The Gender Hubcast: Exploring Participatory Methods to Tell the Stories of Research

In this episode Hubcast guests – Evelyn Pauls, Will McInerney and Nicky Armstrong – discuss what it means to use participatory methods when telling the stories of research. 

Our guests discuss the “Story of the Hub” project, where they worked to tell the stories of 39 research projects in an individual and collective manner, using a participatory model. They delve into the reasons for working this way and the benefits of using such an approach. They also discuss some of the challenges and core aspects that should be thought through from a storytelling, impact and communications perspective. 

About the contributors

Evelyn Pauls is the Impact Manager of the Hub. She joined from the Berghof Foundation, where she was the lead researcher on a participatory action research project on the long-term reintegration of female ex-combatants in Burundi, Indonesia, Nepal and the Philippines. Prior to joining the Berghof Foundation, she completed her PhD at LSE, focusing on international advocacy on child soldiers in Sierra Leone and Myanmar. She was the editor of the Millennium Journal of International Studies and a visiting researcher at the National University of Singapore. She holds an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford.

Will McInerney is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the London School of Economics where he works as a Co-Investigator on the UKRI GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub and a Research Officer at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security. William’s research focuses on gender justice; men, masculinities, and violence prevention; education and peacebuilding; and the role of arts, storytelling, and technology in promoting social change. He has 15 years of experience as a practitioner – teaching and leading peace, arts, and gender violence prevention education programs around the world. William is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Medical University of South Carolina and a Visiting Scholar at the George Mason University Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

Nicky Armstrong is a Policy and Communications Consultant, currently working with the Gender, Justice and Security Hub. Nicky has a background in graphic design and international relations, using the theories across both disciplines to inform her ongoing research around communications and popular culture. Nicky is a PhD student at Queen Mary University London, where she is exploring visual communication and methods when framed around social issues and the role of the communicator and cultural producer in advocacy campaigning.

Transcript

Evelyn: Hi, everyone. Good to talk to you today. I’m joined by two of my favourite colleagues to chat about the story of the Hub. They’ll introduce themselves, but me, I’m Evelyn Pauls. I’m an impact consultant and researcher on the Gender, Justice and Security Hub where we all work together. And I’m also an associate researcher with the Berghof Foundation.

Will: Thanks so much for bringing us together, Evelyn. It’s great to be here. My name is Will McInerney. I’m a postdoc working at the London School of Economics, where I specifically work on the Gender, Justice and Security Hub as a research officer and a co-investigator on The Stories of Research, which is something we’re going to talk about today.

Nicky: Thank you both. Likewise, great to be part of this conversation today. I’m a communications consultant on the Gender, Justice and Security Hub and worked closely with Evelyn and Will on The Story of the Hub, which is what we’re going to focus on in today’s conversation.

I’m also a PhD student at Queen Mary University, looking at the role of communications in social movements and backlash against gender justice movements.

Evelyn: Brilliant. So yeah, you’ve both already mentioned it, The Story of the Hub – so what is that even? Let’s get it started to give our listeners a vague idea of what we’re even talking about.

Will: Yeah, so The Story of the Hub is complicated. So maybe I almost need to take a step back first and give our listeners a quick overview of what is the Hub before we can talk about the story of the Hub. And the Hub is, the Gender, Justice and Security Hub, which is a five year interdisciplinary transnational research network.

And this includes more than 40 global partner organizations. We’ve got more than 150 members who are researchers, practitioners, and activists working on 38 distinct research projects in seven conflict-affected countries and 17 additional other countries around the world.

And so, what Nicky, Evelyn and I have been working on is how do we tell that story or the many stories to be more accurate. So, The Story of the Hub is a multi-year participatory process that we’ve been leading, that’s all to document the work of the Hub, and I would argue a combination of critical and creative ways and using both print and digital formats.

And so, this consisted of, maybe three key components. And the first was a series of what we called ‘collective output projects’ that brought members of multiple different Hub research projects together to examine key, what we call cross Hub themes or new collaborative insights that have emerged in the process of the Hub.

So, there are five of these collective output projects that were developed. A second component of The Story of the Hub is the Hub’s website and digital project stories that were created making this giant online archive of the Hub’s work. Designed and developed in a kind of an immersive scrollytelling format.

