Participatory Poetries Against Othering—Creative Writing and Social Literary Practice with Displaced Women in Lebanon

Abstract

This article examines collaboratively produced poems by displaced Lebanese and Syrian women created within a Participatory Arts-Based Research (PABR) project in Akkar, North Lebanon. The study asks how creative writing pedagogy and participatory research methods can reduce forms of ‘othering’ that may arise in top-down research on conflict and displacement. The project combined creative writing workshop practice with participatory research methods, including joint analysis workshops with NGO partners and participants. Writing prompts, group workshops, and subsequent collaborative translation resulted in reflective and creative texts drawn from lived experience. The work documents war, migration, economic hardship, and fractured social relations. Close readings show how metaphor, dialogue, and narrative fragments function as acts of self-narration rather than passive testimony. Participants describe writing as a way of thinking and coping, and several texts foreground storytelling as a relational process. The study argues that Creative Writing practice, based on the participatory tenets of the ‘workshop’ can support shared knowledge production and ethical engagement. The writings suggest that a counter-archive can emerge in which storytelling can resist victimising narratives and can instead, within a social literary practice participatory paradigm, model new forms of collaborative reflection.

1. Introduction

This article examines a cycle of collaboratively produced poems by displaced Lebanese and Syrian women whose work emerges from conditions of conflict, migration and social exclusion. Set against the concerns with representations of otherness which are the focus of this Special Issue, the poems articulate embodied and affective registers of gendered precarity within contemporary situations—which though termed ‘post-conflict’ at the start of the project (2021) would not be so described as such at the time of writing (February 2026). I argue here that the poetry performs a dual function: it documents lived experiences of war, loss, and economic vulnerability, while simultaneously enacting forms of resilience, cultural memory, and self-narration. The women’s voices foreground the gendered labour of survival, caregiving, maintaining grief rituals and seeking better futures, as well as the fractured social relations that can occur during migrant experience. This is work which refuses to be contained by narratives of potentially ‘othering’ victimhood. Instead, these writers model storytelling as a ‘gentle way in,’ a method of thinking-while-writing that generates a counter-archive of survival.

Participatory Arts-Based Research (PABR) can be defined as a set of transdisciplinary approaches to the creation of shared knowledge that uses or adapts the tenets of creative arts within research contexts. As Patricia Leavy puts it, PABR has ‘art making as a way of knowing’ at its core (Leavy 2018, p. 4). Further, Caitlin Nunn identifies the potential of PABR projects to create ‘an exceptional sphere of belonging’, one that supports understandings of PABR’s transformative potential (Nunn 2022, p. 253). Creative texts, arising as part of a research project in Lebanon, are discussed here within a positionality and ethical stance created by the scaffolds of PABR.

While the argument here rests on foregrounding the writings of participants, it is acknowledged that these are presented here in translation—both literally translated mainly from Arabic (with some from French)—but also that the texts exist within the nexus that characterises emergent translations and interpretations. To remain ethically aware of this, and of the fact that no fixed set of meanings will be possible, the discussions here of work by writer-participants are offered as one possible set of approaches to these texts. While all participants have given permission for publication and commentary, they remain anonymised by design, and it is indicative that within the discursive sections of evaluation questionnaires, several noted how they hoped their work might go on to inform, affect or inspire others.

When referring to these texts as possibly offering forms of counter-narrative, or an alternative to the kind of disclosure-based trauma writing which may risk aestheticising trauma, I am drawing on theorists across a range of disciplines who consider the contexts of writing and trauma. Cathy Caruth, in The Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, notes that trauma often resists direct and easily comprehensible narratives in contrast to the kind of linear, full-disclosure type of narrative, which may be more commercial but less ethically sound. Felman and Laub, in discussing ethical contexts for writing, note that writing emerging from trauma is often fragmented and fragmentary and by this very nature, it invites readers to become close readers, even co-witnesses, thereby inherently asserting agency (Felman and Laub 1992). Dominick LaCapra proposes that storytelling, as part of working through trauma, can include the processes of acting out, working over, and working through, thus appearing to provide a voice to the traumatic past (LaCapra 2001, p. 186). Leigh Gilmore theorises that pieces of memoir, when considered as testimony, can be more about the author’s ability to assert their own story than about their actual content, as fortitude becomes self-realised within the act of writing (Gilmore 2001). Caruth and others have long argued for an ethical repositioning within reflective and expressive writing, maintaining that supporting agency does not entail eliciting entirely autobiographical or explicit texts (Caruth 2016; LaCapra 2001). This project, in trying not to be prescriptive, attempted to support an ethical distance that might allow writing to emerge that could be ‘agentive’ and could be part of the kind of ethically engaged writing that represents trauma beyond more disclosure-based work (Braidotti 2019; Gilmore 2019).

