Research through action: a collaborative biographical study with immigrants in Portugal

Abstract

This paper deals with a collaborative piece of research with immigrants in Coimbra. It is a scientific study in which volunteers participated through a participatory research methodology on the migration experience. The collaborative nature of the research aimed at getting a theoretical and practical coherence between the assumptions of a knowledge ecology applied to the study of immigrants in Portugal and the method of biographical workshops, also known as “rodas de histórias”. In this paper, the theoretical and epistemological framework is presented as well as the major contributions of the method of biographical workshops and the exercise of transformation of experiential knowledge into scientific knowledge.