Empowering Communities: Future-Making through Citizen Ethnography

What is ‘citizen ethnography’?

The politics of representation are at the heart of citizenship and at the heart of ethnography (Clifford 1986, 1988; May 1997; McDougall 2013; Ortner 2005). Therefore, we use the term “citizen ethnography” to describe a process whereby the people who belong to the community being researched are the ones responsible for generating knowledge and meaning about their lived experience, and are therefore responsible for driving change interventions for themselves. We also recognise that by engaging in the reflexive practice embedded in the ethnographic process, those citizen ethnographers will inevitably ask fundamental questions about their own citizenship; with regards to their rights, responsibilities, levels of inclusion and agency, as well as opportunities to be heard and represented on a political scale (McDougall 2013). As such, we see “citizen ethnography” as both a reflexive approach to citizenship as well as a method of engaging citizens in the conduct of their own auto-ethnography. Drawing on Appadurai (2006), we will show how the capacity to do research is also a pathway to “full citizenship”. We appreciate that there is slippage in the terminology that may cause confusion to some, but we are satisfied that this slippage is acceptable when applying a phenomenological method to the collection of ethnographic data.

In a phenomenological approach, reflexivity and multiple perspectives are taken into consideration to understand the lived experience of social phenomena (Neubauer, Witkop, and Varpio 2019). The process starts with identifying a phenomenon and investigating that experience as it is lived, rather than as it is conceptualized. Researchers reflect on the essential phenomenological themes that characterize the participant’s experience with the phenomena, simultaneously reflecting on their own experiences (Neubauer, Witkop, and Varpio 2019). Researchers capture their reflections in writing and then reflect and write again, creating continuous, iterative cycles to develop increasingly robust and nuanced analyses. It is a specific methodology of describing, interpreting, writing, editing, triangulating and validating, and it is rendered more robust when the process is democratised; when the collation, synthesis and analysis of information is co-constructed, contested and shared (Loblay et al. 2021; Neubauer, Witkop, and Varpio 2019). Throughout the analysis, researchers must maintain a strong orientation to the phenomenon under study. That strong orientation is one’s embeddedness in the field (Neubauer, Witkop, and Varpio 2019). Embedded implementation research, as Churruca (2019) defines it offers a range of advantages over traditional dichotomized research‐practice designs, including better understanding of local context and direct feedback to improve the implementation along the way.

Citizen ethnography is therefore a potent method to empower non-ethnographers to make sense of their experiences and enact future change. By enabling citizens to reflect and capture thick descriptions of their environment, analyse their own data and decide on a course of action for their future, we suggest that citizen ethnography can lead to successful change activities which are suited to a given context. Citizen ethnography therefore attempts to create more sustainable systems change, positive outcomes, replicable and scalable structures, greater knowledge and understanding, as well as processes that are envisioned, defined, designed, anticipated and enacted by the very people who are affected the most. Citizen ethnography transforms the method of enquiry to appreciate the dynamic nature of change and causality, creating an environment where adaptation, safe critique, evolution and supportive relationships are the norm.

We therefore situate citizen ethnography as a significant approach that valorises the lived experience in understanding complex social phenomena. We believe that, in doing ethnography, the setting of future directions and outcomes should benefit and be driven by the very people being ‘researched’. We feel strongly that ethnography has plenty to offer society, and sharing it with citizens who can benefit is one way to achieve this. We also think that this is a necessary direction for our profession to not only have positive social impact but also for future professional relevance beyond being typecast in organisational settings as insight professionals and researchers of “real” people (Nafus and Anderson, 2006).

How is it different from other approaches?

To experienced researchers and tertiary trained ethnographers, the involvement of non-ethnographers in ethnographic processes is hardly a new concept. In many applied settings, forms of community engagement such as citizen assemblies, cultural probes and co-design have at their centre the ethnographer leading, making sense of and intervening on behalf of the community. In this paradigm, the “expert” ethnographer is the agent of change, whereas in the method we are proposing members of the community become the agents of change.