These acts of generous sharing of the writing which appears in this paper is fully acknowledged here. Full texts in the original are available via the Open Access ORDO site referenced below.

The creative work here was part of the unexpected but welcome outcomes of the ‘Creative and Expressive Life Writing and Telling’ strand of the project, set in Akkar, North Lebanon, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) UK under Grant Ref: AH/V01045X/1. The research team consisted of the PI, Professor Siobhan Campbell, The Open University; Co-I Professor Meg Jensen, Kingston University; Dr. Sally Blackburn-Daniels, research fellow at The Open University; and Nadine Saba, Director of the Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), Akkar Network for Development (AND). Translations were completed using collaborative methods with the authors by Nadine Saba and Siobhan Campbell.

The project found that an ethical recognition of inequalities and power imbalances is best built in by combining established methods associated with the ‘writing workshop’ paradigm from the discipline of Creative Writing, along with a Participatory Arts-Based Research (PABR) model, which seeks to recognise the expertise, contributions, and actions of members of the community joining in that research. The typical creative writing workshop, in almost every arena, is characterized by an attention to creating a situation where participants are relieved of feeling that there’s only one correct way to approach the writing activity. Convenors typically try to define the ‘safe space’ of the workshop as one where all responses have validity, often being explicit about the fact that there are no wrong answers and that the process of engaging in writing is what makes all in the room (with an attempt to leave aside knowledge of each other’s place in wider power structures) equal in the undertaking at hand. Convenors will often draw on the fact that they too face the blank page as writers themselves and that the workshop may find itself interested in what happens during the process of writing together. That emphasis on process feeds into the understanding that the workshop is an occurrence, or ‘live event’ with spontaneous responses, group dynamics and an ongoing unfolding of collective experience. This, in turn, often leads to the group becoming reflective about the processes of the workshop itself, as well as about the writings that emerge within the workshop.

As Marja Liisa Swantz tells us, what makes research contextual is ‘participation and action’ (Swantz 2008, p. 33). She adds that as the ‘roles of the researchers and the researched’ interchange across the development of a project, ‘a mutual development of knowledge’ can take place (p. 38). Creative Writing as a discipline within the academy, has formalised and theorised how the writing ‘workshop’ has created the generative situation where a potential for potential is fostered, where shared knowledge emerges, and where the outcomes, the creative works themselves, are situated in a self-reflexive context of ‘becoming’, in that they are often accompanied by commentary on the processes which led to their creation. Workshops in the wider creative writing arena, within all sorts of community and third-sector situations, have consolidated these radically levelling approaches to ‘thinking together’, as they embed a willingness to allow a process to occur without necessarily knowing what the outcomes will be (Campbell 2012; Campbell and Jensen 2024). I have previously linked these insights to the development of a theory of applied writing practice, which recognises that shared workshops and shared experience of writing can create what Etienne Wenger has called communities of practice or CoPs (Wenger 1998, p. 73). CoPs are a natural outcome of working in participatory ways and what occurs under both the CoP and PABR monikers, something equally recognisable to academics in Creative Writing, is that active participation within workshops is a form of knowledge development, and that the description of what occurs during and as a result of participation leads to knowledge that can be shared. Such shared knowledge, moreover, can be seen to enhance emerging communities of practice through mutually beneficial social learning, and further, it may also have an impact on organisational adaptability and change (Campbell and Jensen 2020 passim).

Whereas ‘practice-based research’ has, in the creative writing context from which I come, been largely understood as research lodged in the individual writing practice of the researcher herself, here, I am widening the field of ‘writing practice’ to include creative and expressive writing interventions and opportunities created and/or curated by a writer-practitioner, typically meeting participants in social situations in their own locales. For a writer-practitioner, such activism is ‘literary’. This is due to the way it emerges from understandings of practice with, and in, texts, as well as understandings of how narrative imperatives operate in workshops in social situations. In addition, there is a recognition of the ways in which overarching metaphors, including the very ability to think metaphorically, affect the nature of the work and its outcomes.