And I know Nicky, you can speak at a lot of great lengths about that. And then the third pillar, the third component here of The Story of the Hub is the Hub’s final report, which was a synthesis of the Hub’s key findings and recommendations at the country, at the thematic, at the project and at the Hub wide level, and that’s literally a 300 page print document. But again, also building upon the others, it’s an online resource. And while they’re three different components, they very much all overlap and fuel one another and they’ve been intentionally designed that way to tell the many different stories of the Hub at different levels with different contexts and with different scopes.

Evelyn: Great, thanks Will. Nicky, do you want to add anything to that?

Nicky: I think you’ve really captured neatly in a nutshell, the parameters of what the project was. And I just want to add this other layer to this, what we were trying to achieve and what we hoped was innovative about the project was that whilst this was a synthesis of five years of research findings and there was a structure to how we did that, it was also about telling individual stories, but also telling those in a collective format as well.

We hoped that we designed this in a way that honoured Hub members’ experience as well. And I think we wanted to capture some of the personal insights and the kind of the discomforts and some of the surprises that sat behind each of the research projects.

And I think we felt that quite often these can become decoupled in academic outputs or traditional impact stories. And we hoped to overcome that. I think to the extent to which we achieve that can be discussed.

But the idea was that this should really be a testament to some of the collaborative thinking and voice and the feminist ethics and practice that underpin the Hub as a model and the Hub’s research, and also just open up storytelling as a medium for more transformative engagement with research.

Evelyn: As I was listening to both of you talk, I was just reminded also of why we started to think about it in this way. Originally, there was meant to be this big output at the end of the Hub that in one way or another summarizes or synthesizes the findings from all the different projects.

Listeners are probably familiar with this kind of output at the end of a research grant, usually the principal investigator, or whoever leads the project writes it up, right? With various amounts of input, maybe from other people. But it’s, at least in my experience, not usually a very collaborative process.

And I think this is where we started from for how can we make this, whatever it looks like in the end, a meaningful and participatory process for actually all the people that were part of this grant. So not just the principal investigators at the end saying, ‘Okay, great. You found A, B, and C. We wrote this up in a nice, neat document. And here it is.’ But, at least for me, that didn’t really feel like it would honour, as Nicky said, the experience of the Hub members and also wasn’t really what we wanted to do.

Nicky: And actually this is a really good prompt to remember how we got to even talking about doing something collaboratively and that process itself was a collaborative process and I don’t think we sat and just had this strategy and this idea. It took almost about a year or a year and a half for us to get to the point where we got to calling it The Story of the Hub.

And it evolved from this flagship output process, which is what you spoke to Evelyn, where you have this kind of ‘end document’ to research project. And there were multiple meetings and workshops and banging our heads against some walls as well in terms of getting to the point of even discussing about doing this collaboratively.

So, I think it shouldn’t be taken as a given that’s something that’s the norm in academia and I think the Hub was always really open to it and gave space for, I think, initially me and you, Evelyn, and Will, when you joined as well, to explore that and run with it. But I don’t think it was easy to get to that point, even.

I think that maybe deserves some reflection. I remember meetings of trying to convince people why you didn’t need to know what the output of this story project was going to be. Yeah, the process was what was important. And we did get really tangled in that. People still came back to ‘But I want to know what you’re going to produce at the end.’ Just to say that these processes aren’t a given either, even when you’re given space to be more creative with an output, there’s still a whole process and still challenges as well.

Will: It’s really interesting hearing the key ideas that come up in, in the memories that are triggered by just us having this conversation. In some ways it’s almost worth to briefly summarize what you all just said there. The Story of the Hub isn’t just a traditional summary. It is an intentional process to try to do something different. It’s maybe something closer to what we talk about in some sections of the report as a web weaving initiative. It’s seeking to bring the 150+ Hub members together to learn, to share, to collaborate, to tell multi-layered stories of the Hub.

And to do so in a way that, maybe sometimes strategically utilizes the norms around research outputs, but also very much at the same time is challenging what research outputs are supposed to and could and should look like. And it grapples with something that I know we’ve talked about often, which is what we call the politics of storytelling and not just telling different stories, but telling those stories differently.

