Not many researchers get to take part in a rave at 10am on a Saturday morning in the name of “evidence gathering”, but if that’s wrong, maybe I don’t want to be right…

This wasn’t just any rave though, it was a rave explicitly designed to enable us to let go of (some) inhibitions, lose ourselves in the music and open up the space to go a little bit deeper with each other. Our Newyddion i Bawb / News for All work in Blaenau Ffestiniog is centred around exactly these kinds of activities and interactions, to create the relational conditions for trust, and therefore honesty. 

I often think that other researchers might observe our sessions and ask, “when are you going to do some actual work?”. But for me, this is the work. If we don’t know each other and believe in each other, we can only ever engage at a superficial level. I’d argue that data gathered at a superficial level might be worse than no data at all.

I’d hoped to do these Week Notes, well, weekly…but sadly that’s not been possible. The demands of the Community Innovation Practitioner Award Programme that Newyddion i Bawb is part of are hugely front-loaded and I’ve been working well beyond my capacity for the last few months. At the end of last year I got to the stage where I basically couldn’t think any more. Not ideal in a job based on…having thoughts.

I did manage to take some time to reset over Christmas, and even have some ideas! I’ve got to the point where I actually feel like I need to write these notes now, so stand by for more updates over the coming weeks.

This note largely reflects on the first of our three Newyddion i Bawb “Research Weekends” – where our team of facilitators and our group of 15 community members are spending a Friday night and a Saturday daytime with each other, exploring broadly what we really want and need from journalism (or at least sense-making).

The challenge statement we developed for the work reads:

“How might we use Blaenau Ffestiniog’s history of innovation and knowledge sharing to inspire new forms of collective storytelling, enabling all our communities to build and express their agency and galvanise more inclusive, representative and effective journalism?”

The aim was to respond to this with modern-day Sesiynau Caban (Cabin sessions). These originally began in the “cabins” of Blaenau Ffestiniog’s slate quarries as spaces for poetry and conversation – before expanding into self-education and activism around current affairs, democracy and workers’ rights.

So, alongside the research weekends, we’ll also be running two co-created “Community Connection” events to explore how bringing people together in creatively designed spaces might help us understand what the future of collective sensemaking could/should look like.

I think what starts to become clear is that we see this as a social and community cohesion project more than simply a “journalism” project. Building on the conclusions of our News for All work in Grangetown, Cardiff, this isn’t about formats or outputs – it’s about “input side innovation”, reimagining how we bring people together to surface the things and ideas which are important to our communities.

Blaenau Ffestiniog is a very different context to Grangetown though. It’s rural, white, and Welsh-speaking in contrast to our urban, multiracial and largely non-Welsh speaking (albeit very multilingual) group in Cardiff. For that reason, it’s felt critical to understand the nuanced understandings of identity in Blaenau Ffestiniog.

We wanted to foreground those questions, so the very first session of our first research weekend explored the importance of the Welsh language and broader Welshness to our group. The Welsh language confidence of our facilitation team covers the whole spectrum, and around 30-40% of our group are also more confident in English, so we wanted to explore with them how best to address that.

This led to a really powerful and moving discussion which highlighted how everyone has a very distinct, nuanced and completely individual relationship with the language. Participants reported it feeling therapeutic, cathartic, but simultaneously reassuring – because everyone realised they had the same conflicted feelings. Importantly, people also reported feeling more connected to their community as a result.

Movingly, the notion of people feeling digon Cymreig or (perhaps more accurately) ddim digon Cymraeg (Welsh enough, or not Welsh enough) came up a lot. From a personal perspective I was struck by how much the conversations mirrored the kind of language immigrants use about identity, and the idea that so many of us feel like we don’t always fit in, even in our own country. Clearly more to dig into there.

We also, of course, used the weekend to talk about the kinds of sense-making our community want and need and I’ve taken a few weeks to let that percolate and synthesise. Over the last few days I think I’ve figured out where that leads to – some ideas related to Foundational Media, explored and articulated beautifully here by Rob Watson. I’m meeting Rob later today, so perhaps I’ll expand on that in my next update, as well as an update on how our community collaborators are leading and developing our community connection events.

Finally – if you want to have your own research rave to the Newyddion i Bawb Bangers chosen by our group, have we got a set of tunes for you!