Engaged Research: Community Involvement
Engaged research is foremost about collaboration with the community, where research is not done about the community but with them. It is about including community partners in the development and direction of the research, allowing for a non-hierarchal space and joint production of research.
We plan to employ engaged research in our development of community narratives of energy and energy transition. Not only allowing community voices in the context of energy transition to feel heard, but having their say over the research direction and outputs. We plan to do this by establishing community engagement groups, where community members give feedback over the research motivations and research output. It is about empowering societal partners so they feel engaged and involved in the oncoming energy transition.
Our first few kick off events in the Whitegate/Aghada and Kilrush will serve as introduction to the project and members of the community can choose to be a part of an “engagement group” to be involved over the research projects growth and evolution over the next three years.
Explored in the picture is an example of another methodology we employ in our project which is an example of 'deep mapping.' This technique that we use - ‘deep-mapping’ - is about learning personal narratives of place through tracing community cartographies of areas, how they map their areas through personal history.