And I think The Story of the Hub is a really interesting example of learning in that process actively. And so, to come back to that and, tangibly, what did it look like? There were tons of different methods that we utilized in trying this participatory process over multiple different in-person conventions that happened in Northern Ireland and Columbia.

There were, I believe, ten in person workshops, five online workshops for folks who couldn’t make the in-person discussions that combined small group discussions, large group discussions, arts based activities and all of this to get together combined around 15,000 words of critical reflections and recommendations and poems and drawings and quotes that we then thematically analysed.

There were also interviews with each one of the research projects in the Hub where we then took a transcript and collaboratively edited together with each one of those projects what the story they wanted to tell about their project.

And then all these things were reviewed, for the report in a collaborative way. And so, you have this combination of in-person workshops, online workshops, individual interviews, collective interviews, written submissions. And so, there wasn’t a one-size-fits-all method, it was a bit more of a mosaic style of piecing together different approaches to try to tell the different stories themselves.

Nicky: Yeah, and I think that speaks to some of the challenges of doing this kind of work. But just to say some of the complexities of when you’re saying the mosaic of work. That quite often on huge research grants, you’re working quite individually and actually it’s a huge amount of thinking and a huge amount of collaboration that takes place to pull those strands together.

And quite often, people don’t think to even pull those strands together to identify some of the commonalities across projects, even though they’re sitting under the same research umbrella. The commonalities across projects or commonalities across countries, there isn’t that work that brings those together and I think that was like a showpiece of what you can achieve if you were to do that.

Evelyn: So now that we know more or less what The Story of the Hub is – I know we’ve already tapped in and out of reflecting as we’re hearing each other speak, but for me, based on work that I’ve done before, I think this commitment to try to work in participatory ways across everything is really strong.

I also had a project on the Hub and I did that there, but also to do that on this one level up, so across the whole Hub, looking at the entire Hub also from a participatory angle was really beneficial.

So maybe we can talk a little bit about this. I know you also both work a lot in participatory ways. And so, if I were to ask you, why is it important that we did The Story of the Hub in this participatory way? I know you’ve already touched upon, Will, what you said, not just telling different stories, but also telling stories differently, I think really captures it well.

But then if I could add another question, which is, what are the main challenges? Nicky already spoke a little bit about the resistance that we met in the beginning. But maybe from my side, I just wanted to highlight this idea of the process mattering maybe more than the output and this kind of shift in thinking.

For me that was really fundamental, how I think about research has changed. If I think about myself as a PhD student and then how I think about myself now and what is important to me when I do research in different settings but really looking at how we’re interacting with our “research subjects” and to not make them necessarily research subjects, but co-collaborators in a way, right? And so, I think that for me, that is one of the main things that’s so important about working in participatory ways.

Nicky: So maybe I’m going to share some reflections on this, maybe from a communications perspective, and I think actually it’s really interesting what you said, Evelyn, about the process being privileged over the output.

And then definitely, learning that from this project. And I take that forward into my PhD research and definitely into my communications work as well that I do as a communications consultant on the side. And I remember being part of conversation circles as part of the Hub where we were talking about how so often what is privileged and what is legitimized in academia is the output and not necessarily the process.

And I think it’s a constant challenge to do that. It takes time and energy to be somebody that continually tries to push for recognition of the process and the participatory nature of it. But then when I apply it to comms and I’m thinking about how I do comms in an academic research sense.

And then when I do comms in a practical sense and on the Hub, how do you tell somebody’s story in a participatory way when you’re the one telling the story ultimately? And that’s always a challenge as a communications professional.

So, I think, it’s my job to strategically transform some of these narratives to make them effective or persuasive or concise or interesting for people to read. That can be quite problematic in a way because whilst we try to do it in such a participatory way, ultimately there’s still a power dynamic when it still comes over to me to actually then communicate that.

And I think, constantly being reflective of your positionality is super important. I think it’s something that you have to constantly grapple with. I don’t think I have the answers for how to overcome some of the nature of participatory research and then when you combine it with the communication element, I think it’s really difficult.

I don’t think the two necessarily sit really well together and I think it needs real careful thought about how you then communicate somebody’s work in a participatory way and what that looks like. It’s something that was a constant challenge on the Hub.