Creative Writing’s emergence as a discipline is traced by D.G. Myers (2006) as a reaction in the late nineteenth century against the dominant philological approach, which addressed literature as a corpus of knowledge that already existed and was, in effect, ‘sealed’. It is in the late nineteenth-century development at Harvard of the teaching of rhetoric or ‘English composition’, but now with an emphasis on individual and imaginative responses, that we can see the connection between the rise of Creative Writing and that of experiments in experiential education (informed by John Dewey), as well as connections to practice which allowed new critical understandings to emerge, ‘conducted from within the conditions of literary practice’ (Myers 2006, p. 7). In my work as a literary activist, I maintain that creative and critical understandings can indeed emerge during social literary interventions, and this article presents one such case study of how this occurs.

2. Results

During the project, the NGO social workers (in effect, co-researchers) and the research team ran several joint analysis workshops (JAW). Those before beginning work in the field focused on needs analysis, looking at how current PSS (Psycho-social support services) used narrative interviews as a point of first interaction with clients, considering how these ‘stories’ often bore witness to lived experiences not expressed elsewhere, and establishing writing and telling mechanisms which might allow that story-telling to become more central to the work of the NGO social workers with beneficiaries. The JAW meetings during the field work itself looked at ongoing feedback from end-users, making small adjustments to allow for more writing prompts to be delivered via WhatsApp, for instance, as not all the participants could always attend the designated centres on the PSS days. Towards the end of the project, it became clear that a number of participants found that writing in groups which met at AND’s women-only safe spaces was a key moment in their week, variously described as leaving participants ‘feeling better about things’ or ‘more able to face the week ahead’ and the demand for continuation of the creative writing strand led to a small group electing to convene an ongoing group under the aegis of AND, using the by then established methods of workshopping. The work here is from this self-selecting group, while other elements of the project (including how certain other stories led to the pursuit of judicial outcomes) are outlined in the datasets mentioned above, along with questionnaire results and JAW transcripts.

The selection of the writings by participating women is presented here in the forms in which they arose (often including reflexive commentary on the writing process itself). It seemed essential, within a Special Issue considering the implications of ‘othering,’ to ensure that the writings were central to this article. It’s important to note for readers, though, that the collaborative translation methods may have led to emphases which were only partially intended by the original writer, as not all the writers participated in translation, though all did give informed permission for the translation process to occur. These women’s writings will be seen immediately as strong in imagery, as well as striking, honest and humbling. Below, within the ‘discussion’, I suggest readings of these works which focus on a set of possible meanings that most resonate with PABR undertakings and with issues of gender and otherness.

• Afterword            by Aliaa

• I love Lebanon, nowhere smells the same as Lebanon.
• Though our Civil war ended 1990, it’s not had closure,
• no one talks about why it ended, so did it really end,
• or is it waiting there to happen again? Could it become
• itself again, how would we know it if we saw that?
• We are brought up in a small proud country.
• We have a mentality that we use to be hardy and able.
• The old saying goes: You never throw a stone in the well
• that you drink from. We look after the small people,
• the small surroundings, the places and the people.
• But without self-reflection, we will not grow.

Narrative is a gentle way in, expression of a thinking about things, expression of feeling differently about things, this is what my writing is doing, it is an active thinking way of writing and thinking at the same time.

• Storyful                by Pari

• When I am sad or alone I remember the stories we were told.
• I think this story is mixed in with my own. When the elder sultan
• called in the governor of the city, he wanted to take away his
• possessions. He said the governor had stolen, and had cheated
• on the taxes on the fruit and the crops. But The truth was,
• the crops and fruit had been damaged by a storm of rain,
• by a battering of wind. It is true that the previous year’s harvest
• had indeed been plentiful, but this year the earth had produced
• barely enough for the people to stay alive. The governor was
• actually not a thief, he had in fact done the best he could.
• He knew to save some seed and use it to make more seed.
• But the elder sultan did not know the ways of the people.
• Though the governor produced his account books, written on the paper,
• The sultan tore these up. Where is the seed you have stolen? he said.
• But there was none to be found as it was in the ground.
• I will take away all your possessions he said and he did.
• So the governor was without anything and no one could help
• him as they could not be seen with him. That year the sultan’s family
• had to move because they had no food. They were destitute.
• But the next year the seeds came forth again with the new crop.
• New bread was made and the people ate and toasted the name of the governor.

