"I Chose to Put my Ego in the Closet for a while, but Struggled to Find It Again”: Backstage Reflections on Participatory Action Research and Resilience

‘Unwelcome truths’ are central to the empowerment and transformation aims of Participatory Action Research (PAR). They confront dominant narratives, challenge power relations, and reveal hidden structures of influence. At the same time, creating communicative spaces in which unwelcome truths can surface is rarely straightforward. Researchers play a key role in creating these spaces and face several challenges. These include ethical responsibilities, power imbalances, emotional and psychological barriers, and external pressures such as time limits and institutional demands. Researchers’ responses to these challenges are shaped by their methodological choices and positionality. These two factors directly influence how communicative spaces are created and sustained. Nevertheless, reflexive accounts of researchers’ methodological choices and positionality in PAR remain scarce in the literature. This scarcity limits accountability, transparency, and learning, which are principles integral to PAR. In this article we therefore present a behind-the-scenes account of a Dutch PAR project on resilience and experiences of loss. We draw on Goffman’s frontstage/backstage metaphor to examine the tension between public accounts of PAR and unpublished realities that are often personal, complex, and morally challenging. On the frontstage, we analyse how communicative spaces were created in meetings with co-researchers and the difficulties this process entailed. Backstage, we examine methodological challenges and the complex positionality of researchers. We explore these issues in greater depth using the validity claims from Habermas’s theory of communicative action. This provides a useful lens for analysing how unifying factors can emerge in communicative spaces despite the challenges faced. Finally, we conclude by considering the value of PAR for resilience research and how insights from this project may inform future studies.