Will: Yeah, that’s really insightful. And as you also mentioned, Evelyn, your own project on the Hub from Female Combatants to Filmmakers, I think is a really incredible resource on these exact kinds of questions. And there’s some great recommendations about the benefits and the challenges of participatory processes that are, contextually specific to the work that you were doing, but also that really can be adapted and applied more broadly to participatory research.

I think the benefits of these sorts of processes at the basic level is around increased engagement and investment from everyone involved and about breaking down as you mentioned, Evelyn, that binary between researcher and researched and trying to disrupt that very premise of that foundation of so much research.

And of course, the challenges are immense, but it can often be simplified or summarized down to, it takes more time, it takes more resources, it takes more efforts, but one point that I wanted to pick up on as well, which is I agree with both of y’all very much about the importance of process over output, process over product. That’s something that in past work, particularly around teaching poetry, which is something that I also do, something I often really emphasize:  It’s not just about the finished poem that you create, it’s about the process of writing it and the knowledge that can be gained about oneself or about the world through that sort of creative writing work. But I think it is also important to not concede the output argument, which is to say that participatory approaches, yes, they produce a lot of process value but they also can produce better outputs too. They can produce different outputs that stand from perhaps a stronger epistemological position that’s rooted in the co-production of knowledge that produces insights that are more responsive or even revelatory to our complex social worlds, which are themselves co-produced knowledge systems.

And so, in some ways, a participatory process is more reflective of reality. And therefore can actually produce outputs, which challenge norms, but are actually stronger outputs or actually more dynamic and engaging and interesting and in that sense, impactful outputs. So, while I agree with the importance of emphasizing process over output, I also think it’s really important to push back that the outputs are necessarily less.

Evelyn: Thank you so much, Will, for highlighting that point about not conceding the outputs. And I think you’re completely right. You mentioned my project where I work with film as a medium. And that’s actually one of the points that we really try to make: If you’re producing a film in a participatory manner, it doesn’t mean that the film is an amateur product at the end, right? It can still look great, sound great, tell a great story. It’s not just about the process.

And I think it goes back to a bigger discussion that I remember having with Nicky in the beginning and throughout, which is what is knowledge, right? How do we produce knowledge? Who is it recognized by as being knowledge? Are we producing something for an academic community that looks at citations and journal publications and peer reviews etc? You all know what I’m talking about. Are we producing for a donor, which often also happens? Are we producing for our future careers to get more funding? Or are we producing for the people that were part of our research, right? I think it’s usually all of those, and so balancing all these different audiences that recognize different types of knowledge is underlying a lot of this.

I just wanted to add one thing to this and I wonder what it means for The Story of the Hub. The Hub is just coming to its end now. So, we don’t really know yet, but something that I always try to remember when I do the film work, is once the story is out there, it doesn’t belong to you anymore.

And you don’t really have a lot of power over what happens. once the story is out there. And so that just, for me, this knowledge reemphasizes the point of how important the process is and also the product that I, for my own sanity, feel okay that at least these parts that I had some level of control over were done in a way that’s respectful of the people that are involved.

Nicky: That just links quite neatly back to where I started with communications and some of the ways that people would traditionally see communications. I think quite often people think of communications as this flow of information or an exchange of messages or kind of establishments of contact links with policymakers. But I think we can also talk about communication as a production of meaning and a production of knowledge and I think people’s rights to participate in that creation or that new shared knowledge. And I think what’s really nice, Evelyn, is what you said about the end product and particularly with creative projects or creative methods, how they’re then taken up, how they’re viewed, how they’re then communicated by the viewers that we potentially never have any contact with.

And it snowballs from that and we don’t necessarily document that because you can’t, it’s impossible to document that sometimes, which leads to some of the issues again with documenting impact and how to document impact in more traditional ways and how to document impact in terms of what new knowledge or how people felt that they participated in the way that knowledge was shaped and shared, I think is really important. So for me, it’s not just a flow of information or an exchange of messages. It’s much more than that.

Will: I wanted to open up the space more broadly, just to think about what are the key takeaways that we are moving forward with in our own work now that this project is coming to an end about the ways in which research can, should, could be represented.

