Professor Jackie Shaw is an Emeritus Fellow. Her research focuses on participation, inclusion and social change. She is a multidisciplinary social researcher and methodological innovator, with 40 years’ experience applying visual and performative methodologies, and inclusive, community‑led research processes, for participatory action research, community mobilisation and social change.
As social psychologist (PhD, LSE, 2012), Jackie is recognised globally for pioneering Participatory Video as co‑founder of Real Time (UK) and co‑author of the field‑shaping book Participatory Video (Routledge 1997). Her early work helped establish visual and performative methodologies as effective dialogic and relational processes. She has contributed critical theory on these approaches, linked to insight on how to navigate the possibilities and inherent challenges in contexts marked by inequity, discrimination, insecurity and conflict.
Underpinned by a longstanding commitment to tackling structural violence, through transforming relational and systemic power dynamics, Jackie’s research focuses on pathways to inclusion, collective agency, radical hope, and meaningful social impact, for marginalised groups, including people with disabilities, disadvantaged women, young and elderly people, de‑notified tribes, and displaced/insecure communities. Jackie convened the Participate visual research (2012-14), which brought poverty realities from 30 countries into UN SDG deliberations – influencing the ‘leave no-one behind’ narrative. She leads large multi-county research collaborations, across South and East Asia, East Africa and the MENA region. For example, exploring intersecting inequalities and sustainable exclusion in Egypt, Ghana, India, South Africa and Uganda, social assistance in crises (Kurdistan Region of Iraq and Uganda), conflict from renewable energy development (Kenya), and disability inclusion in 6 countries during Disability Inclusive Development (DID) and Inclusion Works.
Most recently she has led cutting-edge research on Healing Justice as a radical organising strategy for feminist activism in Africa, funded by UAF-Africa. This built on her prior insights on the embodied, emotional, psychosocial, and performative dimensions of transformation, her conceptualisation of creative practices as emergent and relational, rather than representational, and shows how Collective Healing processes can combine healing modalities, creative approaches and political organising strategies to strengthen feminist wellbeing and movement sustainability.
Jackie was IDS Research Ethics Convenor from 2017-26, guiding the navigation of ethical complexity in sensitive, high‑risk research environments. She has a substantial track record in teaching and capacity-building. Since 1990, she has provided practitioner and research training for professionals, community groups, I/NGOs and governmental organisations globally. She designed and teaches IDS’s module in Interpretive and Constructivist Research Design for doctoral students, contributes to the Power, Participation and Social Change Masters programme, and designed and taught the Masters module Qualitative Methods in Global South Studies as Visiting Professor, at the University of Torino (2019 and 2021). Within research projects she delivers embedded training on PAR, participatory video, creative methodologies, disability‑inclusive research, research ethics and reflective practice. She is open to supervising PhD students, particularly in areas related to participatory and visual methodologies, inclusion, feminist organising, collective healing and relational, power-shifting approaches to social change.
Research themes: Participation; Inclusive Societies (including disability); Healing justice & collective healing.
Video links
Seeing Conflict at the Margins: an integrated research process on Vimeo
From the project: Participatory Video in Kenya: “Seeing” conflict generated by green energy projects – Participatory Methods
Building Sustainable Inclusion From the project: Navigating the Pathways from Intersecting inequalities to Accountable Relations
What’s the message The purpose of video-mediated messages from marginalised groups. From the project: Pathways to accountability for marginalised communities – negotiating extended video
Working together for change
