My doctoral research, The Socio-Spatial Dynamics of Gang Violence in Bermuda, examines how gang violence develops in a small island context characterised by limited space, dense networks, and enduring inequalities. It also explores how violence is lived, understood, and governed under these conditions. Over a year, I combined Participatory Action Research (PAR) with interviews involving policy and practice stakeholders, including government and agency officials, alongside individuals with direct lived experience of gang violence. The participatory exercises helped generate early themes. They shaped the study’s direction, informed interview prompts, and were revisited iteratively to reflect on emerging insights with participants.  In this blog, I reflect on how PAR-informed methods were used in my study and their practical implications within a doctoral research design.

PAR is commonly understood as an approach that involves those most affected by a problem in shaping how it is understood and addressed, emphasising collaboration, reflexivity, and action-oriented emancipatory social change. At the same time, what constitutes ‘real’ or ‘full’ PAR remains contested. Some scholars reserve the term for projects involving shared control over research questions, design, analysis, and action, while others recognise more pragmatic approaches that incorporate participatory elements without full co-production at every stage.

My study is not a PAR project, in the sense of joint control over research decisions and outputs. Instead, it deliberately incorporates PAR-informed components within a broader qualitative design. These include participant-led exercises, iterative feedback loops, sustained engagement with a community organisation, and opportunities for participants to reflect on emerging themes and solutions. The approach is grounded in a transformative research paradigm that centres power, social justice, and the inclusion of marginalised voices in knowledge production. It draws on a pluralist analytic approach that treats community, institutional, and structural accounts as distinct forms of evidence, without assuming that one is inherently more credible. In Bermuda, institutional voices often dominate discussions of gang violence and ‘solutions’, while system-impacted young Black men, who are the most at risk, are often less considered. Incorporating PAR elements offered a way to partially rebalance this dynamic without overstating the level of co-production that could realistically be sustained within a doctoral design.

I conducted three interactive PAR exercises through Transitional Community Services (TCS), a local charity which works with marginalised young men in Bermuda. A Root Cause Analysis exercise invited the young men to identify perceived causes and effects of gang violence. An Islandness Mapping exercise explored how small-island conditions, including smallness and isolation, shape gang violence and everyday life. The exercise highlighted both challenges and strengths of island life, including the pressures of limited options, intense social interconnectedness, and lack of privacy, alongside closeness, familiarity, and community support. These sessions directly shaped the interview prompts used with stakeholders and individuals with lived experience of gang violence. I then returned to TCS for a final exercise in which participants reflected on themes emerging from the interviews and discussed what they considered meaningful responses. The PAR exercises were built into the research design from the outset and were inspired by earlier participatory models used in Caribbean research.

An early consultation with TCS staff helped me see how research language can carry power. When I described the later interview stages using the term ‘elite stakeholders’, a common label in research methods training for high-status or senior participants, a member of staff flagged that, in Bermuda’s colonial context, the label ‘elite’ can be read as class legitimation, implying that certain actors are naturally entitled to speak for the island. I adopted ‘senior stakeholders’ thereafter. It was a reminder that consultation built into participatory work can surface tensions like this around language early, before labels quietly shape how authority and credibility are framed.

Another moment corrected a basic assumption. I expected ‘marginalised’ to align with limited formal education and material disadvantage. Several participants had qualifications, and some had private school or university backgrounds, yet still described exclusion and vulnerability. That disconnect sharpened my analysis. It clarified that marginality in Bermuda is relational and contextual, not a straightforward proxy for class or schooling.

For me, the value of incorporating PAR elements was methodological and relational. In the final session, the young men described the exercises as a rare space where they felt genuinely heard and not judged, particularly in a group setting that supported safe, shared reflection. While this did not constitute a structural change, it reinforced the idea that the research process can be conducted in ways that are respectful, grounded, and accountable to those most affected. This was a meaningful outcome of the research design and a reminder that, within a doctoral project, participatory success is not limited to the thesis produced but also lies in the relational and practical change the research process can create, even when academic and community priorities do not fully align.