From Methods to Meaning: Community-Engaged Research in Practice

This panel explores how researchers integrate community-engaged approaches into their work and how these methodologies shape both research processes and outcomes. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and research trajectories, the discussion will reflect on the opportunities, challenges, and ethical considerations involved in conducting research in collaboration with communities.

Panelists will share personal reflections on the methodological choices that shaped their research journeys, the communities they engaged with, and the institutional or practical constraints they encountered along the way. The conversation will also examine how community-engaged approaches can foster more meaningful connections between academia and society.

Key themes include:

• Methodological choices and research trajectories 
• Building relationships with communities through research 
• Ethics, impact, and the purpose of engaged scholarship 
• New insights and outcomes generated through collaborative approaches 

The session will begin with short reflections from each panelist, followed by a moderated discussion and audience exchange.

Speakers

Duha Ceylan (junior researcher) - Duha Ceylan (they/she) is a feminist and abolitionist researcher completing a PhD on care, migration, and racialized childhood in Europe. Their work bridges academic theory and lived experience, exploring rupture, refusal, and accountability in politicized relational spaces through decolonial, queer, and poetic frameworks of transformative justice.

Marta Guarda , Senior Researcher at the Institute for Applied Linguistics and the Centre for Migration and Societal Change of Eurac Research works in the field of plurilingualism and plurilingualism education, with a focus on the promotion of socially just forms of education through the valorisation of school children’s full linguistic repertoires and knowledges, particularly through translanguaging and transknowledging pedagogies.

Moderators

Alba Planchart , PhD candidate at Malmö University & IMISCOE PhD Board Member

Ana Beatriz Pelicioni , PhD candidate at University of Warsaw & IMISCOE PhD Board Member