Description
This paper explores how aesthetic methods of practice can act as relational infrastructures within transformative research, mediating conflict and reimagining belonging through the inquiry process itself. Drawing on two arts-based interventions used within participatory action research deploying the Facilitative Listening Design (FLD) method in Cambodia, it examines how the Peace Mask project and Life Afloat photography exhibition opened visual and affective spaces of encounter amid Khmer-Vietnamese tension and the precarity of statelessness. Following weeks of dialogic fieldwork, community participant-researchers entered a silent mask-making process that invited stillness, surrender, and introspection. When the resulting washi replicas of their faces were displayed together as a public-facing artefact, distinctions of ethnicity, gender, and ability dissolved into a shared visual metaphor of collective humanity. In the floating villages of central Cambodia, ethnic Vietnamese community members used photography to capture everyday life at risk of disappearance, later exhibiting the images as Life Afloat—a suspended archive that made the unseen visible without naming a stigmatised community. These multimodal practices did not simply represent data but infrastructured transformation, shaping the sensory, spatial, and symbolic conditions through which participant-researchers related to one another and to the issues at stake. Together, they demonstrate how visually accompanied research can generate counter-imaginaries of peace and presence, extending participatory action research beyond verbal dialogue into the realms of touch, stillness, and shared seeing.
