Explanation of the represented challenge of RRI methods

We presented the performance of a ‘game’ designed to help researchers in RRI projects (/RRI researchers) reflect upon their choice of research methods.
The game was inspired by Jean-Paul Vanderlinden’s lecture and the difficulties researchers sometimes face in making the intentions of their research align with the actual (and likely) outcomes of the research process(es).

In the game, we imagined a fashion runway, at the beginning of which the researcher/research team would stand naked before a critical audience, presenting – uncloaked – their true intentions of the research process.
An audience of diverse stakeholders would listen to the presentation of these intentions, upon which they would present their critical views upon/questions about the project based on their own situatedness, priorities, values and/or worldviews.
These critical views/questions could involve anything from the underlying assumptions on which the research rests, the desirability and practical/symbolic value of its outcome and whether or not its applied methods will indeed produce the desired effects.

Projects for which this broader audience is satisfied that the project’s intentions are well reflected in, and will materialize through, the selected methods, are allowed to leave the runway for ‘the lab’ – which represents the research implementation stage.  

Projects for which the broader audience finds that there are concerns not adequately covered by the project (primarily in terms of its methods, but also in terms of the validity of its intentions) must address the expressed concerns by proposing methods, methodologies and/or additional approaches to meet these concerns.
These added methods/methodologies are in the game conceptualized in terms of garments preparing the researcher/research team for the (metaphorical) kinds of weather they will meet once their project moves into the world outside the research institution.
No project can leave the runway until it is properly dressed for this meeting with the world.
The project/project team must continue on their path along the runway and go through multiple rounds of critical inquiry and reflexivity – acquiring added layers of methodology/clothing – until the audience is satisfied that intentionality and likely outcome are aligned.

The intention of the game is both to make the research team critically assess their research proposal and its method and to help them imagine what arguments against it may be posed by a broader audience.
It should moreover make the team conscious of the necessity of including stakeholder engagement at an early stage in – and possibly throughout - the research process. The design is presented as a gradual process of reflection in which the way to the implementation process, or into the world, may be short or long, relatively straightforward or necessitating multiple rounds of reflection and methodological adjustments, depending on the intention and likely outcome of the research project.

Our reflexive game is based upon the (Harawayan, Latourean and Indigenous methodological) assumption that knowledge is situated and not neutral, and that research implies values and shapes our world and therefore needs to be opened up to democratic processes involving public engagement and the inclusion of a broad range of producers and forms of knowledge. The well-dressed and well-prepared research project will wear a lot of different kinds of garments.

Alice Demattos Guimarães, PhD candidate at HVL (Norway), and Tanguy Sandré, PhD candidate at CEARC-UVSQ, University Paris-Saclay (France) are performing a ‘game’ designed to help RRI researchers reflect on their choice of research methods.
In particular, this game helps navigate the challenges researchers sometimes face in making the intentions of their research align with the actual (and likely) outcomes of the research processes.

This performance was realised and filmed at the AFINO summer school 'Transdisciplinary RRI', in Bekkjarvik (Norway), on the 27th August 2021.