This is how I have learned to cope with the different years and the lean years and to hope for the better years to come sometime in the future

• The phone—my world            by Amira

The workshop brought us to writing and gave us a quotation that I understood:

‘We the exiled ones, who live on anti-depressants, Facebook has become our Homeland. It opens the sky they close in our faces at the frontiers.’ Maram Al-Masri, Syrian poet

This made me think about the phone in our family and this is my writing:

We have one phone in our family. I keep it most days but sometimes my husband has it when he goes out. I can have very little data so I use telegram or WhatsApp. I have the contacts for the social worker and the aid office on this telephone. When the social worker says to me that we will do a PSS, I say let me see if I will have the phone that day. This is the phone that brings me into the world. Here is a photo of our past lives. I do not take photos now. When I have the telephone and I talk with the social worker, I am calm when I am talking to her and she is calm as well. It is as if there is a quiet with our voices in it. The way the children want to use the phone is not for their homework but for other things and they want apps as well but we do not have the data so I cannot let them.

• ‘Beirut is no more’                by Farah

• Torrent and storm.
• The cranes are falling.
• The buildings are stuttering and coming apart.
• Where there were windows, now they are gaping open with holes.
• Where there were families, now there are none.
• They have all left this place to find shelter elsewhere.
• Where they are gone, I cannot tell.

• A poetry dialogue          by Nida and Guitai

• i
• Here I thought I will find solace, here I thought I will meet my brothers.
• But my brothers have beaten me and there is no solace.
• The solace has evaded me and there is no brotherhood.
• Here I think I see the futures but the futures do not include my children.
• My children have run to other places, other futures, and they have left me behind.

• ii
• When my child died, I felt it was my fault.
• We had come from war but found another conflict.
• We did not know who the enemy was here.
• Maybe the enemy was ourselves.
• When my child died I wanted clothes to bury him in.
• I wanted a suit from my home to bury him in.
• Something he would wear into the afterlife.
• Something he might meet me again in.
• I could not find the clothes to bury my child.
• Then the social workers helped me.
• Then I saw that kindness is still existing.
• Then I heard the kind words of the social workers.
• Then I did have the clothes, they were blue and white
• but that is not important –
• They were what I wanted for my child,
• My poor dead child.

• ‘Everything is changed’ by Maha

• I am 23 years of age. I am from Syria.
• I am here in Lebanon with my family due to the war.
• I live with husband and three small children
• in a small room in North Lebanon.
• I will not say where.
• We fled our village near Homs 5 years ago.
• We had just been married. Our house had been flattened already.
• I had to find work, whatever I could do, because my husband could not work,
• was not allowed to work. I worked in the fields near my home village,
• it was hard work. My back was hurting. I had to take one of the children with me.
• The children played together in the shade in the corner of the field.
• When we came here to Lebanon, I thought it would be better.
• The government and the aid workers do their best.
• But my life and the children’s life has changed.
• My husband has changed. He used to be the leader.
• Now he too has to queue for the water and medicines.
• He has hit me which he did not do in Syria. He shouts.
• I am blamed for things that cannot be my fault.
• How will we ever go back? Even if the war ends,
• there is nothing there for us now. And there is nothing here for us.
• Can we feed our children here better than in Syria?
• We have to get the aid that comes two days in the week.
• We go with everyone else and we get the grain and the flour.
• My children are only hungry in the evenings
• so they drink some water and go to bed.
• Nothing will be the same. Everything is changed.

• ‘Education is what can change the things that we see’ by Alina

[This is a ‘told’ piece. The case worker notes: Alina is a 50 year-old grandmother of three. Her own son, the father of these children, returned to Syria seven months ago to join in with his family to try and rebuild their house but they were bombed again and now she has not heard from him. He asked her to mind the children until he came for them. They live in a hut. There is no heating. They burn what they can get in the forest for warmth. We gave them blankets and sleeping bags. Alina tries to do work some days as a cleaner.]

