“Nothing about us, without us.” Developing a Community Engaged Research Format for Belgian and European Prisons

“Nothing about us, without us” is a well-known slogan referring to the lack of participation of socially excluded groups in policy development (Levinsky-raskin & Stevens, 2016)
. Fortunately, the awareness concerning the need for participation of socially excluded groups is growing in academia, and the discipline of criminology is no exception with the growth of, for example, convict criminology as the main driver (Earle, 2017; Maguire, 2021). In Belgium, however, most criminological and penological research uses collaborative research designs in which the participation of respondents is limited to only specific phases of the research. This results in research formats that still privilege the views of researchers in, for example, publications and reports (Piché et al., 2014). Therefore, this study aims to develop a Street Participatory Action Research format (Bryant & Payne, 2017) which is adapted to the Belgian and European prison context and which can be applied within a variety of disciplines. Based on an existing community engaged learning project in the prison of Beveren (Vanhouche et al., 2018), a research design will be developed and introduced in several existing studies. Moreover, this ground-breaking format will support the submission of new funding as well as the development of other innovative dissemination strategies that include incarcerated individuals.