Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This paper discusses the fieldwork experiences of using participatory methods in studying religious minorities in Plateau State, specifically, male Christians in Bassa local government area of the state. The research, conducted for CREID between February and April 2021, among communities perpetually vulnerable to violent conflict and now the COVID-19 epidemic, helped provide an insight into their experiences and coping mechanisms. This chapter primarily discusses the author’s experience and his views on using specifically the ‘River (or Road) of Life’ and the Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) Matrix Ranking. The uniqueness of the participatory method is in its intentional use of the visual to help the respondent create a more vivid picture of his/her experiences, using their own picturesque details. Furthermore, the Matrix Ranking provides a minor but efficiently clear set of quantities, which can postulate a mixed-method approach. The research helped the author to acknowledge the impact of his subjectivity on field research, and how new and innovative approaches help one to overcome these subjectivities.
In this chapter, Zeri – a Yazidi activist from Bashiqa, Iraq – reflects on her experience and learning from using participatory methods to research with women of religious minorities in the region. Yazidi communities in Bashiqa and Bahzani, northern Iraq, have experienced significant marginalization on account of their religious identity, including in access to education, healthcare and employment. In the research, Zeri explored with Yazidi women how intersecting inequalities impact their positions and roles in relation to the state, social justice and development policy and practice. She highlights how the methods build confidence among the women.
This chapter reflects on experiences of accompanying activists – as peer researchers – through processes of undertaking participatory research on the intersections of religious and gender marginalization. It details methods and learning for supporting peer researchers from religious minorities in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq to conduct, analyse and present their research. Consequently, it highlights the importance of cultivating relationships and trust, and how this might be modelled during workshops and through the process of accompaniment, as well as within peer-support and writing groups. Such approaches enable greater depth and nuance in relation to freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) within these contexts and communities and to the gendered dimensions of religious marginalization as it is experienced on the ground.
This chapter examines the experience of employing participatory methods with a group of Dalit Muslim women in Bangalore from the perspective of the facilitator, Laila Khan, and reflects on how these methods might contribute to the generation of knowledge about the intersecting vulnerabilities of minorities. Such vulnerabilities include restrictions on the freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) imposed on the poor in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Laila Khan and Fatima Qureshi, two Muslim teachers from the local school, served as facilitators for two participatory research exercises: the ‘River of Life’ drawing exercise and the ‘participant ranking’ exercise. Five Dalit Muslim women were invited to talk about living through the pandemic.
This chapter presents the key lessons learned during participatory action research (PAR) carried out by the Al-Khoei Foundation and HIVE Pakistan conducted between January 2020 to March 2020 in the Christian minority communities in Lahore and Islamabad. The research enabled us to explore nuanced community perspectives related to intersectional marginalization faced by minority communities, especially minority women. A key finding was the interplay of poverty and religious identity that manifests in diverse forms of discrimination and social exclusion in the everyday lives of the minority communities.
Peer researchers from within the communities collected narrative-based stories of social exclusion and marginalization and conducted matrix ranking – where communities ranked the level of stigma as well as deprivation they faced while accessing public goods. These findings informed the implementation phase of the project that aimed to address the underlying inequalities by fostering community-based solutions to the most pressing issues at hand.
In Iraq, education has not succeeded in promoting pluralism and inclusion of religious minorities (Osman, 2015). It has rather had the opposite impact. One reason is that it has failed to acknowledge the presence of other religions and ethnicities, contributing to strengthened stereotypes and eventually the marginalization of individuals from minority religions.
This is the case for the subject of religious education (or Islamic education), whose curriculum follows exclusively the Muslim view, lacking the promotion of ‘an inclusive discourse that transcends the communal segmentation of Iraqi society and the associated binaries of sameness and otherness’ (Osman, 2015).
In December 2019, the Coalition for Religious Equality and Inclusive Development (CREID) programme launched a project to reform religious education (RE) with the aim of fostering pluralism and appreciation of diversity among the young generations in the name of freedom of religion and belief (FoRB). The project sought to improve poor religious education standards, which the country scoping phase (Lapcha, 2019) had identified as a core contributor to the marginalization of minorities. More specifically, it addressed religious inequalities through introducing a new pro-pluralism religious education curriculum.
