Creating Spaces for Collective Remembrance, Recognition, and Grieving Within Participatory Dissemination

Current literature on participatory dissemination of public health research centers the importance of relationship-building across diverse interest holders, but is largely silent on the difficult psychological terrain of sharing public health data that is often an expression of systemic harms. This paper explores the role that the collaborative creation of healing spaces might play in participatory dissemination. Specifically, we analyze our experience of using participatory processes to design a launch event for a memorial artwork, Trace : A Memorial, which honors the lives of essential workers who died early in the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing this work, we saw a different level and kind of participation than is typical in participatory research projects, and we came to learn of the deep desire for spaces for collective remembrance, recognition, and grieving (CRRG), which can bring communities together across differential vulnerability. We describe three core practices for this kind of space-making: 1) Practices of shared remembering that allow the emergence of personal experience alongside professional experience and that help to knit new kinds of relationships, 2) Practices of orienting toward potential participants’ diverse interests to create a wide tent, and 3) the use of the Deborah Frazer Howze’s Council of Elders Framework to give local interest holders permission to help create the space and to ensure the integration of cultural knowledge from those most impacted by the public health issue and those responding to it. Finally we discuss the strengths and limitations of this approach, and how the thoughtful creation of CRRG spaces might benefit participatory research dissemination efforts.