Kinder cuts and passionate modesties: the complex ecology of the invitation in participatory research

This paper draws on a series of applied theatre and popular education workshops in G lasgow, S cotland in 2010–11. While the workshop content involved participatory applied theatre and popular education as tools for community environmental and social justice organising, the performance‐based methods of these workshops also troubled assumptions of the participating subject as singular and self‐reflexive. In the paper I propose that the question of subjectivity in participatory research might be fruitfully linked to the ‘content’ of environmental and social justice in two ways. First, applied theatre is presented as a distinctively mediated participatory space that can rely on an unrealisable conception of subjectivity. I argue that exploring the tensions within this mediated space can illuminate such tensions in participatory research generally, and further a ‘passionate modesty’ – a shared reckoning of limitations that can enrich the potential for praxis of participatory research. ‘Passionate modesty’ is brought to bear on activist research, asking us not to bypass in our writing the complexities and costs of participating in relations of solidarity and resistance. This participatory space is further explored as one of important ecological consequence for the co‐production of knowledge. B arad and B ell's work on making the ‘cuts’ that determine what we include (and exclude) in our attentions is used to argue that participatory research, and creative methods in particular, can orient our attention to social–nature relations in distinct and powerful ways. An ecological perspective is proposed, where acknowledging the asymmetry of encounter and the co‐performance of responsibility might ‘cut’ such research more modestly but perhaps more generatively. In a concluding response to this invitation, I return to the content of the G lasgow workshops on environmental and social justice, and the complex relationship between the politics of grappling with injustices and a participatory politics of co‐learning.