Nicky: For me it’s actively thinking through how we consume research. And I think that active thinking doesn’t always happen. I don’t think anyone’s necessarily to blame for that. I think it’s some of the structures within which we work. Also sometimes people just don’t have the capacity or the bandwidth to actually do the research and then also actively think through how it’s going to be consumed.

But I think it’s reconceptualizing that relationship between knowledge and communication, which I think in some ways has been dampened by some of the ways that we do communicate. Quite often people see communication just as social media and not something bigger or more structural than that within research within projects like this.

And yeah, so I think the idea is that I’m not saying that some of the more policy focused or the legal or the academic outputs from projects like the Hub are not important. They really are, but they can be really complimented by this additional layer of thinking through how is that research going to be consumed by whom and why, and what needs to be a complimentary layer to those kinds of products.

Will: I like that phrase that you used, rethinking the relationship between communication and knowledge, which is something that is perhaps often very taken for granted and because of that, it doesn’t warrant critical examination, but that when you do actually open that door, there’s a lot there and that the strong norms, particularly within academic research and policymaking spaces, they’re so strong. Those currents are so compelling that this is what a policy brief is supposed to look like. And this is what an academic journal article is supposed to look like, that there isn’t flexibility there to rethink that critically and creatively.

Evelyn: For me, given that my main hat on the Hub was on impact, which is obviously really closely related to all the things Nicky was talking about, the other side of that coin is also rethinking what impact looks like, right? First getting an idea of what impact both The Story of the Hub and the Hub in general has at this point is almost impossible because we’re just coming to the end of the project and this is again a little bit this ‘once the story is out there you don’t know what’s going to happen’ because material realities exist, none of us are going to work on the Hub anymore, very soon. There’s no one there to follow all of that knowledge as it disseminates around, different communities of practice, different groups of people, students, researchers, etc.

If I think back to the first movie I ever produced in a participatory way, which came out in 2020. Now I have people coming to me being like, “Oh, I saw the thing. It’s so great. How did you do that?” It’s four years later, right? And that’s just a tiny example. And the work on the Hub has been so vast and it’s in so many different places, both in terms of disciplines and academia, but also physical places. That’s going to be very hard to keep track of that.

And the second point is this idea of how academic knowledge gets translated into the real world, let’s say, which is through policy influence, which is true, obviously. But it’s just a tiny portion of how people actually interact with your research and what they actually do with those findings, with that knowledge that comes out of research projects. And it’s definitely not just policy influence.

And for me, what I noticed also, and I don’t really know what to do with it yet, is that if we’re talking about how to represent research in a different way, the way that the research is done in the first place really affects how I can and or want to represent it, talk about it, etc. What I’ve noticed and maybe it’s because I’m obsessed with working in participatory ways and so I find myself drawn to that. But there are a number of projects on the Hub who really have worked in those ways. And I find myself drawn to them. As I speak about different ways of producing impact, different ways of communicating research, different ways of doing research, I find myself drawing again and again on the same projects.

Nicky: It really speaks to some of the PhD research I’m doing about this power and positionality of a communications professional or actually just communications actors. In the sense that, everybody is part of the communications process.

And I certainly have biases and leanings towards certain projects on the Hub that have used creative methods, that have used participatory methods, because that speaks to something that I’m personally really interested in and working on. But what does that then mean when I’m sometimes the face of the Hub presenting the research as a whole, and how have those biases crept in? Or have they crept in? Have they not crept in? How do I talk about different projects? Which ones do I surface more than others?

And I just think it’s a really great question and it’s part of the research that I’m doing specifically when looking at the role of communications actors in how #MeToo is communicated in the UK context and the influence that those people have. Quite often the influence of somebody doing communications or impact is overlooked because they’re seen as these tag on roles within academia. They’re seen as professional services roles rather than part of the research role.

For example, when I started on the Hub, I didn’t have a gender background. Does that matter that I didn’t have a background in understanding the issues that we were working on the Hub? Across the five years I’ve now come out having much more nuance and understanding of the field, but I wouldn’t say I had that going in and what does that mean?