Citizen ethnography perhaps shares the most with existing approaches to participatory ethnography (Grace-McCaskey et al. 2019; Haynes and Tanner 2015; Hemment 2007; Kral 2012; McDougall 2013). Both are deeply concerned with global/structural inequality, and both are also attentive to the power relations inherent within the research encounter (Hemment 2007). However, whilst participatory ethnography offers the researcher a framework for engaging in collaborative research practice (Hemment 2007), citizen ethnography offers the researcher a framework for stepping away and handing over the research to the very people who seek to benefit from the study. Importantly, citizen ethnography aims to equip community members with ethnographic skills to be almost completely community-led. By democratising the skills of the researcher, citizen ethnography helps members of a community to harness the innate wisdom of a community to solve its own challenges so they can work towards realising a truly community-led future.

In fact, citizen ethnography has perhaps been emerging for some time, but under different labels. For instance at EPIC 2013, Ichikawa, Tamura and Akama shared an example of a “model of participatory social innovation” that they experimented with as part of research conducted with Japanese prefectures impacted by the Great Eastern Japanese Earthquake in 2011. The team of ethnographers encountered a situation where, after months of work, their findings and recommendations for economic recovery for the prefectures were politely regarded as “good ideas” but attempts to “hand over” their research and actions to the community found that “no one was willing to receive it on the other end” (2013). As a result, the research team decided to shift to an experimental combination of participatory action research, that situated people as research partners and change agents, with transformation design to identify possible social innovations and community-led interventions. This new combination of approaches embraced both the inherent knowledge and inventiveness of communities to tackle challenges. The result was an increase in local connections and information sharing across sub-groups within the community, increased sense of local pride, new vocational pathways, intergenerational learning and new sources of income for local businesses. In their paper, Ichikawa et al (2013) concluded that the success of their experiment was the combination of approaches which focussed on the community gathering information and making sense of it, developing and utilising skills within the community enabling community-led innovation to emerge, and the potential for change to be nurtured.

We suggest that there are two important, and beneficial distinctions of citizen ethnography over other participatory approaches. Firstly, citizen ethnography has the potential to leave communities better equipped to navigate possible futures beyond a one-off, moment-in-time research project. Similar to Ichikawa et al’s (2013) experimental approach, we expect citizen ethnography to increase individual and collective skills (such as self-awareness, critical thinking, data collection and analysis) and lead to healthier, more resilient communities (including greater tolerance and understanding of diverse perspectives, the establishment of new and/or deepening of existing relationships, building a source of local pride). The second benefit we suggest for equipping citizens to do their own ethnography, are increased chances of successful and suitable change to occur. This, we propose, is because the community trusts that the process and results of the research are truly grounded in the reality of the community, they are community-led and owned, not just community informed as is more often the case in traditional consultation processes. Additionally, the knowledge gained through this style of research stays in the community rather than leaving with the external researcher. This intimacy, involvement and embodiment of experience being elicited by a community member (that is, the citizen ethnographer) we think can actually compel people to contribute more honestly and authentically and to move more purposefully towards the changes needed for community betterment.

The downside to citizen ethnography is the fact that robust ethnography takes time, as does learning how to manage, process and analyse the vast amounts of information gathered. Similarly, gaining a level of self-awareness of the cultural lens through which information is gathered and interpreted also requires an investment of time. However, established processes from user-centred design and systems thinking can provide useful methodological tools to operationalise and speed up the process (Haines 2009; Hawe, Shiell, and Riley 2009; Irwin 2018; McKercher 2020). We outline how this can be done at in a later section of this paper; “Example project: Anthropology, Suicide and Citizen Ethnography”.

Who Should Collect and Make Sense of Thick Data?

