Mapping the Labour of Participation: a collaborative autoethnography

This chapter explores the Labour of Participation (LOP) as an embodied, emotional, social and temporal demand placed on disabled people when they are invited to participate in research. Drawing on my PhD project, Mapping the Labour of Participation, the chapter examines how participatory research can reproduce inequity when it assumes that participation is inherently good, accessible or empowering. Instead, I argue that participation must be understood as something that is designed, and therefore as something that can also design exclusion, fatigue, harm and unequal forms of labour into the research process.

Through a collaborative autoethnographic approach, the project uses diaries, story gathering, mapping and a co-created board-game-inspired research artefact to explore how disabled people experience participation across everyday life and research contexts. The chapter reflects on how these methods were designed to reduce, redistribute and make visible the labour involved in participation, while also creating outputs that collaborators could shape and keep beyond the research encounter.

By centring mobility, access and lived experience, the chapter proposes the Labour of Participation as both a critique of extractive participatory research and a methodological tool for designing more careful, mobile and accountable research practices.