Introduction

Shared experiences, informal conversations, and team activities, through which community researchers navigate the research process as a team, lie at the heart of participatory action research (PAR) (McIntyre, 2008; Gratton and Beddows, 2018). However, as the COVID-19 pandemic shocked communities around the globe and introduced periods of ‘lockdown’ and physical distancing, many community-based projects were forced to adjust to new, remote ways of working or temporarily pause their engagement.

This chapter outlines how a participatory research project adjusted to the COVID-19 lockdown and imposed physical distancing regulations. We show how the initial ambitions to replace face-to-face meetings with remote research activities were re-evaluated and replaced with creative and less structured activities designed to promote wellbeing and connect the group during unprecedented times. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the benefits of the adapted approaches, drawing on a small number of interviews with the community research team, and identifies how moving to a messier approach to research resulted in unexpected outcomes for the group.

Keep Talking

Keep Talking is a research project funded by UKRI's Enhancing Partnerships for Place-Based Engagement fund in 2020, led by Staffordshire University in partnership with Expert Citizens CIC. The project aims to develop a model for sustainable structures for community research to engage members of the public with meaningful, place-based research. Staffordshire University has a long history of working in partnership with communities to better understand the issues affecting communities through the Get Talking approach to PAR (Emadi-Coffin, 2008; Hetherington, 2015; Gratton and Beddows, 2018; Gratton, 2019). Get Talking supports a team of community researchers, often made up of people most impacted by the topic of research, to take a full and active role in the research process. The approach also embraces creativity, utilizing creative techniques in planning, consultation and dissemination of findings to ‘remove many of the challenges of engaging wider communities as research participants and generate deliberative dialogue around the topics being explored’ (Gratton and Beddows, 2018, p 147).

Keep Talking builds on our learning from previous Get Talking projects.