When attempting to understand complex sociological phenomenon, as ethnographers often are, we need to open our field of enquiry to include not just the objective and subjective forms of knowledge that can be captured through traditional means, we also need to include the shared/social and the embodied forms of knowledge (Madsbjerg 2017; Roberts 2020). Madsbjerg (2017) states that having access to all these four domains of knowledge (objective, subjective, shared/social and embodied) are essential in the process he calls “sensemaking” (although where we talk about embodied knowledge, he talks of the sensory). This process of sensemaking is central to the way in which humans “make-sense” of the lived experience of a phenomena – parts of our experience that are not easily accessible through conscious or verbal means – the parts that are felt and known and intuited deep in our bodies – the parts that are not easily represented through statistical means alone (Roberts 2020). It is precisely because human existence and meaning is not simply understood via mental constructs (found in the domains of subjective and objective knowledge) that humans have used culture as an embodied means of sensemaking. Culture is the mechanism through which we marshal our embodied knowledge to make sense of our lived experience and existential struggles. Living is experiencing, experiencing is learning and processing, and culture is the lens we use to filter those experiences in order to make sense of them. We perform that culture and embed it in our bodies through rituals, practices, stories, symbols, relationships and interactions.

As such, embodied knowledge and “thick”, ethnographic data can only be gained from direct human experience. This is why we as anthropologists spend years in the field for our PhDs, using a phenomenological approach to study an individual’s lived-experience of the world. In the applied realm, we frequently try to balance “being there” and immersive activities to experience as much as clients or employers will permit based on project timeframes and budget constraints.

If the value of embodied knowledge is recognised in both academic and applied realms for its insight into a phenomena, the question arises about what is the best way to ‘collect’ embodied knowledge? As mentioned above, in the academic and applied sense in ethnographic engagements, this often involves the ethnographer being the instrument to collect and make sense of phenomena. Citizen ethnography aims to collect embodied knowledge another way – by equipping those already with the lived knowledge with the skills to reflect, make sense of and document the knowledge they already have about a phenomena. By having a lived experience of a culture, citizens use their bodies as the information sensing, processing, analysing and synthesising tool to become both the operator and the instrument of data collection (May 1997).

By now ethnographers reading this may be feeling uncomfortable, perhaps even asking the inevitable question: Can anyone be an ethnographic researcher? If so, then what becomes of us as professional ethnographers who have been trying so hard to establish the legitimacy of our skillset and professional expertise? Appadurai (2006) notes that research is a term given to describe the general capacity to make inquiries into things we need to know but that aren’t known yet (p.167). All humans, he argues, are in fact researchers in that they systematically engage in gaining new knowledge to make decisions, especially in contemporary society. Additionally, he proposes that being able to research is in fact a special kind of human right that ultimately leads to a democratic society by equipping citizens with research capability. “Viewing research in a rights-based perspective”, he argues, “is to force us to take some distance from the normal, professionalised view of research, and derive some benefit from regarding research as a much more universal, elementary and improvable capacity” (p.168). Furthermore, research enables citizens “to approach their city and their lives as objects of study, and as contexts susceptible to change” (p.175) which provides a degree of empowerment and agency over their future. Building capacity in research also builds social and cultural capabilities to plan, hope and achieve socially valuable goals (defined as “the capacity to aspire”)(p.176). Framed in this way, equipping communities with ethnographic research skills via citizen ethnography enables them to gain the capacity to make informed decisions about their future.

By supporting community members to produce and gather thick ethnographic data we can also empower them to tell their own stories in a medium with which they feel comfortable, therefore diminishing the “hierarchical relationship between the researcher and the researched, ‘offering a feminist practice of “looking alongside” rather than “looking at” research subjects’ (Kindon 2003, p.143)” (as quoted in Haynes and Tanner 2015, p.359). As Haynes recounts, in her study with young people dealing with environmental disasters in the Philippines, methods aligned with citizen ethnography, such as participatory video, enabled groups to research, document and raise awareness of risk, and use screening events to mobilise and advocate for risk reduction measures in their communities (Haynes and Tanner 2015). In particular, it demonstrated that these methods enabled a deeper and more complex level of analysis previously unavailable to professional researchers (Haynes and Tanner 2015).