Alina’s story:

I am alone. I divorced long ago. My daughter died, the mother of these children. How I am living, how I have nothing? They have to help me secure food and medicine. Their mother has a death certificate. This means we have the papers to get the aid. My son went to Syria to try for a return there. He may not have got past the border. He could have been arrested. People disappear. My brother has not been heard of. My nephew, and two of the cousins—so many lost. No one knows where they are. Will they ever be seen again? Our country is better than this. It could be better again. But it’s not safe yet. If it were safe, that would be different. I will stay until I feel it is safe. But if my son comes, I will have to go back with him and the children. I want them to go to school here but if I am at work or going to get the medicines, they have to stay here, they cannot go out. I want them to be educated. Education is what can change the things that we see, the things that we want to be different.

3. Discussion

The extensive record of experience and the ancillary reach toward metaphor and symbolic register within some of these texts is heart-stopping. Taken collectively, these works situate meaning-making within reflective, provisional acts of narration and it’s within that spirit that these short readings are offered.

Aliaa’s ‘Afterword’ makes this explicit when she frames narrative as ‘a gentle way in’. Her statement that writing is ‘thinking at the same time’ could be taken as a potential antidote to expectations of a certain kind of trauma-writing. The agency that Aliaa claims is itself a stance against a kind of ‘othering’ where ‘victims’ may be expected to stay within the confines of a certain kind of testimony. This piece refuses the received ‘closure’ about Lebanon’s civil war, for instance, asking whether it really ended. Such questioning resists fixed historical accounts and instead, with phrases like ‘without self-reflection, we will not grow’, recognises that thought itself is a form of action. Writing appears as an ongoing practice of attention that can be parallel to, and sometimes amplify, records of fact.

Pari’s ‘Storyful’ extends this logic through parable. The governor who saves seed rather than prioritising possessions becomes a figure for ethical foresight. The line ‘the elder sultan did not know the ways of the people’ positions knowledge as local and experiential. The poem embeds contemporary political critique inside the guise of an inherited story. In PABR terms, this is situated knowledge articulated through a culturally resonant form. The final hope articulated as when ‘the seeds came forth again’ frames survival as collective and cyclical, and perhaps something that can partly be taught via parabolic meaning. ‘This is how I have learned to cope’ turns inherited narrative, now transformed, into a lived method of self-protection.

Amira’s prose piece uses the phone as a concrete image. It functions as a tool and threshold. The repeated word ‘phone’ anchors the narrative in everyday mediation. The sentence ‘this is the phone that brings me into the world’ gives it the full symbolic weight of a relational object. The fact that the psycho-social support (in the form of Creative Writing and Telling) brought by the social workers of the NGO is reliant on the use of one phone in the family means that Amira’s statement, ‘It is as if there is a quiet with our voices in it’ describes an oasis of calm within an otherwise highly pressurized situation. In this way, this short piece, with its focused attention on the phone and its significance, shows how documenting affective labour and care can be one way this kind of work circumnavigates othering, by valuing lived experience as spoken in an individual’s own register.

Farah’s ‘Beirut is no more’ demonstrates how compression can carry collective loss without explanatory framing. Simple declaratives, ‘the buildings are stuttering’ and ‘they have all left this place,’ refuse interpretive closure. Absence is left uninterrogated in the line ‘where they are gone, I cannot tell’. The poem thus resists being read as a complete account and instead functions as a fragment within a counter-narrative of ongoing rupture.

The poetry exchange by Nida and Guita stages relational or dialogical witnessing. These two writers felt shy about their individual voices being shown individually, particularly as both were dealing with difficult subject matter. Having felt supported by the sharing of writing in the weekly face-to-face workshop, they instead elected to employ an ancillary approach, by devising this form of ‘poetry dialogue’ where a statement by Nida is followed by a response by Guita. The first voice states ‘the futures do not include my children’, while the second responds via images of grief and care. The act of burial is described through unmet hope rather than full resolution. Aid appears as relational kindness, ‘then the social workers helped me’. This exchange, as raw and unfinished as it may appear, may actually demonstrate an outcome of the creative writing workshop’s levelling or PABR structure. Here, the meaning of the work is amplified by how the writers themselves chose to present it, whereas research that does not prioritise the value of participant experience might be inclined to impose a different form, and therefore a different meaning.