So there are multiple layers to what I’ve said – how am I selective and biased in my communication, but also how does my own knowledge and understanding of the field that I work in also impact that. And I think that speaks to the reflexivity that I would always prompt and promote within any project or within research, but I think there’s a real complexity there.

Will: Yeah, if I can jump in there as well, I think that’s a really good point, Nicky, around examining our own positionality and our explicit and implicit biases as communicators and as representers and as facilitators of participatory processes themselves

I relate to a lot of what you said. I too think I have a preference for participatory projects and an increased interest in them. And I think part of that’s my own preferences and my own interests in research and how I value the process but I would also argue that participatory research is collectively undervalued within mainstream academic research. And so because it’s undervalued, it feels like when there are opportunities to highlight it, it’s important that perhaps there’s an imperative to show that value, and to push back again, that it’s not just the process, that it also can be high quality products and outcomes of research as well.

And so I certainly relate to that, but I also think it is worth challenging again because I don’t know that I believe that participatory research is always the answer, and it’s always the best approach.

And I really like something that you wrote in in one of the recommendations from your project in the Hub, Evelyn, was around, the idea that partial implementation is possible, that it’s not a binary choice. You either do a robust, full, start to finish participatory research project or you don’t do it at all and one I completely agree with that statement, but I also think that shows me that again it’s got to be responsive to the questions you’re asking it’s got to be responsive to the challenges and the problems that you’re addressing, and that it doesn’t have to be this binary yes or no.

It’s about finding a better balance. And I think, again, we’re currently in a state where it’s very unbalanced, where there’s not enough emphasis, there’s not enough value being placed on participatory approaches to research. And so it feels like there’s a need to highlight them, but also we don’t want to over correct and make the assumption that it’s always the right choice

Nicky: Yeah, and I think that kind of raises the fundamental question is who is this research for? And I think that should always be at the forefront of any project anything that you do and that will Help define whether a participatory process is relevant to that project or not.

Evelyn: That reminds me so much of our standard lines of whatever we used to do on the Hub, giving comms and impact advice to people on the projects, those conversations would almost always start with, “So who are we doing this for?” And that both applied to conversations we had with management of the Hub, as much as with researchers on the Hub who are trying to do different things in their projects. So yeah, who is it for is always a really poignant question.

So maybe as a final part on this podcast today, there’s just a couple of questions that I think we’ve asked each other and I just want to bring them out. One is simply: Was it worth it? Was it worth the effort? Was it really worth starting all these different things to then struggle at the end to bring them all together? Because it’s always like that, that you start a participatory process and that really opens the box to a lot of things and then at the end it’s always a struggle to bring it all back together without doing this disciplining and editing and all these things that you have to do to bring all that vast amount of knowledge that comes out of the process into a, not even just a manageable, but a digestible format for anyone to take anything out of it.

So was it worth the effort? And is there anything that you would really do differently next time?

Will: Was it worth it? Yes, I think so. I think it was definitely worth it. I say that as I had the privilege of joining The Story of the Hub while it already had momentum thanks to the two of y’all’s work. So maybe it’s easier for me to say, yeah, of course it was worth it, because I got to join once it already had some steam behind it.

But I do think it’s worth it because, one, based on a lot of conversations that I’ve had with other Hub members who are our co-participants in The Story of the Hub and the meaning that they’ve taken from what we created and how we created it together and the emphasis that we place not just on distilling, impact dot points that we can share with policymakers, but in the collaborative approach to engaging with them and trying to learn with and from them.

I have lots of little micro moments in my mind of conversations or emails or chats that I’ve had with folks who were in this process with us that lead me to believe that it was worth the vast amount of work and time and effort and energy that went into it. And I would also say that I do think the tangibles that have emerged, the products, the outputs that have stemmed from this are, to me, evidence that it was worth it.

To briefly rattle some of them off: the incredible new website, www.thegenderhub.com, which everyone should go visit that Nicky, I know you in particular, poured countless hours of work into with our various web design collaborators. That’s an incredible testament to this work working and being worth it to me. There are 38 beautiful project stories that immersively tell the research findings and recommendations there. There are seven country briefs. There are six stream summaries. There are five collective output projects. There’s the report and the report summary and the translations of the report summary. There are all these very tangible outputs that I think really do document the goals coming to life that we put forward, which is this web-weaving initiative to try to tell the many stories of this complex five year interdisciplinary transnational multidisciplinary project.