The role of the ethnographer and why it matters now?

Communicating the value of ethnographic research, and by association the value of the ethnographer, has at times been problematic as ethnography has made inroads into business contexts. During this time, the EPIC community has been a place where these challenges are raised and discussed. One of the recurring themes has been the concerns surrounding how ethnography is defined in organisations and what that means for ethnography’s significance and relevance to business in the long term. For instance, Nafus and Anderson (2006) traced how ethnography became defined as research conducted in “real” environments with “real” people” to find out what’s “really” happening as part of it’s trajectory in organisations. While the “real framework” was a useful and successful starting point, they argue that it has become a limitation on the ethnographic ‘brand’ (2006). Similarly, Bezaitis (2009) noted that across roles in business strategy, marketing and product development, the association of the ethnographic researcher with “users” and “real people” remains strong. Both papers challenge us to expand to new frontiers in order to grow beyond these definitions.

Entangled with the challenges of conducting ethnography in organisations, is its close association with design thinking. Madsbjerg, in the EPIC keynote in 2014, called for ethnography to “distance itself from its partner of the last decade”. While design thinking has been a “nice marriage” (2014) that has helped ethnography to find homes in organisations and demonstrate its value to organisations, Madsbjerg argues that a far better application of ethnographers skills are in providing cultural perspectives to big issues, including those in business environments. Criticisms of design thinking have also been gathering pace within the very organisational contexts that enthusiastically adopted them. In a recent Harvard Business Review article Natasha Iskander (2018) argues that design thinking is “at its core a strategy to preserve and defend the status-quo” and thus hardly an approach suited to tackling complex social issues and change. Worse still, she argues that as a method it: privileges the designer’s abilities and perspectives above the people they should be serving; positions problem solving as the remit of the powerful with certain skills, and; credentials and limits genuine participation (2018). Even in more collaborative forms of design thinking, “the designer or policy maker ultimately decides which ideas and preferences are included in the solution” (2018).

As these discussions and critiques have been building for quite some time, the need for our role as ethnographers to change and adapt has been identified, but what is perhaps less clear is how we need to move forward. We suggest that employing the tools, training and perspectives of ethnography to empower others via citizen ethnography is one avenue whereby the value of ethnography can be applied and realised beyond existing roles, associations, frameworks and limitations.

The simple fact is that, as professional ethnographers, we have all been taught to “do” ethnography by someone, in some way. Logic must then follow that it is a teachable methodology. With the appropriate resources and skills, why could it not be taught to groups who wish to ethnographically understand themselves? Moreover, as we have already stated, if this methodology has the potential to lead to better outcomes for the communities we work with, might there not be an ethical obligation to utilise it? In citizen ethnography our role shifts to skill-builders, coaches and facilitators in transferring ethnographic research knowledge and skills to citizens. We move beyond researching in order to produce outputs and “deliverables” such as research reports, journey maps, personas, blueprints, product roadmaps, service design improvements, user requirements etc., and towards facilitating ways for understanding to emerge, solutions to become known and meaningful change to occur.

When reflecting on his own field work in South India, one of the authors of this paper himself employed community members to help with data collection (Badami 2010, 2014). We are therefore highly cognisant of how community members collaborated to help make sense of the data that they themselves gathered as part of the overall research process. We therefore openly welcome the fact that ethnographers are often led and guided to their cultural understanding of a field site by their interlocutors in the field who often want to authorise their own forms of representation. After all, the people with the real resources for understanding culture are the ones with a lived experience of that culture.