Maha’s ‘Everything is changed’ exemplifies how the expected narratives of ‘witness’ or ‘trauma’ may not be what emerges in projects run in contested or ‘post-conflict’ arenas, or with people who have been displaced. Here, there is none of the ‘healing’ which well-meaning funders sometimes want to see in the outcomes from such projects. Having had to articulate to several funders myself why the writings that emerge may not be readily used by them to create a ‘good news story’, I could now employ this piece by Maha to make the point much better. As her account of labour, hunger, and domestic violence is delivered in plain syntax, the palpable refusal to aestheticize suffering reinforces the ethical stance outlined earlier, where writing operates as a set of thinking processes embedded in lived contradiction.

Finally, Alina’s story situates hope within an acute awareness of social structures. Her statement, ‘education is what can change the things that we see,’ is not an idealistic abstraction but grounded in constraint. The text moves between the realities of the disappeared and the pressures of ‘not-knowing,’ coupled with the necessary grind of paperwork to get aid for daily survival. Knowledge here is aspirational yet fragile, and the emphasis on education firmly lodges the future in required actions. The overall tenor of the piece is fully cognisant of how social structures currently operate and how they are likely to continue.

Across these writings, the creative work does not seek to resolve precarity but to hold it in language shaped by participation. In doing so, the texts enact the premise that storytelling, when generated through collaborative and reflexive frameworks, can become a method of thinking together rather than a mode of (mis)representing the other. Such a position, however, is fraught with ethical questions. Can we really be sure, as visitors to a situation, as funded researchers with an obligation to produce at least some ‘outcomes’, that we are not in fact othering participants even while apparently adopting methods which seek to do the opposite?

4. Methods

To some extent, and the results are seen within this article, we are attempting to put into practice the same ethically aware practice both during the field work and later, in the presentation of research in academic arenas. One way to do so is to draw on theorists like Mary Brydon-Miller, who argues that a fully participatory approach to the development of ethical research practice ‘addresses some of the ethical challenges inherent in more traditional approaches to research’ as it ‘engages real issues and involves community partners’ (Brydon-Miller 2008, p. 203). Our approach in partnering with the NGO, Akkar Network for Development, sought to follow what their expertise and on-the-ground knowledge had established as appropriately ethical ways of engaging with their clients. Nevertheless, we remained acutely aware of what Brydon-Miller calls ‘a unique set of concerns’, the ‘complex, intersecting system in which multiple stakeholders operate with sometimes competing sets of interests and moral convictions’ (p. 203). From my experience as a long-time convenor of writing workshops with constituencies including military veterans, nurses and patients in end-of-life care, social advocates and rights activists, I can attest to the truth of those complex and intersecting systems. I have therefore employed a (creative writing-informed) framework for joint analysis workshops (or JAW), as previously mentioned, that typically occur before any project is designed and continue for the life of a project. Ensuring that all those who are involved in, or may be affected by, a project are represented means that their stories of lived experience can be heard and acknowledged as instrumental to the ongoing co-design. This embeds narrative-based ways of allowing individual voices to be heard on the ground, and it tries to fully acknowledge the expertise that participants bring so that the levelled playing field, as it were, that a creative writing workshop paradigm offers can be a methodology adopted from the very first working meetings in advance of any participatory project.

The act of creative writing, even if at an early stage (which might, to someone outside the project, appear apparently uninformed by literary tradition), is in fact connected through the very act of the writing process to the process of literary canon-making, and through that to the grand dialogues that have shaped great swathes of human thought over the centuries. We know that Bakhtin, in essays on the discourse of the novel (Bakhtin 1981), argues that authors craft works to participate in the ongoing conversations already occurring in society. Certain works, then, though by first-time authors, like those arising from the project in Lebanon, though they may not knowingly appear to carry literary intent, are nonetheless in dialogue with other verbal and written discourse taking place in society over time. This is evidenced by the texts presented here, with one writer quoting a Syrian poet and with others using inherited stories, parables and metaphors, or mentioning the paperwork, requiring life and death narratives, which are required to receive aid.

One ethical way to approach these texts is through Burke’s (1966) extension of Bakhtin’s dialogism, which frames society as an ongoing conversation in which each contribution is a ‘turn’ in a never-ending dialogue. Read through the lens of Creative Writing pedagogy within a PABR project, these texts can be understood as invitations into a section of that wider conversation about what it means to live together now, prompting reflection on shared humanity and mutual obligation. This links with ways that multi-disciplinary researchers are describing the participatory work they do. From PAAR (Participatory Arts Action Research) to Participation Arts and Social Action in Research—PASAR, there are several names for the foregrounding of how participation may, or should, culminate in action. Patricia Leavy and her contributors outline several such in her 2025 Handbook of Arts-Based Research: Second Edition.

