Queering Community Based System-Dynamics

Overview: Grounded in traditions of social work,community-based system-dynamics, and queer epistimologies, this workshop will explore the importance of insider/outsider perspectives. Shared identities between the researchers and participants, intentional project design, and goals optimize for deeper, richer, and more meaningful data, careful analyses, and minimize further stigmatizing marginalized populations.Proposal text: This workshop will identify the value of using community based system dynamics (CBSD) within the context of community-based social work research. The team will use their experience as queer researchers using CBSD to explore factors causing connection or disconnection with healthcare across the queer community. This workshop will explore how researcher positionalities came into play while conducting group model-building sessions within the queer community. The team will demonstrate the role of shared identities in the research process and the strategies they utilized to harness the power of shared identities and complex positionalities while supporting self-care and fidelity to CBSD methodologies.

Community-Based System Dynamics: Community-Based System Dynamics (CBSD) is a participatory research method involving communities to understand the underlying structures of systems. CBSD utilizes the insights and experiences of community members to elicit a meaningful understanding of social systems and structures, identifying leverage points to change them if needed. CBSD uses endogenous system variables, looking at feedback perspectives to improve understanding of the system and therefore design more effective interventions.
CBSD is done within research contexts via group model building. It can provide a powerful tool for designing effective transdisciplinary collaborations and learning collaboratives. It helps people with varied perspectives and expertise visualize the more extensive system around an issue by identifying constituent components and relationships through feedback mechanisms, consensus, controversy, and knowledge gaps, and identifying leverage points as intervention targets. CBSD can also help in power distribution amongst the participants and enable the team to identify unintended consequences of actions and interventions.

CBSD has not been historically used within marginalized communities with facilitators from within the community. The utility of insider/outsider perspectives within such research methods brings forth many learnable moments for research across marginalized groups. An 'insider' is a researcher who personally belongs to the group their research participants also belong (based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity, sexual and gender identity, class, etc.). At the same time, an 'outsider' is not a group member. Our critical approach to conducting research within a queer epistemological frame recognizes and accounts for researcher subjectivities and lived experiences as part of the research methodolgoy. As such, we acknowledge our positionalities during research, as no research is done without the imposition of the researcher's "gaze." The researcher's identification of whether they are an insider or an outsider is an epistemological matter because their position concerning their participant directly impacts the knowledge created (Griffiths 1998). This is especially relevant for group model building as the modeler elicits narratives from the participants, simultaneously identifying constructs and modeling connections between them. If nuances within the narrative, metaphors, or subtleties are missed, not only could the researchers end up identifying the incorrect "problem" to be explored but may also misrepresent the truths and hence the system's mental model held by the community. Community-based system dynamics were designed to increase transparency in modeling for communities- however, if there is a gap in the researcher's understanding and belonging with the community, it could lead to the opposite effect.