Democratising qualitative research methods: Reflections on Hong Kong, Taiwan and China

It was a great honour to be invited to review the June 2017 special issue of Qualitative Research examining democratic research practices. As social work scholars focusing on issues of gender, sexuality and intimacy, we have long been interested in how power and hierarchy in knowledge production serve to marginalise service users, practitioners and research participants. Here, we draw on our personal experience to consider what is at stake in attempting to democratise qualitative research methodologies in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The special issue usefully categorises participatory qualitative studies into five approaches: ‘transformative’, ‘inclusive’, ‘co-produced, ‘indigenous’ and ‘care’ful’ (feminist) research. This categorisation serves as a good starting point for examining the extent to which our own studies achieve the goal of democratic knowledge production. What do the five categories mean – and how are the approaches they entail practised – in the social and political contexts of Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China? In addressing that question, we reflect upon what we have learnt from both our own collaboration and that with the participants of our studies on the 2014 Umbrella Movement to explore the personal consequences of social movement participation for Hong Kong families (Ho et al., 2017b), Hong Kong men (Ho et al., 2018) and young female activists (Ho et al., 2017a) and to initiate a dialogue with the issue’s contributors. We discuss some of the opportunities and challenges of confronting the western/northern dominance of academia, from western theoretical hegemony and the valorisation of science to the constraints of knowledge production and dissemination within an authoritarian regime. We propose that democratic knowledge production does not simply require a shift in ethical (recognising how knowledge-making often disadvantages the less powerful), epistemological (recognising how knowledge is produced from the standpoint of those in power) and practical (seeing how knowledge can be used to improve policy) practices, but is also political: it constitutes a political statement, set of political practices and form of social activism, particularly in politically turbulent times when public opinion, civic education and participatory social science all find themselves in jeopardy.