Such moves are rooted in how both action research and participatory action research were introduced in the 1960s and 1970s, drawing on prior texts by Kurt Lewin (a German social scientist attached to the history of action research) and Paulo Freire (a Brazilian philosopher who created the generative tenets of participatory action research (MacDonald 2012, pp. 35–50). Both maintained that enabling underrepresented populations to study and effect change within their own environment could be empowering and effective. In 1997, Daniel Selener laid out a seven-step framework for Participatory Action Research (Selener 1997):

Acknowledging and defining the problem;

Identifying the need for radical transformation and the beneficiaries;

Engaging the community throughout the research process;

Empowering economically disadvantaged, oppressed, or marginalized parties with involvement;

Taking inventory of available resources;

Striving for community involvement at every step of the process;

Recognizing leaders as facilitators.

Learning alongside partners and end-users, over several projects, we find that this seven-step process is still useful as a framework device. This can be seen where creative writing practice leads to participants convening their own workshops to continue the process, as Selener maintained that an objective is to enable leadership skills in participating individuals. Also striking is how the very tenets of the creative writing workshop paradigm (inclusion, all voices valued, workshop-as-community, etc.) are mirrored or implied in Selener’s outline. I have written elsewhere about the ethical challenges that still pertain however, in any participatory project and would never seek to underestimate the inherent complexity of unequal relations, which can lead to flawed processes, especially when working in cross-cultural situations (see Campbell and Jensen (2024) ‘Expressive Writing and Telling and Participatory Action Research: Relational Ethics for Story-based Interventions in Crisis Settings’).

5. Conclusions

This overall framing, then, of Creative Writing disciplinary tenets as redeployed within a PABR project underpins my use of the term Social Literary Practice to describe the participatory, research-informed writing-based interventions I lead. Creative writing workshop methods already align closely with Bakhtin’s thinking (Bakhtin 1981, 1990), and Social Literary Practice treats the creation and circulation of writing, and reflection on that process, as dialogic acts. Such a dialogic stance is oriented toward understanding rather than persuasion or assimilation, recognising that shared participation produces situated, collective knowledge. Bakhtin’s concept of the ‘excess of my seeing in relation to another human being’ (1990, p. 24), and within that, the idea that our understanding of the world is shaped by our interactions with others, may further guard against othering: because each person is uniquely positioned, each sees what others cannot. Further implied is that our perception of reality is influenced by the perspectives and experiences of those around us, leading to a richer and more complex understanding of our own identity and the world. This combination of surplus and lack binds self and so-called ‘Other’ in a relationship of interdependence and complementarity. Here, I hope to have shown that the texts emerging from this project enable and indeed demand such an approach in any attempt to make a ‘reading’ of them which is ethically informed.

Social Literary Practice, therefore, based on the premise of the workshop being dialogic, leads naturally to ways of reading and responding to text which can now be seen to constitute a framework for both theory and practice. These acts, via dialogue and via the relational experience of the workshop, lead to shared knowledge about how individuals and the group make meaning, about what the meaning has to say about being alive together, and about what it implies about how we might behave in the world.

Taken together, the writings by Syrian and Lebanese participants here, responding so generously within the NGO provision, are perhaps the beginning of a counter-archive shaped by participation and reflection. They document lived conditions while resisting expected tropes. Imagery emerges from contemplation of everyday challenges, some of which may be difficult for a reader to encounter on the page. Metaphor grows from a seed, a phone, clothing, and the earth. Several writers comment on writing itself as thinking and as coping. These texts can be read as refusing narratives of passive victimhood, as refusing to be othered. They speak through uncertainty and relation. They show storytelling as a ‘gentle way in’. They model thinking together through shared forms and exchanges. Considered in these terms, the writing aligns with participatory approaches that value process and becoming: meaning remains open, authority remains distributed, and the work invites response rather than closure.

‘You never throw a stone in the well that you drink from’ becomes a metaphor for mutual respect and ethical recognition combined with the implication that we are all, in the end, drinking from the same well.