Normative approaches to conducting participatory research abound (see e.g., Cornwall, 2011; Burns, Howard & Ospina, 2021), as is the case for empirical accounts of participatory communication research experiences (see e.g. Dyll-Myklebust & Zwane, 2015 and Thomas, Eggins, & Papoutsaki, 2016). Variously defined, participatory research has been a staple of communication and media studies with a focus on social change for decades (see e.g. Dervin & Huesca, 1997; Bordenave, 2006; Thomas & van de Fliert, 2014; Jiménez-Martínez, Tufte & Suzina, 2020).

In this presentation I will reconsider taken-for-granted ideas about what ‘participatory communication research’ is/should be by reflecting on the differences between designing a research project that depends on the participation of human subjects, getting formal ethical clearance, and putting the design to the test of conducting fieldwork in critical conditions in interaction with those human subjects.

Based on qualitative data from (and on the process of doing reflexivity about, see Dean, 2017), a research project that studies the everyday communicative practices of women in Argentina (CORDIS, 2020), I will deconstruct the notion of participation implicit in my initial research design and show how I reconstructed it to acknowledge lessons learnt from dialogue with the thirty-six (36) women I interviewed in 2021-2022, in the long aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the context of a dire socioeconomic situation. As I will show, acknowledging that participation starts the moment that the subjects of our investigation agree to volunteering their time to meet with us may help us reconsider what “researching with care” (Phillips, Christensen-Strynø & Frølunde, 2021; Brannelly & Barnes, 2022) means in practice. Such disposition is crucial at a time when qualitative research requiring the willing participation of human beings takes place in the context of increasing precariousness (Lorey, 2015).