— Marion Carrel The craftswoman of knowledge: learning to work slowly
Marion Carrel
Left: Inrae Participatory Research Award 2023, co-construction category: “Croiser les savoirs avec tou.te.s”.
Stills from the presentation video of the project “Espace collaboratif : Croiser les savoirs avec tou. te.s” (ATD Quart Monde, CNAM, CNRS). There’s no miracle method. There’s only patient bricolage, continuous adjustments, collective reflexivity, and the long haul. And the discovery that others’ knowledge is necessary to truly understand. Marion Carrel is a sociologist who had to unlearn her profession in order to truly learn it.In the 2000s, she studied poor neighbourhoods in France and public participation policies. She saw failures everywhere: institutions couldn’t get residents to participate. But she also encountered people she called “artisans de la participation” – craftspeople of participation.
They were professionals who, since the 1970s, had developed popular education methods in working-class neighbourhoods. Suzanne Rosenberg, Michel Anselme, practitioners of theatre of the oppressed. People who didn’t apply recipes but patiently built methods, situation by situation.
Marion understood something fundamental: participatory methods are crafted through accumulated experience. There’s no miracle method. There’s bricolage, as De Certeau says. There’s continuous experimentation, patient, reflective research.But understanding this intellectually and practising it are two different things.Between 2019 and 2023, Marion coordinated the Collaborative Space “Croiser les savoirs” – Crossing Knowledge. This was a partnership between CNRS, ATD Quart Monde (an anti-poverty movement), and CNAM. Four years of participatory research with three groups: academic researchers, people experiencing poverty, and social work professionals.The method: peer groups worked separately on the same assignment and then met to cross-reference their findings. A mixed steering committee for decisions. Very long meetings.Marion found all of this unbearable at first. She’d been trained at the university to work “alone and fast”. To write her thesis alone, to compete, and to publish. Now, she found herself spending entire afternoons discussing with associations and social workers about which assignment to give, what went wrong, and how to proceed. This seemed like a waste of time.“C’était trop long” – it was too long. She couldn’t listen. She became agitated.But then something changed. Slowly, Marion understood that she had to unlearn the individualistic and competitive way in which she had been trained. She had to learn to work “collectively and slowly”.It was a delicate learning process. It meant discovering that her knowledge was partial. “Ça fait mal” – it hurts – “ça fait mal et en même temps c’est très intéressant” – it hurts and it’s very interesting at the same time. Everything she’d been explaining for ten years was true but incomplete. She hadn’t truly understood the difficulties faced by social workers, the silence of the poor, or why certain mechanisms didn’t work.She needed the knowledge of others to build a more complex understanding. And she couldn’t transform society alone.Marion became a craftswoman. She worked for four years in this collective workshop where a method was built step by step. Peer groups to acknowledge the differences in knowledge, legitimacy, and power. Precise facilitation techniques prevented academics from always taking the floor. Constant reflexivity.It wasn’t rigid, it wasn’t a recipe. It was craft: each situation required dedicated care and constant adaptation. It was built by doing.In 2023, the Collaborative Space won the INRAE Prize for Participatory Research. A collective price and a personal result: Marion learnt that there’s no good or bad practice. There are experiences, you learn by doing, and you learn from one another.And her career? Paradoxically, this slow and collective approach didn’t hold her back. It provided her with the energy to infuse her research. In 2017, she obtained her Academic habilitation and became a full professor in Lille. Since 2022, she’s been the co-director of the Sociology Department. In 2023, she received the ESA Best Article Award.Not despite, but thanks to participatory research. She produced different knowledge, more complex and more just. She opened spaces that others didn’t see.At the final conference of the Collaborative Space, 150 people from France, Quebec, Switzerland, and Belgium attended. Researchers, people with mental health issues, people in poverty, professionals. All engaged in reflexivity on ethical and epistemological questions. A craftspeople’s ecosystem: different workshops sharing accumulated knowledge.Marion used the expression “artisans de la participation” in her 2013 book. But only after four years of the Collaborative Space did she truly understand what it meant. It means building methods with patience. It means slow collective work. It means accepting that one’s knowledge is partial and that this partiality hurts but is also the condition for learning.This means conducting radical research: co-produced from start to finish without claims of neutrality, aimed at producing social justice. It means recognising subaltern knowledges – post-poverty epistemology, just as there’s feminist and post-colonial epistemology.Above all, it means accepting that there’s no miracle method. There’s only patient bricolage, continuous adjustments, collective reflexivity, and the long haul. And the discovery that others’ knowledge is necessary to truly understand.Marion Carrel is a craftswoman who learnt her profession slowly, collectively, uncomfortably. She now knows that this is the only way for research truly aimed at transformation: not recipes to apply, but knowledge to build together, step by step, with the patience and care of a craftsperson.
Marion Carrel’s key dates
2004 · Doctorate in sociology (Paris 5) on resident participation in marginalised neighbourhoods.
2007 · Maître de conférences, University of Lille.
2017 · Academic habilitation (Paris 8). Research on citizenship in working-class neighbourhoods, discrimination and participatory methodologies.
2019-2023 · Participatory research project Espace collaboratif : Croiser les savoirs avec tou.te.s (CNRS, ATD Quart Monde, CNAM).
2020 · Professor of Sociology at University of Lille, CeRIES laboratory. Director of the Institute of Social Sciences (2022–2025).
2025-2028 · Research on citizenship and democracy (DemoCIS project) in the Collaborative Space, with ATD Quart Monde and the Federation of Social Centres of France.