Frizell, Caroline; Taylor, Mark; Diener, Juliet and Weston, Nicola. 2024. 'Bringing the researcher into the room: New materialist entanglements of the research team when analysing 26 interviews exploring the emotional wellbeing of parents of learning-disabled children and young people'. In: UKCP Conference. Online, United Kingdom 7 - 8 June 2024. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

This presentation describes how a research team of four entered an interdisciplinary, inquiry, becoming its own emergent community, that served as a container for carrying out and making sense of fieldwork that comprised interviews with 26 parents of learning-disabled children and young people (LDCYP). The paper poses ethical dilemmas about how much the researchers can bring of themselves and how knowledge was produced in the spaces between the subjectivities of the researchers and the data generated in the fieldwork. Informed by new materialist principles, this presentation invites you to join us in a critical discussion about the positionality of the researchers as an entangled, subjective actors in the research. The team represented diverse professional identities, including, dance movement psychotherapy (DMP), social work and Theatre in Education (TIE), as well as being at various stages as post-doctoral research-active lecturers in Higher Education and doctoral candidates. In addition, members of the team had diverse personal motivations in relation to the fieldwork subject area. The chosen method comprised Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and new materialism to conduct interviews that located the wellbeing support needs of the parents within wider socio-political landscapes in the UK. Semi-structured interviews prompted parents to share how their own wellbeing was supported as they navigated challenging external landscapes, whilst meeting the needs of their learning disabled daughters and sons. This presentation tracks the process of the inquiry and invites dialogue about the dynamic and ethical meeting places of researchers’ subjectivities with the fieldwork data.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Social, Therapeutic & Community Engagement (STaCS)
Dates:	Date Event 8 June 2024 Completed
Event Location:	Online, United Kingdom
Date range:	7 - 8 June 2024
Item ID:	36907
Date Deposited:	17 Jun 2024 11:05
Last Modified:	17 Jun 2024 11:05
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/36907

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