Open and accessible? Challenges to participant-led knowledge production about participatory folk singing

Access Folk is a University of Sheffield-based participatory and action research project that works toward understanding (1) who takes part in folk singing activities in England, (2) challenges to participation, and (3) strategies for increasing access. As part of this work, we provided small project grants to organisers who were interested in making changes to a singing activity they run with the intention of servicing historically marginalised or underrepresented groups in England’s folk scene. While our intention is to support community-led knowledge production and improve access to participatory folk singing opportunities, structural realities and complex power dynamics challenge this objective (cf Wright 2024). Data often must flow through researchers and remain in restricted project archives. This is especially true of ethnographic documentation and creative outputs. The power to disseminate and preserve, in other words, remains vested in researchers.This presentation addresses how existing regulatory regimes, particularly relating to data protection and intellectual property rights, influence how knowledge and creative outputs arising from community-engaged research projects are produced, controlled, and shared. Through grounded examples, we interrogate the gaps in knowledge, systemic challenges, and solutions we’ve attempted in efforts to make our research both open and under the control of our partners.This project received ethical approval by University of Sheffield: 56800. Participants gave permission to use their images in shared presentations.All the available items arising from the project are available in the Access Folk Collection.