Representing Polyvocality in Research – a case study on Augmented Reality approaches to British colonial history
Introduction
In this post Daisy Abbott explores Polyvocality – the practice of representing and foregrounding multiple voices, perspectives, or interpretations within research (and by implication within our teaching), particularly those that have been marginalised or excluded from dominant narratives. This matters not least because of education’s role in including or systemically excluding people. We feel that Daisy’s work helps us all think about how to make our practice authentically inclusive – welcoming all our students – and the whole of them – into the classroom space.
What Is Polyvocality?
Polyvocality refers to the practice of representing and foregrounding multiple voices, perspectives, or interpretations within research, particularly those that have been marginalised or excluded from dominant narratives. In research contexts, polyvocality resists monolithic accounts and instead acknowledges that complex social phenomena such as heritage, memory, or colonial history are best understood through plural (and often contrasting) viewpoints.
Why Polyvocality Matters for Research in Higher Education
Historically, heritage projects and cultural histories have privileged authoritative or “official” voices: the institutional archive, canonical experts, or dominant cultural perspectives. This can obscure the experiences and interpretations of groups whose voices were excluded, marginalised, or silenced. A polyvocal approach seeks to:
- Highlight diversity of experience and perspective, especially where power imbalances have shaped existing narratives.
- Challenge singular historical interpretations, opening space for dialogue, debate, and critical reflection on both history and current identities.
- Foster critical engagement with past and present, particularly in contexts such as colonial history where ethical and political questions remain live.
In research practice, polyvocality supports more inclusive, socially just outputs that reflect the complexity and contested nature of lived experience and memory.
Case Study Overview: Reimagining the 1938 British Empire Exhibition
The Empire Exhibition of 1938 was the last of the large, British imperial-themed exhibitions held between The Great Exhibition (1851, Crystal Palace, London) and the outbreak of WW2 in 1939. Held in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow, it drew nearly 13 million visitors and operated as a site of architecture, industry, culture, and imperial politics. Yet today few traces remain, and the event has largely faded from public memory. Through a recent interdisciplinary, participatory project, this historical event can be revisited not simply as archival record but as a site of multiple, co-existing narratives; a focal point for exploring how history, identity, and power intersect.
“Decolonising the British Empire Exhibition of 1938 through Augmented Reality Narratives” offers a case study in the advantages and challenges of how we chose to represent polyvocality through a combination of community-engaged co-design, augmented reality storytelling, and game-based approaches. This work builds on The Glasgow School of Art’s long-standing research into the Empire Exhibition and its digital reconstruction, extending that work into participatory narrative creation and interpretation. At the core of the project are interactive digital resources including a fully interactive 3D reconstruction with thematic guided tours and augmented reality narratives that spatialise diverse interpretations within the very park where the original Exhibition took place. Each thematic tour integrates archival records, scholarly interpretation, and community reflections, prompting users to confront not only what happened but how it has been remembered and felt. Other project outputs included physical exhibitions where people were encouraged to respond to the materials with their own thoughts and stories of colonialism and Glaswegian identities, and a deck of cards foregrounding a range of voices and quotes that stimulate discussion about colonialism, identity, and heritage; whilst simultaneously presenting a wide range of different and contradictory viewpoints in a non-hierarchical way.
These resources (all freely available from the project website or your app store) grew organically from our participatory approach. Through interviews, workshops, and creative experimentation, five key themes emerged from stakeholder communities in Glasgow:
- A general lack of prior awareness of the Exhibition and its context
- Critical reflections on empire, colonialism, and Glasgow’s role
- Personal and emotional responses with very individual stories of how people became residents of Glasgow
- Counter-narratives that disrupt the official histories
- Creative visions for how the Exhibition could be re-told today
Whilst we had always planned to use place-based Augmented Reality storytelling to allow people to ‘travel in time’ within Bellahouston, the quantity and diversity of materials and responses gathered presented a key challenge. In some of our co-design activities, expressions of civic pride sat alongside anger at colonial exploitation. So how could this project possibly represent a coherent set of outputs to drive deeper understand of the event? The answer, of course, was to not attempt this at all but rather to treat these contradictions as integral and embrace the ‘mess’ of decolonial practice by producing explicitly polyvocal resources that aim to provoke disagreement, analysis, and therefore new understandings. In the words of one of our participants: “Decolonising isn’t about writing an alternate narrative, it’s about creating space for multiple narratives”.