Your second question was what would I do differently next time? I don’t know. This is maybe less helpful for the world that we live in, which is always constrained by limited budgets and limited resources. But I would have more people power behind it. The three of us got it done and I’m proud of what we got done.

And to be clear, we got it done with an incredible amount of support from our fellow colleagues on the LSE MICA team, the global MICA team and the Hub as a whole, but we did a lot of work and we could have probably benefited from more people power, and what would my advice be to someone who’s looking into this is really try not to underestimate how much time and energy goes into it and to properly resource to the extent that is possible within the constraints that you’re operating under enough people power to make the process live up to the ethics that it’s striving for. And if you can’t, if you don’t have enough money to do that then thinking about, yeah, how do you strategically downsize? And I think we’ve definitely had those conversations amongst ourselves, but how do we strategically operate within the constraints that we have?

Nicky: Yeah. I think I’ll probably just build on what you said. But for me, certainly in terms of was it worth the effort? Absolutely. Yes. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have things that I wouldn’t do differently. It doesn’t mean that I look back and there were certain really hard points, tricky points about the process, but I use this work every single day now in my research.

I’m researching and doing a lot of research in my communications work, and that means that every person I’m in contact with in my research, in my communications with the clients I work with, they’re also getting access to this work in a way. Like it’s not structured in that way, they don’t see it like that but it informs the conversations that I have with them, it informs the way that I speak about communications with the clients and the way that we do some of the project work. So in that way, it’s a legacy of this work. It continues through. And even down to working with the web agency and how they now would look at potentially working with clients and in communicating research and what that means and the different ways of doing that.

There was a Hub member that said this to me, that you plant these seeds and you might not see them grow, but I take those seeds of this project now and I’m putting them everywhere I go and I might not see the outcomes of those, but it certainly informs my conversations and how I do things daily.

What would I do differently? I don’t know if I’d do anything differently per se, but just to reflect back onto the ethics of care and some of the reflections that are definitely really poignant in academia and across all industries and the way that we work and the way that we structure work and the way that we privilege productivity.

And I think some of those things I probably would have pushed to the forefront of conversations a bit more than I did. Really because this was such a lovely project to work on and I could see the benefits it was going to have for me in my career as well. But that doesn’t mean that you should compromise in terms of your workload and some of the strain that comes with that.

So I think I wouldn’t say that you can’t do it unless you have a huge team and a huge budget, but it should certainly be to scale to what your capacities are in terms of budget and team. And so, whilst we had really open minded people behind us and reasonable budget to do this that didn’t mean that it didn’t come with a lot of excess around the edges of the nine to five, let’s say.

Evelyn: And from my side on the was it worth it? I obviously I agree with you guys but just to add a different perspective because as we said with my own project on the Hub, I remember being on the recipient or let’s say the participant of this process. as well as being on the facilitation side.

And I remember doing the interview and that was so nice. To be heard in that way, and I don’t know it’s always nice if someone wants to hear about your research so that’s not new, but it felt a little bit different. I find myself sending the report to a lot of people and saying, check out page 238, which is where you will find my project because it looks great, and it’s just a really nice thing to have. But I think maybe the most powerful feeling that I had at the first convention where we trialled these giant workshops where everyone comes together and starts thinking about how their work relates to each other.

One of my main feelings apart from exhaustion from putting this thing on was that I wanted to be part of it. I didn’t want to just be facilitating. I wanted to do the thing that I was making the other people do. And so, I think this feeling for me was quite strong of no, but I want to also talk to these other people and think with them about the stuff. And so maybe that speaks to also what Will said about these moments that he heard from a lot of people who were participants in the process, that they also really liked being part of it.

What I would do differently, the first thing I wrote down before Will even started speaking was: more people exclamation mark. So, glad we agree on that. And the second one is, I think, to start earlier, which I guess speaks again to this time constraint thing. But what was beautiful for me on the Hub is that it gave me the opportunity to even explore and push for this kind of thing, because this wasn’t envisaged from the outset.

