theories that are empirically grounded, intersectionally sensitive, and oriented toward social transformation.

Discussion of all three presentations