This approach was key to the design of the content within each Augmented Reality narrative, all three of which take a position on opposing interpretations of the 1938 Exhibition. It was also the driving force behind the decision to include six different ‘tours’ within a large 3D recreation of the exhibition, delivered through the Unity game engine. This tool allows users to experience a range of varied archival and contemporary materials which are presented, without further interpretation, at key points within the 3D model, thereby allowing personal interpretations to be drawn from place-based, non-hierarchical prompts. Other key findings were expressed similarly, not as a single ‘correct’ narrative but as a kaleidoscope of ideas. Exhibition materials were designed to present contradictory quotes side-by-side, and a playful (analogue) tool was created specifically to promote polyvocality itself. This Polyvocality Card Deck includes characters based on historical figures, first-hand witnesses of the exhibition, anonymized versions of workshop participants, Glasgow residents, and public figures. The characters are positioned alongside quotes from the workshops, newspapers, scholarly works, interviews, and Exhibition ephemera. The card decks also (importantly) include blanks which form an interactive, dialogic aspect for their use in exhibitions, schools, and other workshops subsequent to the project, bringing in particular viewpoints of key significance to specific groups.
Our methodology is discussed in detail in a research paper: and the short video abstract on YouTube.
What This Project Offers to Other Researchers – Teachers and Learning Developers
Through its combination of community co-design, digital technologies, and polyvocal interpretation, this project offers several lessons for researchers interested in representing diverse voices – and for those of us wishing to bring those perspectives into our classrooms:
- Design with, not for, communities: co-design processes foreground participant agency and ensure that multiple perspectives are genuinely represented rather than superficially appended.
- Don’t underestimate the difficulty of decolonial practice: Whilst we believe our approach to have been largely successful, informed and sustained development for decolonial research practices is essential to allow critical self-reflection on researchers’ internal capacity to engage proactively and consistently with racial justice. In this case study we deconstructed the researcher-participant power dynamic using a range of techniques from anti-racism training and guidelines for best practice (Wong et al., 2023).
- Make implicit power structures explicit: by juxtaposing official archival material with alternative viewpoints, the project invites critical interrogation of whose histories have been privileged and why. However great care was taken in balancing the project’s educational ambitions with sensitivity to participants’ (often highly emotional) lived experiences. This requires relational and respectful co-design and providing counselling and embedding anti-racist development opportunities was absolutely crucial.
- Use technology or game-based tools to layer meaning: digital tools like 3D environments and AR enable the spatial and conceptual juxtaposition of narratives, encouraging users to see history as contested, layered, and situated. It also allows the explicit inclusion (and foregrounding) of polyvocality within learning resources, promoting individual interpretation and meaning-making alongside an understanding of why other people might feel/have felt differently.
- Facilitate reflection, not just transmission: playful and interactive elements invite active engagement, prompting users to question and reflect rather than passively consume a single story. The exploratory and non-linear nature of our project outputs further reinforces critical engagement.
- Interdisciplinary collaboration: our project’s success was contingent on the inclusion of a wide range of experts from participants to academics to artistic and industry specialists. This allowed the necessary quality and accessibility to be achieved in the delivery of our polyvocal outputs.
Conclusion
Representing polyvocality in research (and our practices) — especially in heritage and historical contexts — demands methodological experimentation, ethical awareness, and a commitment to inclusive practice. The playful and AR approaches explored in this project demonstrate how digital and participatory methods can open up historically “closed” narratives, making space for plurality, dialogue, and critical engagement. Whilst polyvocal and decolonial practice itself comes with a range of challenges, these can be (imperfectly) mitigated by careful (and well-informed) planning of research. However inclusive or disruptive our intentions, polyvocal methods cannot be separated from systems, structures, and institutions that continue to privilege dominant experiences and identities. Therefore, to authentically represent multiple voices we need to ensure that mere ‘inclusion’ is not mistaken for equity and empowerment.
BIO
Dr Daisy Abbott is a Reader in Game-Based Learning, and interdisciplinary researcher. Her current research focusses on game-based learning, serious games, 3D visualisation, and issues surrounding digital interactions in the arts and humanities. In particular, she is investigating the use of games to teach academic and research skills in Higher Education. Daisy is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Certified Leading Practitioner of Learning Development. She is a peer reviewer for a range of serious game journals, a judge for the GaLA serious games competition, and has been a reviewer for both the AHRC and the EPSRC. Her publications can be found at https://radar.gsa.ac.uk/view/creators/436.html and her personal research blog is https://gamebasedlearninginhe.wordpress.com/