Conference Program

Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) represents a methodological approach that is widely established within the fields of Medicine and the Health Sciences (Coughlin et al., 2017), where it has emerged in response to the historical exclusion of minorities and vulnerable groups from public health policies and interventions. This methodological framework is characterised by the collaboration between researchers and communities aimed at building trust, sharing power, fostering co-learning, strengthening community assets and resources, promoting capacity building, and examining and addressing needs identified by the community itself (Israel et al., 2012). Grounded in the active participation of communities in research processes, CBPR seeks to rebalance power relations between researchers and research participants, promoting a more inclusive production of knowledge. Although its use has progressively expanded into other areas of the Social Sciences, the field of education remains one of the most marginal. A broader application in this field could provide an opportunity to deconstruct approaches, methodologies, and methods in order to reconstruct new balances and new research relationships between researchers and the ‘researched’, who in many cases remain constrained by the predominant use of scientific approaches that are insufficiently oriented toward a decolonial perspective on research and on the recognition of communities, citizens, and minority knowledge (Walsh, 2007). Within CBPR, the role of the researcher also shifts, becoming an opportunity to critically engage with one’s own positionality and with the interpretation of power relations (Forster & Forster, 2023), as well as to experiment with decolonial data collection tools and analysis methods.

This paper aims to present the experience of implementing CBPR within an ongoing research project funded by Horizon Europe, focused on the development of a Cultural Literacy Competences Portfolio through the practice of Performing Arts (music, drama, and dance). Four target communities are involved in Serbia, Italy, Germany, and Norway. Children, adolescents, and adults are engaged in a methodological process inspired by CBPR. The research has demonstrated the potential of this method as an opportunity to work through a decolonial perspective, understood as an emancipatory possibility within the research process itself, as it recognises community members as holding equal dignity in the production of knowledge (Gorman & Garnett, 2009), which is co-generated and co-produced. It has also revealed the practical demands that such an approach entails. Among these, the community engagement phase is crucial for its role in the process, yet it also represents a challenge in balancing the project’s limited timeframe. This paper presents reflections on the challenges and opportunities that CBPR offers as a decolonial perspective for research in European projects.