Contributor Object Sharing
Many Memories, Many Voices (MMMV)
MMMV is a public engagement and research project that invites people living in Northern Ireland and Ireland to share memories, stories, and personal objects connected to colonialism and the British Empire. Through auto-ethnographic interviews, creative writing, visual art, and object-sharing, contributors explore how imperial histories shape social identities today. The project builds on earlier research from the ‘Museums, Empire and Northern Irish Identity’ (MENII) study and aims to support constructive, respectful conversations between people with different perspectives on these difficult histories.
Object-Based Participant Auto-Ethnography
Let people speak for themselves — through the things they hold dear. A method that uses personal objects and free-choice creative expression to unlock sincere, unfiltered reflection from your participants.
Phase 0: Logic Model & Topic Mapping
Identify the “Evaluation Gap” this method fills. It is best suited for projects where conventional evaluation feels extractive or performative and contexts involving sensitive, identity-laden, or emotionally complex themes where participants may self-censor.
Primary Objective
To bypass rehearsed or expected answers and surface participants’ genuine thoughts, emotions, and experiences — not a filtered version shaped by what they think you want to hear.
Key Stakeholders
Community organisations, heritage and cultural projects, public engagement teams, arts facilitators, researchers, funders seeking richer evaluation evidence, and participants themselves — who become contributors rather than subjects.
Reflective Planning Questions — Ask Yourself Before You Begin:
- “Am I genuinely prepared to hear what participants want to tell me — even if it doesn’t map neatly onto my outcomes framework?”
- “What theme or question will I give participants, and is it open enough that a personal object could meaningfully connect to it?”
- “Do my participants have creative skills of their own, or will I need to bring in facilitators to help people feel confident expressing themselves?”
Part 1: The DIY Step-by-Step Method
Frame the Theme and Plan Early
Define a clear but open-ended theme that participants can connect to their own lives. This isn’t a survey question — it’s a provocation broad enough that a recipe book, a medal, a photograph, or a poem could all be valid responses. Build consent and ethics into the design from the very start, not as an afterthought.
The Details:
- Action: Write your theme as a single, resonant sentence — something like “objects that connect you to [your topic].” Make it feel like an invitation, not an assignment.
- Action: Design your consent process early. If participants might share photographs of personal objects, family documents, or creative work, your consent form needs to cover that from the outset — not midway through (if you need consent/ not all evaluation needs consent).
- Tip: If you are working across languages or with communities for whom English is not a first language, pay special attention to the accessibility of your consent materials. Legal and technical language can be a barrier to genuine participation.
Build Trust and Level the Room
This method only works if participants believe you sincerely want to hear what they have to say. That means showing up not as a detached evaluator but as a real person who is genuinely interested. You are asking people to invest emotional labour and creative time — you owe them transparency about who you are and what you will do with what they share.
The Details:
- Action: Be transparent about yourself and the project’s purpose. Share something of your own connection to the theme. The dynamic should feel mutual, not extractive.
- Action: Make clear — and mean it — that you will act on what participants contribute. Show them their material matters and will be treated with care.
- Tip: Working with a trusted community partner organisation can be transformative. They already have the relationships and networks you need. If possible, let the partner — not you — conduct or co-facilitate the sessions.
Invite Objects and Open the Medium
Ask participants to bring, share, or photograph objects they associate with your theme. Then — and this is the radical part — let them choose how to express what those objects mean. Some people will want to talk. Others will write a poem, take a series of photographs, create a collage, or send you an official document. The meaning lives in the connection between the person and the object, not in any single format.
The Details:
- Action: Run a session — a workshop, a group gathering, or a series of one-to-one conversations — where participants present their objects and begin responding. Use a loose question schedule to guide discussion, but do not stick rigidly to it. Let people go where the object takes them.
- Action: If your budget allows, bring in creative facilitators (a writer, a visual artist, a photographer) to help participants who want to express themselves beyond words but feel uncertain about their creative skills.