We just a few years in, Nicky and I were like, should we try to do it differently? And it was possible to do that, but if we had an idea already of what this could look like from the get go, I think it could have addressed some of these things around budgeting, around time, around resources, around managing people’s capacity etc.

But it never works in an ideal way. I think that’s also fine. So, I think I already shared my key moment, which is that at the convention, me wanting to be part of it. And I think that’s quite a strong feeling for me personally. But just maybe to finish up to ask both of you if you have any sort of key moment that stays with you from this work that you want to share as a last thing.

Will: I don’t know, for me it’s really hard to think about one particular key moment. Maybe one, one distinct one, which sits with me because of, I also have a background in poetry as part of The Story of the Hub process and the report I wrote a poem that kind of reflected on the many different ways that people describe the Hub because the Hub itself is a really hard thing to describe. We’ve spent close to an hour here talking about The Story of the Hub, which is one level removed. It is a massive, series of projects, a massive network that’s hard to distil into a few words. And so this poem was trying to grapple with that and using different quotes from different members. So, I performed the poem for a group of Hub members and this member came up to me afterwards and said, “After five years, I finally get it. I think I know what the Hub is.”

And it was slightly in jest but that really sat with me, which is to say that the work that we are doing, the work that the three of us did together, it really was making a difference. Our willingness to take a risk and to do it the harder way and to do it the more time intensive way and to take on the sacrifices that came with that to represent it not just as one giant report at the end that summarized everything, but that invited people to be a part of the process. To weave the web with us to create the website and the digital project stories and the briefs and then to still do the report at the same time. But to have a report that’s infused with poetry and images and QR codes that link you to digital resources. And I think, that quick answer from that Hub member really cemented to me that again, that it was worth it and that there was value in this creative approach.

And I guess I say all that to say also that I’m just really appreciative of the two of y’all for being on this journey. I’m really appreciative to Kirsten Ainley and Christine Chinkin the co-PIs of the Hub for taking a risk, too. And giving us the autonomy and the bandwidth to put a lot of time and resource into this because those are both important, having incredible collaborators and having PIs that are willing to take a risk. Those are two things that I don’t take for granted. And so my moment is that quick reflection from the poem, but by the end of this answer, I’ve actually realized that my moment is the opportunity of having hundreds, thousands of moments working with the two of y’all to make it all possible.

Nicky: Actually, I was struggling to think of my key moment and you prompted me to think too, if I may, and it’s just to add to what you’ve just said there, that really this work is an extension of the Hub’s recognition of the value of creative methods and I think expanding our ways of knowing, gathering data around gender justice and that’s a real testament to how the project was conceived by the various people that were a real part of that heavy lifting of getting this funding and it shouldn’t be taken for granted that the value of creative methods is appreciated by all.

And I think we were given a huge amount of trust and huge amount of freedom to run with this and I’ll be forever thankful for that as being able to work on this project because of it. And then you said something about inviting people to be part of this project, and this is really maybe quite strange or less poignant take away than both of yours, but I was thinking about when we were sat with the web designers, and we’d been grafting for weeks and weeks thinking about how this project looks and we hadn’t seen it yet. And they showed us some visuals and I cried in the meeting, which is very classic Nicky, which means I’m actually okay. And I was just thinking, we’ve really brought in a whole new team of creative thinkers that now understand the gravitas of what it is that we’re trying to do. And they’ve used their skills and their creativity to really help us communicate that. But beyond that, they were also talking about our work in a way that they understood it.

They were getting to engage with our research and they were starting to think about what it means as well for them to communicate research, but specifically around gender justice and people’s stories and women’s stories. And I think that’s maybe why I was so moved in the moment. Originally I thought I was just relieved that I managed to indicate what we wanted to achieve but actually I realized that this whole new team of people that were on our side and become part of the project and participating in it and I think that can’t be underestimated.

Evelyn: Brilliant. Thanks, guys. So yeah, I think that wraps up our conversation for today. Thank you both so much for taking the time. I want to plug again the website, which is www.thegenderhub.com, where you can see what Nicky just spoke about in its full bloom, let’s say. One final round of thanks to Will and Nicky and thank you for working, with me and for us to work together over this time. It was amazing. I hope we get to do it sometime again soon.