Reconfiguring the Subject–Object Relation: Grassroots and Civil Society Organizations In Participatory Research

In response to a "dystopian reality" marked by intensifying global interdependencies, escalating crises, and shared planetary vulnerabilities, this panel advances participatory research as a methodological and epistemological resource for interpreting ongoing social transformations. By bridging academia and society, theory and praxis, participatory research reconfigures the relationship between knowledge production and lived experience. At the heart of the panel lies a commitment to decolonizing research practice, interrogating Eurocentric epistemic structures through subaltern and decolonial lenses. Operationalizing this commitment requires more than methodological adjustment: it demands the transformation of the classical subject–object relation into a collaborative, co-authored partnership, in which members of grassroots movements and civil society organizations are often key subjects on equal epistemic footing with professional researchers. The panel further interrogates how concrete participatory tools — i.e., Social Labs, visual methods, and performative or embodied techniques — can be methodologically designed to sustain multi-perspectivity and multivocality.The panel welcomes empirical, theoretical, and reflexive contributions organized around (but not limited to) the following themes: a) the epistemological foundations of participatory methodologies and their relation to subaltern, decolonial, and Global South epistemologies; b) the decolonization of the subject–object relation, examining how grassroots and civil society organization members are repositioned as co-researchers and knowing subjects; c) facilitation strategies for negotiating power asymmetries within participatory research design; d) the management of dissent, conflict, and disagreement within participatory approaches; e) the ways in which research design choices sustain or undermine multi-perspectivity across diverse participatory tools.