As such, in our conceptualisation of citizen ethnography, we ask the question “What defines an ethnographer?” Is it an online course? A PhD? Professional practice? Lived experience? More importantly, what is the role of the ethnographer, and who has the authority to perform that role? And finally, what do we seek to gain by holding on to that title and that role? In fact, we believe that the skillset is more important than the title of ethnographer, and are more concerned with unpacking and articulating the dispositions required to collect the type of data that is relevant in complex social studies.

Employing the tools, training and perspectives of ethnography to empower others

Project context

Kiama, a small rural town in New South Wales, Australia, has experienced a disproportionately high rate of youth suicide over the past 11 years. A range of activities and initiatives are underway in Kiama, however, since COVID, this problem intensified, and in 2020, the community suffered the loss of several young people. The issue has energised a community-led coalition of organisations to understand why this is happening and what to do about it.

Why citizen ethnography

In studies of successful community-driven interventions for suicide and self-harm prevention, it is essential to use a variety of data sources (including death certificates, youth risk surveys, emergency call data, and hospital discharges) to understand the phenomena of what is known as “suicide contagion” (Hacker et al. 2008). Suicide contagion is “a process by which exposure to the suicide or suicidal behaviour of one or more persons influences others to commit or attempt suicide” (Hacker et al. 2008). Contagion is deeply social, so we need appropriate and relevant methods to understand it. We know that social, psychological and physical proximity affects contagion, and research supports the need for varied methodology and data sources – including ethnography to help to get a more nuanced picture in order to inform more effective and targeted interventions (Hacker et al. 2008). The simple truth is that getting data on the emotional and psychological state of young people who are actually at risk is almost impossible through statistical means, especially if we want to intervene before a self-harm or suicide event has occurred. Thick ethnographic data entails affording greater attention to social, economic and political factors that influence social vulnerability (Haynes and Tanner 2015).

As a team of anthropologists and public health researchers, one of whom is an embedded practitioner within the Kiama community, we are in the process of undertaking a multi-disciplinary study that goes beyond surveys and standardised approaches to suicide prevention. Through participatory engagements with young people and people working with young people (including teachers and youth workers), we want to see how ethnographic methods can be used as tools to both understand the issues facing young people in Kiama and to enable young people and other community members to develop their own solutions and strategies for change. Our aims and objectives are:

1.  To describe how young people in the community understand, experience, and embody social connectivity, personal distress, and identify deficits in their community.
2.  To describe the role and value of community mechanisms and event-based interventions to mobilise social connections.
3.  To examine the fit between existing mechanisms for well-being education and local contextual considerations to determine whether or not those mechanisms enhance the experience of connectedness and well-being among young people.

A method of community engagement is currently being prototyped and developed that emerges from the ground-up, focusing on the lived experiences of community members, and which centres the voices of young people through a range of ethnographic techniques that address the explicit power dynamics between researcher and “participant”.

The project and process so far

The project has been in various stages during the writing of this paper. We provide an outline of some of the key steps in the project so far, starting from the very beginning.

1.  Community social challenge identified

In 2020, after a series of suicides in close temporal proximity to each other, the Kiama community very quickly mobilised around the shared experience of grief, loss and social disruption. It was clear that members of the community were actively seeking answers, solutions and ways to manage this crisis. Underpinning this was a desire to “do something” to reconcile the overwhelming sense of powerless felt by many. Community members sought connection with each other to attempt to make sense of their loss and confusion.