- Tip: Remember that many participants already have creative skills you may not know about. Before hiring facilitators, ask your group what they are comfortable doing. Sometimes the best move is simply giving people permission and space to use the skills they already have.
Hold Space for Asynchronous Response
Not everything will happen in the room. Some of the most powerful contributions arrive days or weeks after the session, when participants have had time to sit with the theme, rummage through drawers, talk to family members, and reflect. Build this breathing room into your timeline from the start.
The Details:
- Action: At the end of your session, explicitly tell participants they can continue to send material — objects, photographs, writing, audio, anything — for a defined period afterwards. Give them a clear, easy channel to do so (email, a shared folder, a WhatsApp group).
- Action: Leave a generous gap between your session and your reporting deadline. Plan for at least two to four weeks of asynchronous response time.
- Tip: Follow up gently. A brief, warm check-in a week after the session (“We loved what you shared — if anything else comes to mind, we’d love to see it”) can unlock contributions people were still mulling over.
Co-Curate and Sit with the Material
Gather what participants have shared into a lightly interpreted collection — a display, a small exhibition, a digital gallery, a printed booklet. The goal is not to over-analyse every contribution but to present the material with enough context that others can engage with it. Think like a museum curator: give people some information, but don’t lead them so far that they cannot form their own response.
The Details:
- Action: Arrange contributions thematically. Use photographic representations of objects rather than asking people to part with their possessions. Pair each object with a short caption or quote from the contributor — in their own words.
- Action: Share the curated collection back with participants before it goes public. They should have the final say on how their material is presented and attributed (real name, pseudonym, or anonymous).
- Tip: Resist the urge to rush interpretation. Some of the richest insights emerge slowly, over repeated engagement with the material. Give yourself and your stakeholders permission to sit with the contributions before drawing conclusions.
Part 2: The Realist Pathway
Evidence Manifest
Documenting how the Mechanism was verified through specific data collection.
| Evidence Type | What it Proves | Data Source |
|---|---|---|
| Participant Contributions Multi-modal creative outputs |
Participants chose diverse forms of expression (poetry, photography, personal documents, collage, recorded interviews) without being directed to any single format — demonstrating that the method successfully decentered the evaluator and gave participants genuine creative agency. | Objects, photographs, poems, written reflections, and audio recordings submitted both during and after sessions. |
| Emotional Depth Unexpected personal revelations |
Participants reported surprise at the depth of feeling the objects unlocked in them — thoughts and emotions they did not know they had. This confirms the mechanism: tangible objects bypass rehearsed answers and access sincere, intuitive reflection. | Facilitator observations, semi-structured interviews, and participant feedback gathered during and after sessions. |
| Sustained Engagement Asynchronous follow-up contributions |
Multiple participants continued to send material after sessions had ended — sometimes sending 25 to 30 additional items. This proves that the method generates sustained, voluntary engagement far beyond the session itself. | Post-session submissions via email and other channels, tracked over the weeks following each workshop or interview. |
Don’t just write a boring report. Use the stuff you actually made during the session.
The Mini Exhibition
You have photographs of personal objects with captions in participants’ own words. That’s not just data — that’s a visual report your funder can walk through in two minutes and immediately feel the impact of your project.
The Diversity Map
The range of objects and creative formats participants chose tells a powerful story about inclusion. If your contributors responded with poetry, photographs, documents, interviews, and collage, that variety is itself evidence that your method reached people who would have been excluded by a single-format approach.
The Before-and-After Quote
When participants say things like “I had no idea I felt that” or “I didn’t know I thought this until I held the object,” that is direct evidence of genuine reflection that conventional evaluation would have missed entirely.
The “One-Sentence” Report
“Because we used Object-Based Participant Auto-Ethnography, participants in our community felt trusted and valued enough to share genuine personal stories and creative responses they didn’t know they had in them.”