By Lamia Mellal

When I joined the Deradicalizing the City research project—which aimed to investigate the effects of counter-radicalization policies implemented after the 2015 attacks, and the intensification of Islamophobia across Europe—I found a space that allowed me to conduct critical research alongside a team of engaged and committed scholars.

As a collective, we regularly questioned our own research practices—particularly through the “Doing Research Otherwise” seminar—which pushed me to reflect on how I could meaningfully engage with high school students in Marseille’s northern districts, who are both targeted by surveillance policies and engaged in everyday forms of resistance.

Building on these collective reflections, I collaborated with Marseille-based podcast producer Samir Akacha ; my colleague Farah Kassem, a filmmaker and PhD candidate in Art within the project ; as well as Léa Drouet and Camille Louis, a stage director and a dramaturge based in Brussels.

Thanks to these collaborations, I was able to design a participatory research process with students, in which podcast production and artistic exploration served as tools to move beyond self-censorship and to articulate their everyday experiences through narrative. To do so, I embedded my research framework within a year-long moral and civic education (EMC) course, structured as a project-based initiative.

The aim was to analyze how surveillance and securitization shape students’ everyday lives—particularly their relationship to school institutions, learning, imaginaries, and the construction of subjectivity.

When I began my fieldwork in Marseille, I connected with two local associations known for their long-term community-based work. During an exploratory phase in April 2022, I chose to conduct interviews with parents as well, in order to understand how the securitarian context had impacted their relationship with the national education system and their trust in public institutions. I reached out to Les Minots de Noailles and Assia Zouane, a community facilitator who works closely with mothers in the neighborhood. Assia runs workshops aimed at strengthening the agency and empowerment (pouvoir d’agir) of parents and children in working-class districts like Noailles.

When my main fieldwork began in September 2022, I decided to focus more specifically on the students, while maintaining strong ties with Assia and Les Minots de Noailles—especially around the work they were doing with parents, notably through the Université Populaire de Parents (UPP). This initiative allows parents to become “parent-researchers,” to recruit an academic with whom they conduct collaborative inquiries based on their lived expertise. They chose to investigate how parental precarity affects children’s schooling experiences.

I also worked with the association Approche Culture et Territoire (ACT) and its coordinator, Soraya Guendouz, who leads anti-racist training programs for educators and social workers. I initially approached ACT before starting my fieldwork, given their deep knowledge of these issues and long-standing experience in schools. After the 2015 attacks, critical teachers began inviting them into classrooms, particularly around the history of immigration and anti-racism in Marseille.

It seemed important for me to learn from ACT’s members and their work before entering the field. Throughout my research, I stayed in touch with ACT’s activities and eventually co-facilitated a workshop on racism in schools with Soraya, aimed at teachers. On that occasion, I shared and played some of the student-produced podcasts.

Within the Deradicalizing the City project, we collectively envisioned “community hearings” as spaces for dialogue among those directly affected by Islamophobia. When the time came to organize these hearings in Marseille, I felt it was essential to do so in collaboration with the two associations I had worked with throughout my fieldwork. I saw this as both a way of sharing the podcasts with the broader community—two years after the end of my fieldwork—and as an opportunity to bring together students, teachers, research team members, and others who had been involved, directly or indirectly, in the project.

The first day opened with a conversation with the parent-researchers, focusing on how they had appropriated a research tool to produce situated knowledge. This resonated deeply with the work we had done with the students, opening up a rich discussion on how collaborative research tools can become spaces that those most affected by structural inequalities can use—not only to name their experiences, but also to move beyond testimonial narratives and generate critical analyses and collective knowledge about issues that directly concern them.

The second day, hosted at ACT, focused on a discussion with teachers about how spaces for listening and knowledge production can be imagined with students within the school institution. Together, we listened to the podcast episodes and reflected on how things could be otherwise—what an anti-racist school might look like, and how it could be shaped collaboratively.

In conclusion, this research-creation process became a way of experiencing something alongside the students. As someone who was not initially familiar with sound creation or artistic exploration, I was able to engage in a different mode of thinking and doing—one that was transformative both for the students and for myself. I believe this is a key element of what research-creation can offer: not only co-producing knowledge, but also redefining the relationships between researcher and participants. Things emerge from a shared process—one in which no one fully controls the direction or the outcome, but where everyone enters with their own singularity and expectations, gradually moving beyond them and allowing themselves to be carried by the collective experimentation.