2.  Community initiates interventions for change

A number of community organisations and local action groups formed and mobilised in order to initiate interventions for change. In particular, one group, The Kiama and District Stronger Community (KDSC) formed in response to the general perception that what was lacking was good leadership and coordination of existing services. Orchestrating a coordinated community-wide response is critical for success in understanding and preventing suicide and self-harm. Community coalitions are important vehicles for mobilizing community members and exponentially expanding the reach of any efforts (Hacker et al. 2008). However, in line with Chatterjee’s (2004, 2008) work on the role of civil society in the context of neo-liberal development, non-state actors within the community (with considerable social, cultural, symbolic…and economic capital) started intervening to “act like states”. Chatterjee (2004, 2008) reminds us that irrespective of the intentions, these non-state actors intervene in matters once reserved for government, are wholly self-appointed and have not undergone any democratic process. It is important to reiterate that the KDSC is not the only organisation who mobilised, and what occurred was a range of community groups claiming authority, legitimacy and attempting to establish their position within the social fabric of collective community action. It is in this context that we believe that the democratisation of ethnographic practice speaks to a deeper issue surrounding the politics of engagement, the “writing of culture” in the politics of representation (Clifford 1986), and the authority of knowledge in health interventions (Lupton 1997; Mosse 2004).

It is important to state, at this point, that one of the authors is a member of the KDSC and this paper is a continuation of his own critical reflection of the methodologies used to bring about change in his community.

3.  Baseline data collected through the Community Mental Health Index (cMHI)

As a result of initial meetings with the KDSC, a Town Hall meeting was held to bring the community together around finding a way forward. This event was both a symbol of solidarity and collective action. In other communities, this collaborative approach has been an important mechanism in the successful response to suicide contagion (Hacker et al. 2008). But importantly, this event also served as an opportunity to engage the community in a baseline survey.

The Community Mental Health Index (cMHI) is a quantitative survey designed by professionals within the community. It was used to identify strengths and areas of improvement to lift mental health literacy in Kiama. The cMHI measured four areas that influence mental health literacy: Improved Recognition; Reduced Stigma; Help-Seeking Behaviour; and Mental Health Promotion. The survey measured how individuals perform in these areas according to four of our most important support systems: Me; My Family; My Friends; and My Community. The intent was to use the cMHI to understand where Kiama is doing well, and what areas we need to focus on, so that we can catch mental health issues earlier, and lend necessary support to struggling individuals, their friends and family, and the community in which we all live.

The survey facilitated the development of an infographic (Figure 1) that helped to show the community that the KDSC was committed to better understanding this situation and doing something about it. Strategic analysis of the results enabled the development of four key priorities in our community response:

1.  More events to reduce stigma and increase awareness of services in the area;
2.  Increased local mental health support services in the community;
3.  A Lighthouse Leadership training program for coaches and mentors in the community; and
4.  Making sure that young people’s voices are heard.

Figure 1. Slide from the presentation of the cMHI results showing the infographic created from the survey, used with permission from the KDSC.

All these activities are in line with evidence-based successful interventions to deal with an increase in suicide within a community (Ridani et al. 2016; Maskill et al. 2005; Hacker et al. 2008). What the use of quantitative, statistical data allowed was for the community to begin the process recovery and rehabilitation (towards resilience) in a way that drew from community consultation and mobilised collective action. The challenge with the survey was that it was primarily quantitative and sought to identify correlations, but could not point to any of the complex causal factors. It was also not wholly representative of the community, and in particular did not include the voice of young people. In addition, in the context of this gap in representation, the infographic has become an artefact that has the potential to hold claims to objectivity, immediately reminiscent of Tess Lea’s (2008) work on health interventions in Indigenous Australia. Lea (2008) examines a culture of community development that needs to create the appearance of action. Her work shows how benevolent efforts to improve health have brought about unexpected co-dependency’s and tragic failures and talks about a culture of remedialism that is “unconsciously geared towards its own reproduction” (Lea 2008: x).

The lead up of events to this moment was itself a process where community members authorised their own research, engaged in their own analysis and used it to drive action. This is a very important step in the dissolution of power dynamics between “researcher” and “participant”. However, it was clear that because of the kinds of community members involved (concerned community members, many connected to the business community, who were self-appointed as leaders and representatives of this change process) new dynamics of power and contestation were emerging. We were falling into the trap of providing a corporate “culture change” strategy to a community problem, on the one hand, and reproducing a bureaucratic culture of remedialism on the other (Lea 2008). We therefore needed to interrogate the existing data and identify not only what it told us, but more importantly, what and who it left out.

