This week, I went to a film viewing of Dahomey, hosted by Lisa Anderson at the Ritzy in Brixton.  Inspired by some of the very thoughtful questions that Lisa asked the panel, I found myself thinking about my own response, with consideration of my own positionality.

Update (2026): view more on disruptive research approaches on Reconcile Journal

If I understood correctly, one of the questions asked the panel to share what they felt institutions could do in response to restitution (definition: restoring something once stolen from its proper owner), when society, culture and on some occasions, the country had to move on without it.

Such a brilliant question that we didn’t have full time and capacity to dig into – in some ways, this is a panel topic within itself that requires time to dig into properly.

So with that in mind, my response is a list of radical research methods that bring complex conversations like restitution to real life. In exploring each of these, I share a little about my own positionality too, as my relationship with each of these methods is intrinsically tied to where I first came across them.

1.      Critical Participatory Action Research

2.      Auto-ethnography

3.      Persona Pedagogy

4.      Mixed method surveys/questionnaires

5.      Bonus? Illustration

Each of these methods feels crucial to decolonising collections, conversations, research and academic discourse. Whilst the names of these research methods sound inaccessible on the face of it, when you dig into what each method entails, we realise that each of these approaches is commonplace in day-to-day life and community conversation - all can be easily infused into research practice.

I think the true approach to decolonising academic conversations is to choose the research methods that are for the people, by the people, and can be introduced with ease. Removing or closing the gap between ‘us’ (the people) and ‘them’ (the researchers/data gatherers). Duality would suggest that sometimes both of those groups are one and the same.

CPAR involves research around social justice, where everyone is seen as having expertise. Particularly important because of the participation and the action (like in all things in life!) – it sees the involvement of the people most critically impacted by social injustice as crucial by working alongside researchers in equal positions of influence. It’s seen as invalid to carry out research without these individuals (which feels obvious) and therefore trains/prepares everyone so knowledge, power and equity are shared.

I was first introduced to this method back when I was doing my postgraduate certificate in Academic Practice (art, design and communication) at UAL. This is the method we had to use for a final project and the more I read, the more I considered its application. I recommend it to all the masters students I supervise now, and as a mental health professional, I thought a lot about public health issues that affect different communities – CPAR would have more influence than one-sided simplistic research findings on prevalence and treatment.

Ethnography is an interesting research method that was heavily used when I taught Fashion Cultures and Histories at London College of Fashion (LCF) a few years ago. We encouraged our students to use ethnography as an approach to explore critical conversations around fashion cultures and it led to students discussing things like the counterfeit industry (and its connection to class), the luxury fashion market, cultural appropriation and how certain sub-cultures dominate across locations.

This research method places power on narratives and suggests that academic evidence isn't just the knowledge circulated in journals and formal academic spaces, but actually, that expertise lies in sharing stories, immersing in the culture of interest and hearing from people's personal experiences. From an auto-ethnographic point of view, it shines a light on your own experiences and brings forward nuanced research questions (& answers) born out of the things you have observed or experienced yourself. It usually used interviews and observation notes to capture this data.

Whilst LCF introduced it to me, I decided this term to bring it into the content I teach my Masters health students. They are studying Health, Social Care and Wellbeing, and one of their units ‘Equality and Diversity in Healthcare’ encourages them to demonstrate a critical understanding of inequalities and injustice in health outcomes – much of this injustice has been experienced by my students first-hand, so using an ethnographic approach validates their experiences and leads to more authentic assignment outcomes.

Persona pedagogy is one of the most recent methods I have become familiar with - I was introduced to while teaching on an ‘Inclusive practices’ unit last year. After doing the Academic Practice PG Cert years ago, last year I started teaching on it, which felt like a full circle moment as that course changed me/opened me up. This course is for educators, technicians and lecturers who want to improve their ‘academic practice’ and seek fellowship from the Higher Education Academy.

I am a bit amused whenever I speak highly of this research approach because my first instinct was to hate it. When trying to understand, it felt like the ‘persona’ element gave rise to misrepresentation, perpetuating stereotypes or putting words in someone out of his mouth. Over the past 6 months, various conversations or examples have led to me recommending it (!) as an approach as my understanding of its power grew.  Persona pedagogy is about giving voices to the experiences of others in a bid to truly understand their position, and more importantly, your own. I see it as taking case studies a step further. Still to be approached with caution in my opinion, but I had an interesting idea during the Dahomey panel event, which connects to the voiceover of the King Gezo statue (voiced by  Makenzy Orcel). His role and script (which he wrote himself) asked him to imagine he was the King statue and reimagine what feelings and experiences he was having. As we continue this conversation about artifacts, and in some cases, people being restituted, we might use persona pedagogy to give students an opportunity to explore what that experience might be like. A revelation for me during the Dahomey film, is that the statue’s experience of returning to a home that is unrecognisable and doesn’t feel like home, and leaving a place he is used to but was forced into, is the kind of uncertain limbo that many of us experience today.  

The last method is the most tried and true of them all. The trusty mixed method survey allows for long-form questions, tick-box questions, numbers and traditional data gathering. It allows us to gather a consensus for what the community think about a particular topic - there is so much power in gathering data points on a ‘population’ level to look at patterns and averages, as well as to reveal insights. Having done a very traditional science masters myself (I did Clinical Mental Health Sciences at UCL nearly 10 years ago), this research method favours the kind of methods we were taught. None of this person-centred de-colonial focus was featured at the time, and I don’t know if that has changed since I was there.

Ultimately, if we really want to know what our people think about a topic, a properly designed questionnaire will give us some insight. I've been thinking about developing a survey or census to share with my community to understand our connection to duality better. Not yet a fully-baked plan so will revisit soon.

I am an illustrator, and if you are familiar with my work, you know my approach with Line & Honey is to explore and re-imagine the experience of black women as easeful, soft, slow and without strife. Illustration can be used as a research method as proven by the Journal of Illustration (and the paper I co-authored in it). I also currently teach final-year undergraduate illustration students, and their final critical project is encouraging them to use illustration as a tool to question and explore. The reason I include this as a ‘bonus question mark’ is because I realise that my illustration practice is less rooted in evidence and reality, and more rooted in fantasy. Dreams. Manifestation.

I think it could (and probably is) a radical research method, but not yet for me.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading (and hopefully enjoying) this. I promised myself that I would write more these days – both academically I would like to publish another peer-reviewed article – and personally because I enjoy the process.

Spending all of my time in proximity to education, debates around knowledge creation, social justice and representation, I have a thousand blog post ideas like this one a week. I normally journal them, but reallyyyy want to post on Substack more. It has been over 6 months (!) since my last post which is not what I wanted!

Anyway, please do share thoughts or comments below, or let me know if I can clarify anything. If you are an educator, please do consider more diverse ways of collecting and researching people. Imagine how much fun there is to be had if we owned all of our stories!  

This post was originally published on Substack, accessible here,

Amberlee from Reconcile Journal

[email protected] | personal website