Relational Infrastructures as Methodological Design: Rethinking the Interview for Transformative Research

This paper advances a methodological reframing of qualitative research by introducing relational infrastructure as a central design principle for transformative inquiry. Donna Mertens (2021), writing within the transformative paradigm, argues that researchers must ask: “What do I need to do in the design of my research to support transformative change and sustainable impact?” This question remains both underexplored and underutilised in research practices within political science, where interviewing is still widely conceptualised as a verbal and extractive technique rather than an encounter shaped by the relational, sensory, spatial, and affective conditions in which it is embedded. Drawing on Facilitative Listening Design (FLD), a participatory and action-oriented method developed in Southeast Asia and implemented across conflict-affected and culturally diverse settings, the paper reconceptualises interviewing as one element within a wider multimodal ecology that produces both knowledge and transformation. Two arts-based methodological design features are examined through the cases, each illustrating a distinct configuration of relational infrastructure. These include an arts-based mask-making process that enabled embodied reflexivity and produced a physical artefact of participant-researchers’ internal sensemaking and a participatory photography initiative that allowed a marginalised stateless community to document its own disappearing social world before it was dismantled. These scenes of relational infrastructure, embedded within a participatory and action-oriented method grounded in dialogical conversations, show how non-verbal, sensory, and spatial arrangements generate forms of insight that cannot be accessed through spoken interaction alone. They also demonstrate how such design features create relational conditions that support the possibility of transformative shifts in cross-group understanding. Rather than functioning as add-on activities, these arts-based relational and embodied elements are presented as methodological components that directly shape both the epistemic quality and the transformative potential of the research encounter. The paper argues that intentionally designed relational infrastructures are essential for studies conducted in contexts shaped by inequality, marginalisation, or conflict, where verbal data often conceal deeper layers of political experience. By positioning community members with lived experience as researchers and embedding analysis within collective meaning-making processes, participatory and action-oriented methods designed with relational infrastructures in mind offer a counterpoint to extractive interviewing traditions and provide grounded ways of operationalising Mertens’ call for transformative design. The paper contributes to advancing political research methods by providing a conceptual framework for examining the non-verbal and processual dimensions surrounding dialogic methods in qualitative research. It shows that relational infrastructures, although often overlooked, play a critical role in shaping what data emerge, how interpretation unfolds, and what forms of transformation become possible.