4.   “Citizen ethnography” program developed to build skills and gather “thick data”

In following the process of how the KDSC and the Kiama Community have begun to make sense of their grief and loss, a big priority was about empowering the community in the processes and decisions that meant the most to them. Whilst community engagement is not a new thing, we hope to turn up the dial to see communities working together, and for each other, in a way that encourages each person to witness and deeply understand the lived experiences of others as part of the decision-making process. For this to work, what is needed is the development of a system that is more genuinely reflective of people, their concerns and their aspirations.

As mentioned, some of the priorities that came out of the cMHI were to: hold more events to reduce stigma and increase awareness of services in the area; to deliver a Lighthouse Leadership training program for mentors in the community; and to make sure that young people’s voices are heard. All these priorities are consistent with evidence-based interventions to deal with an increase in suicide within a community (Ridani et al. 2016; Maskill et al. 2005; Hacker et al. 2008). We have leveraged these 3 priorities and are using them as opportunities in our implementation of “citizen ethnography” in Kiama.

Some of the events that were planned and have already delivered include: “brave conversations” to talk about death, suicide, grief, loss and a whole range of other factors affecting young people and parents of young people; community gatherings and festivals; a youth mental health forum; a life skills program; a change-maker program that gives young people the skills to be the drivers of their own change; mental health first aid training, and community leadership workshops. One of the key components of the program is to train and empower young people and people working with young people (including teachers, youth workers and trusted mentors) to deliver these programs whilst simultaneously taking on the role of citizen ethnographer.

Drawing from the work of Hawe et al. (2009) we are theorising these events as interventions that are situated within the complex system that is the Kiama community. As such, these events and interventions build upon each other over time, thus strengthening the relationships (or links) between the nodes within the community and enabling a social process of meaning making and communal enquiry to unfold. Conventional preventative interventions focus over simplistically on what information is delivered or what activities are done (Hawe, Shiell, and Riley 2009). By seeing these events and interventions as existing within a complex system, we hold that the relationships developed and the meanings created within these social experiences are often more important than the content being delivered. Here, the act of coming together is itself a therapeutic intervention as well as a potent symbol and method of developing community resilience. This new conceptualisation has significant implications for how interventions should be evaluated and how they could be made more effective (Hawe, Shiell, and Riley 2009). But it also has significant implications on how we might gather data from these deeply social engagements about the shared experience of existential crisis on a community level. With this new paradigm of assessing and valuing community events, we can see these interventions as not just evidence-based, but also “evidence-making” (Rhodes and Lancaster 2019). The challenge remains; how does one ethnographer, or even a team of ethnographers access and record the vast amounts of information that is generated out of these encounters? This is where citizen ethnography comes in.

The collection of thick data, through the method of citizen ethnography that we propose, employs a method of facilitation which enables the creation of user-generated ethnographic outputs. The sites for data collection range from a para-ethnography of community events, to ethnographic film as a community-generated artifact, to visual storyboards that are generated during workshops and deliverable programs. For example, members of the community create films and documentaries which are screened in a festival to bring people together to explore issues, voice concerns or simply to be creative and tell stories (Haynes and Tanner 2015; McDougall 2013). Another example is where workshop participants give insights into their lived experience through trauma-informed facilitation styles that engender trust and rapport through the establishment of emotional and psychological safety (Coady-International-Institute 2012; Haines 2009; McKercher 2020). These outputs are then reflected upon, contested, negotiated and validated through the bringing together of multiple perspectives. Our method of facilitation combines participant-observation (May 1997) with embodied facilitation techniques that are grounded in the phenomenological method. They apply principles similar to that described by Madsbjerg (2017) and Roberts (2020), and focuses on the embodiment of knowledge with specific methods to extract this knowledge from participants.